An Injured Lion Still Wants to Roar

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Another matter upsetting Jai: To give the talk as scheduled, I would have to fly to Pittsburgh the day before, which was Jai’s 41^st birthday. “This is my last birthday we’ll celebrate together,” she told me. “You’re actually going to leave me on my birthday?”

Certainly, the thought of leaving Jai that day was painful to me. And yet, I couldn’t let go of the idea of the lecture. I had come to see it as the last moment of my career, as a way to say goodbye to my “work family.” I also found myself fantasizing about giving a last lecture that would be the oratorical equivalent of a retiring baseball slugger driving one last ball into the upper deck. I had always liked the final scene in “The Natural,” when the aging, bleeding ballplayer Roy Hobbs miraculously hits that towering home run.

Dr. Reiss listened to Jai and to me. In Jai, she said, she saw a strong, loving woman who had intended to spend decades building a full life with a husband, raising children to adulthood. Now our lives together had to be squeezed into a few months. In me, Dr. Reiss saw a man not yet ready to fully retreat to his home life, and certainly not yet ready to climb into his deathbed. “This lecture will be the last time many people I care about will see me in the flesh,” I told her flatly. “I have a chance here to really think about what matters most to me, to cement how people will remember me, and to do whatever good I can on the way out.”

More than once, Dr. Reiss had watched Jai and me sit together on her office couch, holding tightly to each other, both of us in tears. She told us she could see the great respect between us, and she was often viscerally moved by our commitment to getting our final time together right. But she said it wasn’t her role to weigh in on whether or not I gave the lecture. “You’ll have to decide that on your own,” she said, and encouraged us to really listen to each other, so we could make the right decision for both of us.

Continued on page 4: Given Jai’s reticence, I knew I... »