It took an awful long time to write this column. Maybe too long.
I don’t know why, but it’s been hard.
Maybe it was too soon. Maybe I hadn’t come to terms with it, or wasn’t ready to admit he was really gone.
Whatever the reason, I’ve been delaying it since December.
That’s when Robin King — my neighbor, my former professor, my friend — passed away after battling brain cancer for 17 years.
Let me just repeat that … he battled brain cancer for 17 years!
I don’t know what it takes to fight that long — stubbornness, resolve, willpower, not wanting to give an inch to something trying to take your life. Or was it something else — some inner calm or peace? The power of positive thinking? I never thought to ask him, and I regret it now.
But I got an inkling about where that strength came from the other day when his wife Darien — who it should be noted fought along with him all those years — held a memorial service at Flagler College. It was at Flagler that he used to teach philosophy and religion, and where I first met him as a student many moons ago. At the memorial, one of his former philosophy students — today a reverend — told those gathered that he once asked Robin about the meaning of life.
The answer he got? To live.
Classic Robin. Painfully simple. Obvious, yet totally profound. Right in front of our eyes, but somehow still a “secret” to us. Was that HIS secret? Was that what kept him going — how he battled through it for so many years? Never quitting. Never giving an inch until his will to live was overpowered by the disease’s will to crush him.
Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned there. That you take life as it comes, one day-at-a-time, and you appreciate everything, and you experience everything, and you smile, and no matter how desperate things seem, or no matter how bad the pain gets, you just never, ever quit.
Maybe that’s the final lesson he taught me. The one I’ll never forget.
Truth is, I think I would have been angry in Robin’s place. Mad at the world. Mad at cancer. Mad at everything I lost, or I would never be able to have.
But I don’t think Robin ever was.
He had every right. He was a brilliant scholar who had a passion for teaching and was tremendously engaging in the classroom. Yet, the disease left him a shell of his former self. He often struggled for words, and at its worst he would rub his brow during long pauses while patiently trying to construct a thought as simple as, “You been running much?” or “How’s the kid?”
I felt guilty — that someone who used to be able to talk at length about Plato or things that floated well above my lumpy head — had to work so hard just to ask me a basic question. Is that fair?
But he never dwelled on what was or wasn’t fair. And as someone else at his memorial noted, he never resented it.
I once read something film critic Roger Ebert wrote about enduring his own debilitating battle with cancer: “Resentment is allowing someone to live rent-free in a room in your head.”
Isn’t that so true, but something we’re all guilty of?
But you know, Robin never did that. It would have gotten in the way of living.
He used to sit on his sofa in the front room of his house watching TV, and as I walked by with my dog in the morning, he would catch me out of the corner of his eye. In order to wave to me, he would torque his body in such a contorted way that I worried he might snap in half.
And there was no nonchalance in his wave. Instead, it was like he was flagging down an airplane. All heartfelt exuberance — child-like excitement — totally infectious. Your day was off to good start after that.
I sure miss those waves.
Every time I walk the dog past his house, I still look over to that window. I don’t know if it’s instinctive after so many years, or if a part of me really expects to see him there waving.
Maybe that part — the one that struggled for so long to write this column — doesn’t want to let go. Doesn’t want to stop waving. Doesn’t want to quit.
Robin never did, and it’s something he’s still teaching me today.