Last Monday was a very special family dinner. My stepson, Anthony, was home from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point for his spring break, and my son, Tate, was also home from hockey prep school. For the first time in a long time, Jill and I had our daughter, Caroline, and our two boys under one roof again. These moments are so few and far between these days, and I cherish every single moment of them.
Jill and I decided a long time ago that we wanted our kids to understand the importance and power of deep conversations. It’s good to laugh and joke around as we break bread, but we always try to inspire at least one meaningful discussion at dinnertime. So, that night, we asked each of them: “What do you think will be the most important thing to you in the future?”
Anthony let Caroline and Tate go first as he always does. When it was his turn, he collected this thoughts and said, quietly, “I really want to be able to graduate from West Point and have a job where I can provide for my family and give them the same life that I was blessed to have. I want to take them all around the world and have a nice house and send them to good schools.”
Then, Anthony frowned just a little and said, “But I also want to be the kind of father and husband who is there every single night. I know it’s going to be really hard, but I want to find a way to provide everything and more for my family but not at the cost of being absent.”
I gotta admit… that hit me hard. I’m proud that I’ve been able to provide everything for my family, but it comes at a cost. I’m on the road 250 days per year, which means a lot of missed a lot of hockey games, dance recitals, and family game nights. The little moments that make a good life. As hard as I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to achieve that elusive work-life balance. With Tate and Anthony living in dorm rooms across the country, and with Caroline only a year away from college, I admit I thought it was too late to make a genuine change.
The day after our dinner conversation—the day after—I went to the dentist’s office. I’m one of those freaks who loves going to the dentist. I don’t just go for my annual cleaning; I’m so OCD that I’m there four times a year. On Tuesday, everything was going great until my dentist peered into my throat and said, “Tommy, your teeth look great, but there’s something in the back of your throat that doesn’t look right. You need to make an appointment with your ENT doctor.”
Immediately I rang up my dear friend Dr. Jeff Chain, who got me in the very next day. He stuck an endoscope up through my nose to the back of my mouth and immediately inhaled. “We need to schedule you for surgery straight away,” he said gravely. “You have a one-inch tumor in your throat.”
“Is it cancer?” I said. “Is it malignant?”
“I don’t know, Tommy. We will do a biopsy after I cut it out. But this needs to be done immediately. I’m going to get you in for tomorrow.”
When I explained the situation to my family, we held hands and prayed, and they reassured me that everything was going to be OK. But I knew there was a chance everything would not be OK. The next morning, Jill drove me to Dry Creek Surgery Center and the anesthesiologists pumped me full of drugs. It was a brief surgery considering they had to cut a tumor out of my throat, but that’s not what truly scared me. What scared me was the next six days. Six days of waiting to find out if my tumor was malignant or benign. Six days of waiting to find out if I was going to die.
At first, I just wanted to hunker down on the couch and watch Netflix shows, waiting in a pit of stress for that call to come from Dr. Chain. Jill and the kids remained glued to my side as the seconds turned to minutes turned to hours. But then I thought about that famous line, “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” There are 86,400 seconds in each day, and I felt like I was spending all of them dying instead of living. When that call finally came, did I want to be living my life or waiting for it to be over? I wasn’t going to wait around until the decision was made for me.
The first thing I did was look up all of Tate’s fall hockey games and lock them into my schedule. I also locked in all of Caroline’s recitals and field hockey games. Then Jill and I did something we’ve been talking about for years: we put in an offer for our retirement home in Singer Island, Florida. It was accepted, and we close on June 19. No matter if I had forty more weeks to live or forty more years, my family was going to get our money’s worth.
When that call finally came six days after my surgery, I wasn’t sitting paralyzed on the couch. I wasn’t wrapped in blankets watching TV. Jill and I were planning how to decorate our new home. Caroline and Tate were laughing and arguing about hockey. Anthony was discussing what he wanted to do after he graduated from West Point. I was cherishing every second and looking forward to cherishing every second that would come after—no matter how few there might be.
And then the phone rang. My family went still and held hands.
“The tumor was benign,” Dr. Chain said. “You’re going to be fine.”
I’m going to be fine, I thought as Jill and our kids jumped and screamed and hugged me. I was euphoric, too, of course. But I realized something after I hung up the phone. Even if that call had gone the other way, even if my doctor said I only had a few months to live, I knew I was still going to be fine. Those six days reminded me of everything I had to live for, and they made me realize how much living we can pack into a short period of time if we just open our hearts.
There’s an old Chinese proverb that goes, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.” Take it from me: It’s never too late to make a big change. It’s never too late to prioritize the people who matter most. And it’s never too late to get busy living.