Читать книгу Six Months to Live - Daniel Hallock - Страница 6

Gobbler

“Not Matt.” That was the most common reaction as the news spread. True, it might have been predictable – the word “cancer” has a way of stopping people in their tracks – but somehow, at least to those who knew him, Matt seemed an especially unlikely victim. When people thought of Matt, they thought easy-come, easy-go; they thought of his moves on the court, his loopy grin, his ability to catch every word of a song the first or second time he heard it on the radio. Hannah, a high school classmate, thought of his big mouth:

A lot of people called him Gauger, but to some of us he was always Gobbler. We called him that because he never stopped talking. He’d salivate as he talked, and wipe away the spit with his hand, and laugh, and go on blabbering. Whenever you were in a crowd, you’d always hear Matt above everybody else, talking his head off. And he was so animated. He had this crazy laugh that sent him lurching over double and slapping his knees.

Ben, another classmate, has similar memories:

I’ll never forget the time he and Zach tried to “kill” Chet and me with a blunted putty knife in the school woodshop. Or the time he locked me in the car wash and soaked me over and over. One time he even tried to wrestle our teacher. Matt fought like crazy, talked like crazy, laughed like crazy, and was a pain. He was a big, geeky kid.

He had these annoying one-liners, like: “Insert foot in mouth, then chew.” Or he’d clutch his throat with one hand and try to pull it off with the other. He had a way of walking that pushed you off the edge of the road. Yet in other ways he was the winningest.

Matt had a killer one-handed, no-arc jumper which ruled the basketball court. We called it the snakey, because his wrist kind of snapped when the ball left his hands. That fade-away jump shot from the right corner was all net all the time, and almost impossible to block. In softball, his long hard drives down the third base line were completely predictable, but damaging.

Matt made friends in high school long before most of us knew where the bathrooms were. Guys liked him because friendship was more important to him than grades. He’d spend all his time in homeroom goofing around and still pull tests in the upper 90s. If not? Well, there were things more important in life.

And the girls . . . all of them liked him. I remember thinking “Gosh, what a flirt!” But it wasn’t like he ever tried to come on to someone. He was just a people person. He couldn’t have cared less who he was talking to.

Matt had tremendous drive. One time in high school he was mowing this huge hay field, and a stray dog ate his lunch while he was on the tractor. He spent fourteen hours in the sun that day without food or water, and came home in the evening looking real pale. But he got the job done. I think he got that sense of responsibility from his parents.

Matt loved his parents, by the way. He never showed any signs of embarrassment over them, even when we teased him about his barn chores and the other things his dad made him do – like getting up early to muck out the stalls. He’d come on the bus smelling like manure. If you didn’t like it, tough cookies.

Matt wouldn’t take abuse from anyone, but he would also be the first to stand up when someone else was disrespected. I’ll never forget how he stood up for Maya – she was the only black student on our bus – on the way home from school one day. Someone was harassing her or something, and he got up in the aisle with his fists clenched. The driver had to pull over and stop the bus.

Matt’s brother, Nick, of course, has earlier memories:

Matt and I fought a lot, though I guess siblings are always like that, and it wasn’t like something separated us. But he was a good teaser; he knew what would make me upset.

When we were little we used to play with this kid named Brody, another guy, Matt’s age, called Reid, and a girl my age, named Amy. I would tease Brody, and then everyone else would tease me. Reid and Matt would trip me or something and I’d fall. Then I’d I throw huge temper tantrums. It wasn’t funny. I’d get so angry, I’d pick up a rock or a tree branch – something from the woods – and I’d just heave it at Matt!

Other times when I got fed up with their teasing I’d run over to our tree house, where I’d stockpiled some stones, and I’d climb up and throw them at Matt as hard as I could.

But those are good memories. Even though Matt would always send me off crying because I was hurt or because he’d teased me too much, when things got really serious he was always there for me. This continued even in high school. I think I must have made a good target for people to go after or pick on, but Matt would stand up to anyone for me.

Later, Matt’s main claim to fame was his knack for getting out of a scrape – the water fight that turned into a brawl, or the time he broke a rearview mirror in a moving car. No matter how sticky the situation, he seemed able to lawyer his way out of it or disarm his challenger with a guffaw. As Megan, another classmate, puts it, “Even if he was in a tight spot, he acted as if he was in control – which often helped him get out of it. Besides, he was always so likeable. . . .”

Despite this reputation, however (or perhaps because of it) no one who knew Matt will forget the time he was really in a pinch and didn’t try to wiggle out of it. Officially, Matt and a buddy were doing their job – nighttime security. In reality, they were drinking up a storm. By morning the empties were gone, the floor mopped. But the room still reeked of vomit, and there were other telltale signs.

