For Pete’s fortieth birthday, I made a movie about his life. I interviewed a plethora of people. Family, friends from every era, people who had known him far longer than I had. Near the end of every interview, I asked a version of the same question.
Did he ever complain? Did he ever ask, “Why me?”
Not one person could remember it happening. Not a sibling. Not a friend from childhood. Not someone who had sat next to him in a hospital room. I have thought about that answer many times in the years since, and I do not believe it was a failure of memory. When you ask people the same question and they all come back empty, you are not looking at bad recall. You are looking at the truth about someone.
Pete was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis as a child. At the time, the average life expectancy was thirteen years. He was twenty when we met in August of 1995, which was before any transplants. He received a double lung transplant a few years later and lived twenty eight years and one month afterward, against an average of five to seven years. In July of 2023, our other best friend Ben gave him a kidney through a three way swap, which bought two more years. I could not donate. Multiple sclerosis and the medications that keep mine stable disqualified me. Pete passed away this past March.
I did not know the five to seven number while he was alive. That is the part I keep returning to.
It was not that I avoided the subject with him. There was no subject to avoid. Pete did not raise it. Cystic fibrosis was not a topic in his life, it was a condition of his life, no different than breathing or gravity. You do not announce gravity to your friends. So for thirty years I knew what he had in the way you know a fact about someone, filed and accurate and completely weightless.
I could not have told you what it felt like. I did not have the equipment.
Here is the closest I can get to it now. Hold a full glass of water with your arm stretched straight out in front of you. For the first few seconds it is nothing. After a few minutes it is annoying. After an hour it is painful, and the glass has not changed at all. The weight was never in the glass. It was in the fact that you do not get to set it down.
The only time Pete and I ever really talked about his disease was when I was the one who got the news. Pete shared that water glass analogy with me when I was diagnosed.
In 2014, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Thirty eight lesions on my brain and spine at thirty seven years old. Pete was one of the first people I called. He said, “Okay. Is there anything else?” and when I said no, he said he would catch me later, and he hung up. Two days later he asked me to dinner, just the two of us, which was not something we did. I walked into the restaurant and found him already at the table, clapping.
Congratulations. Your life isn’t what you thought it was going to be. You better go figure out what you want it to be.
He told me I would have good days and bad days, and that he did not care, and neither did my wife, and neither did God. He told me he was not supposed to be here and that I was never supposed to have met him. Then he set the terms of our friendship for the rest of his life: if I racked up too many days of asking why me, we were finished. I have written the whole story down here, because it is the single most important thing anyone has ever said to me.
I have been living with my own disease for eleven years now. My scans are stable. Stable is a word that appears on a report. It is not a word that describes a morning. Every time I stumble, every time I catch something ordinary, every small oddity in a hand or a leg or my vision, the question arrives on its own. I wake up and find out what kind of day it is going to be. MS is unpredictable by design, and unpredictability is its own kind of weight. I do not get to set the glass down either.
Which means that somewhere in the last decade, without trying to, I learned to read something I had been looking straight at for thirty years and never once seen.
From August of 1995 until March of this year, Pete did not complain. Not while he was waiting on a set of lungs, not in the twenty eight years and one month he got out of them, not at the end. Thirty years of silence on the subject is not the absence of weight. It is a decision, made daily, by someone whose arm was shaking the entire time.
I journal every morning. I start with gratitude, and I write down the same affirmation every day, that I want to respond with empathy, kindness, and logic. A few weeks ago I got to the end of the gratitude list, looked back at the affirmation, and realized something was missing. So I went back up the page and added multiple sclerosis.
That looks worse in writing than it feels. I am not grateful for the lesions or the medications or the mornings. I am grateful because almost nothing in this life is entirely good or entirely bad, and the disease that took things from me also handed me the one thing I could not get any other way. It gave me the ability to assume the invisible thing is there. It gave me an understanding of Pete that I would likely never have had any other way.
Everyone you talk to today is holding a glass. Most of them will not mention it, and the ones carrying the heaviest ones are often the least likely to say a word, because they stopped thinking of it as news a long time ago. Silence is not evidence of absence. That is the whole lesson, and I paid for it in a way I would not have chosen.
The reason it surfaced now is Mexico. Courtney and I went with Pete’s wife and with Ben and Tammy, for their youngest daughter’s high school graduation. Ben’s entire extended family was there. It was the first time the five of us had been together for any length of time since the hospital, where we had spent those final days together nearly around the clock.
It was healing. It was also the exact kind of milestone we would have celebrated with him. My kids saw Pete more than they saw my siblings combined.
Pete’s motto was Do Better Today. He was not a gentle man about it. He gave me empathy and then immediately took away my right to use it as an excuse, which I now understand was the point. Assume everyone is carrying something. Then get up anyway.
I am still holding the glass. So are you. Today is a gift and a blessing, and my best friend would want me to say that without the slightest trace of sentiment, because to him it was never poetry. It was just the arithmetic of a life he was not supposed to have.