Coming Off Conquerer

“All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”

—Sun Tzu

As I sit at my desk I can’t help but think back 365 days ago and see a very different person.

For years I’ve tried to set and maintain my New Year’s resolutions. And for years I failed time and time again. I would start off great, sprinting out of the gate and giving my all to changing my diet or reading more books or picking out a new hobby. But after a week or two I would slowly give up the healthier food choices and settle back into the convenient arms of late-night Taco Bell nachos or gas station chips and salsa. Gone were the bottles filled with healthy water. In their place were the neon glow of Mountain Dew and the tar black of Coca-Cola. The reading list I’d make gradually became shorter and shorter, and after a while Youtube videos had secured their place in the entertainment department. And my new hobby? Well, by the time summer rolled around it became a distant memory, fading back into the “Oh, I should give that a try” category.

That’s what last year could have been. But it wasn’t. Instead I was in a completely new place in my life, one that many of us will have to be in at some point.

My father died at the end of October 2020, a day after my birthday. I watched for a week as he sat in a hospital bed struggling to breathe as while sitting as his body fought against the Streptococcus running throughout his body. Some days he was lucid, others he slept the entire time I was there. His passing was abrupt—I guess anybody’s death is abrupt as you are here one minute living and then the next you are not—because he seemed to be somewhat on the mend, but somewhere during his hospital stay a blood cot had formed and broke loose hitting his heart.

I remember leaving the hospital that night, long after the life support machines were shut down and visiting hours were well past over, thinking that my brother and I were now effectively orphans. Our mother passed away two years prior in her sleep. We were just starting to get used to life without her. Now we were forced to start from scratch.

I didn’t get much of a chance to grief. Dad died on a Friday. That Sunday my brother and I were arguing about autopsies and whether or not the hospital was negligent in Dad’s care. On Monday we were making funeral arrangements.

Setting up the formalities of the funeral were simple enough. We worked with the same funeral home that set up Mom’s service. They took care of everything. All we had to do was show up at the end of the week. It was the settling all of Dad’s affairs that took much longer. My brother burrowed himself into our parents’ house. He had already been living there so it wasn’t much of a problem. Dad’s checking account left us enough money to make the mortgage payments through the winter and there was even enough money to keep the utilities current. However, I didn’t take into account his girlfriend moving in with him and the two of them pretending to play house. Their first order of business was to clean the place out, tossing out the night stand in Mom and Dad’s bedroom as they searched for a family will that didn’t exist.

My wife and I spent the next several weeks going over and rescuing old photos and journals from the garbage. We boxed and packed albums and trinkets and other memorabilia to store at our tiny rental home. I sat my brother down and we made a list of how we planned to divide up the rest of the possessions and the remaining work—I would file life insurance claims and get the ball rolling on selling the house come spring; he would be in charge of the house’s upkeep and any small updating we could do on the cheap.

So that was where I was at a year ago. I was thinking of making house payments on a home I didn’t own nor live in. I made trips to the county courthouse filing the necessary documents to claim letters of authority over our parents’ estate. And I spent many afternoons making phone calls to insurance agencies about policy numbers and check amounts and dates of when said checks would arrive. I was exhausted both mentally and physically, yet I couldn’t show it. There were too many eyes that were red with grief looking at me for support and assurance. I thought I had to be the strong one, the immovable object that people could rest upon and feel secure. That’s what my wife and children needed at that time. But as we watched the ball descend on December 31, 2020 I realized for the first time how fragile life can be. One minute you are in somewhat perfectly fine health enjoying time with your grandchildren, making plans of when to pay off your home and when you are going to retire; and then in the next you are lying cold and lifeless in a hospital gown.

As the ball fell over Times Square I knew I didn’t want another year of my life to go to waste. My New Year’s resolution this time was to live life with meaning. This year I was going to go get what was mine.

I put together a list of goals when we got home. The original list went like this:

• Earn my national medical interpreters certification
• Earn my American Translators Association certification for English-Spanish
• Have an intermediate knowledge of French and Portuguese
• Enroll in Michigan State University’s Masters of Global Health program
• Weigh 250 pounds by the end of the year
• Transcribe Dad’s mission letters
• Blog for 2 months straight
• Write a book and publish it
• Submit an article to the Liahona (our church’s magazine)
• Play the violin for one hour each day for the rest of the year

When I first started my list I was still in my parents’ shadow. Since I served a mission in South America they thought a career as an interpreter and translator would be a good fit for me. For years I put off trying to take the state interpreters exam for Michigan courts, but after spending time in the hospital and being the one in charge of my father’s care, I thought that maybe they had reason. I could help people lost in the healthcare setting, both on the patient’s side of the line as well as the medical staff. And since I love to write and creative writing was my major in college, adding the country’s premier translation certification to my skillset seemed like a no-brainer.