Confronted, Matt owned up, not only to getting drunk but also to stealing the alcohol in question from his employer. Further, he apologized at a meeting the next day, volunteering that “my life has been going down the drain, and I can’t fix it by myself.” “I need God in my life,” Matt added, “and I need your help. I ask for your forgiveness, and I thank everyone who has taken the time to speak with me and find out how I’m doing.”

Though the matter was quickly laid to rest, it seemed to be a turning point for Matt; from then on, some acquaintances say, he began to take life more seriously and to engage in fewer antics. Others disagree. According to them, the real change came later, after Matt spent a five-month stint at the Open Door, an Atlanta outreach that runs a soup kitchen and a shelter for the homeless. In a letter to his parents, he wrote:

This morning I served breakfast and noticed several people who must have AIDS. They’re obviously in pretty bad shape but are still out on the street . . . A lot of people are sick with colds, too, and tired from having to walk around all the time. Every night we give out blankets to whoever needs them. The homeless aren’t allowed to sit in public places; the police run them off if they have no permanent address. But it’s pretty amazing that almost every one of them is cheerful, or at least makes the effort to look cheerful, when coming through the food line. You know that they probably didn’t get much sleep last night, and that it was down to about 35 degrees. They have every reason to be upset. They don’t really have anything to live for. Yet still they smile at you and say good morning. It sure challenges me.

Last Sunday we had a pretty good meeting. The theme of the sermon was John the Baptist and his call to repentance. It sounded really familiar, but sort of refreshing. . . .

A few months later, Matt returned to the Bruderhof and asked to become a member. Shortly afterward he was baptized. A few days before this, in a meeting where he and several other peers were asked to explain why they wanted to be baptized, he said:

I need to find a relationship with God and with everybody here . . . I’ve been a rotten example. I am determined not to talk a lot, but to show my faith in deeds. Up till now . . . I’ve been pretending to be focused on God when I really wasn’t; I made people think I was a Christian, or that I was dedicated to this way of life. I haven’t been. That’s where I’m going to change . . .

It was this same honesty about himself that touched many people a year and a half later, in the days that followed Matt’s return home from the hospital. Understandably, most patients who have just been diagnosed with a serious illness are primarily concerned with their physical condition. Matt, too, was worried about that, and peppered his doctors with questions – What was the cause of the lymphoma? How effective was the treatment supposed to be? What were his chances of survival? What did this or that medical term mean? But his overriding concern was his spiritual state. It was, Jonathan recalls, as if Matt sensed that his life had taken an irreversible turn, and that no matter what the outcome, he needed to set his life in order.

I dropped by Matt’s room two days after he’d been discharged and noticed that he’d been crying. I asked him what was up and he told me, in brief, that he had had a long talk with his dad, and that he felt he had to deepen his life. He said there were things on his conscience that he needed to tell someone about. He also said he felt “scared and lonely.” I suggested that he try to get out of the house in the next few days, even if he felt rotten. Maybe that would help. But he just looked past me and said, “My relationship with God is not what it should be.” I assured him that all of us needed to deepen our lives, not just him, and that his illness was helping us all to realize our need for God. Matt just lay there with big wet eyes, staring straight ahead, absorbing the gravity of his personal situation. Looking at him I suddenly realized that each of us needs such a moment.

Two weeks later, Matt wrote Christoph, a trusted friend and senior pastor of the Bruderhof:

There is a passage in the Bible [James 5:13-16] which is very important to me right now. It talks about telling each other your sins so that your prayers will be heard and answered. Making sure that all of my sins are confessed and forgiven, and asking forgiveness of people whom I’ve hurt, has never been so important to me as it is right now . . . more important than physical healing. When your need for God outweighs your need to appear flawless in front of the people around you, repentance becomes something you long for, not dread. I experienced this very personally when I came home from the hospital. I knew it was literally a matter of life or death to straighten out my relationship with God if I was going to get through my illness.

In the weeks and months that followed, Matt would often confide in Christoph, and the answers he received were a source of deep comfort to him. To recount just one conversation, in Christoph’s words:

I told him that having cancer means having one’s personal power dismantled, and that perhaps God was trying to speak to him through it. I also reminded him that he had everything going for him up till now: he was young and strong and handsome and gifted. He had the world by the tail. But now God was saying, “Uh-uh. You’re no good to me.” God had allowed him to have cancer. It was a terrific blow – there was no question. But perhaps God couldn’t use him with all his gifts. I said, “Matt, God had to bring you low, because God works in the weak. Now you have to ask for strength to accept it.” Amazingly, he agreed. He said, “I hear what you’re saying. It’s going to be hard, but that’s what I have to do.”