But four months of studying medical vocabulary and enrolled in an interpreter’s prep class, it hit me that being in and out of hospitals for the next 20 or 30 years wasn’t the future I envisioned. I love languages. I love speaking Spanish. Sometimes it feels like I’m speaking a secret code when I talk with my wife or in-laws, but to use it as a career didn’t feel right. I couldn’t live my life for someone else. I needed to live it for me. So, I re-evaluated my goals and trimmed them down. The focus, now, for 2021 was getting a book written. It has been my dream to be a full-time author, to make a living writing. I had an outline completed and some notes, but I didn’t have the muscles yet to carry the project through. I needed to get into shape like Chris Evans or Henry Cavill—in the literal sense—for their roles as Captain America and Geralt of Rivia…and Superman, I suppose. In place of weights and barbells, I used my Dad’s letters he wrote to me while I served my mission in Chile to build up my stamina. For three months I transcribed 10 letters a day—five in the morning and five a night after work—never breaking from pattern. When I knew I wouldn’t be able to transcribe in the evening, I did extra work in the morning. If I knew my morning was going to be occupied by something like a kid’s doctors appointment, I transcribed extra letters the night before or got up earlier that morning so I could get my five in. It was hard, but it was worth it. The process taught me how to keep a daily writing schedule. It taught me how to push past the times when I didn’t want to transcribe. It showed me that I could overcome fatigue, and it helped me develop my editorial skills as I often had to clean up many of Dad’s run-on sentences and other grammatical errors..

I remember tears swelling at the corner of my eyes the night I finished transcribing his letters. For a time he was with me every morning when I woke up and said good-night to me at the end of the day. With those final 10 letters that was going to end. Yet, there was more to the goal than just transcribing old letters. I decided that when I finished the project I would have them commemorated in a book. Two weeks after that final night I placed my order through jrnl.com. It took about a month to get the book back, but when it did return I found myself crying once more. I had 419 pages filled with Dad’s voice telling me that I could do this writing thing.

The next step in my training shifted to my creative side. Now that I knew I could keep to daily writing I needed to “up the ante”.

This blog was born from that revelation. I needed an audience to write for once again. When I worked as a sports writer for The Herald-Palladium I wrote for our subscribers. It was thrilling to know that people were reading my work, and that I was contributing something to the communities we covered. It had been two years since I was on the sports desk. I fell in love with the idea of being a full-time writer but I wasn’t doing anything to make it a reality.

That was about to change.

Late on August 8 I logged into my WordPress account and started to type a post very similar to this one. I described making the choice to focus on writing, on my book and about how Dad’s letters were helping me to get there. I worked on that post throughout the week, following the words wherever the led me. Then on Friday, Aug. 13, I posted my second blog post ever.

I didn’t expect many people to read it. Maybe a few family members, maybe a few friends. But then I started getting notifications about other bloggers reading my post and liking it. That gave me a boost, and from then on for the at least the next two months I planned, wrote and posted a new entry every Friday by noon.

Since that late-night entry I have written about my neighbors and their struggles with domestic violence. I’ve shared my experience of finding two lost children and reuniting them with their mother. I’ve expressed my feelings about moving on from grief and I’ve embraced my fears of my children growing up and becoming their own selves while I slowly take my seat on the sidelines of their lives.

When I started this blog it was a means to an end. It was going to help me build my audience, give me a soapbox to stand on and perform. And yet, it has given me so much more. It has become a place where I reflect, and reflect differently than in a journal (which I also keep). Here is where creativity and real life meet. It is here where I can reveal a bit more of my true self without timidity. This exercise has made me grow as I hoped it would. It’s provided me with the tools necessary to accomplish the big goal of writing a book, and it’s also established the confidence, or as one math professor said to me, “the swag” to carry out such a project.

I won’t be finishing my book by tomorrow. That would be a real feat. However, the plan is to have the final draft completed and submitted for publication by April 2022. That seems more than doable. In fact, it may be too much time but I’ll play it by ear and see what happens because I know that I will be finishing it here very soon.

I am glad I am not like the man who started out this year. We both still have awesome beards and we are both nowhere near 250 pounds, although I am a little closer to that number than he was. But he’s grown up to be me. Someone who no longer sits around waiting and hoping that his dreams will come true. Instead I’ve become a hunter, a tracker. I’m going after what I want now, and that will carry over to 2022. I’ve learned how to deal with my grief and turn it into positive energy. It has taken a lot to get here and it will take even more to get where I truly want to be, and I’m OK with that.

Like Sun Tzu said, it isn’t the tactics I use that helps me achieve but the strategy that helps my victory evolve.