Free Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters by Lt Col Mark Weber, Robin Williams Page B

his ego to handle, but when he takes on a task, you can bet your life it will be done exceptionally well.
    When I hear people call him crazy for ignoring a warning or advice about what can’t or shouldn’t be done, I can only nod in agreement and smile, because I’ve heard those same words as a cadet, a student teacher, a soldier, an officer, a husband and father, and a cancer survivor.
    Our man-to-man experiences helped me temper my immature, youthful memories of him. His “madness” was actually all about taking calculated risks, often choosing a path of difficulty and challenge over comfort, being literally and figuratively willingto walk on thin ice, and relying on actions over words to get things done.
    I know your memories of me may be dominated by visions of the same hard hand my dad held over me, and naturally I want you to see virtue in my madness. I can only hope my stories about his actions will help you see the wisdom—and love—in mine.
    Words mean things. Words, mean things. MacArthur didn’t say to disregard them; he said to make sure you don’t substitute them for action. My experiences in combat and with cancer, and the conversations that resulted, have taught me that too many people seem to think sentiments are strong enough without action. Don’t you believe it
.
    Or as a drill sergeant once told me, hope in one hand …
    ----
    * www.caringbridge.org . Site name: “markmweber.” This is a free-access website where all visitors can read updates and leave comments.
    † The news story and photos of the snow fort can be seen at www.tellmysons.com .
    ‡ One of the best conversational works on the complexities of child rearing I’ve ever read is David Brooks’s
The Social Animal
. I recommend chapters 3 through 9, which give a far richer account than what I think about the subject.

Chapter Three
     …  TO BE PROUD AND UNBENDING IN HONEST FAILURE, BUT HUMBLE AND GENTLE IN SUCCESS.

    1977, with Dad’s number 26 race car

SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 2010
    When the day finally came to leave the hospital on September 8, five weeks after I went in, I felt like a baby bird being pushed from the nest with no feathers on its wings. *
    I had only been eating solid food for a few days, weighed 130 pounds (down from 165), and could barely walk. Bullah was still a fist-size drainage pocket inside my body, and Buford was still a quarter-inch-wide slit across my abdomen that leaked digestive juice 24/7.
    Oh, and I still had cancer.
    When we got home, my eyes misted at every turn. Everything was just as I had remembered it, but I was not, and that mismatched feeling was intense.
    I glanced at the massive half-acre garden that had taken me three years of backbreaking labor to create—completed just two months before my cancer diagnosis. Now I was so weak and feeble I couldn’t even trim a rose.
    On my way to the bathroom to take a shower, I walked past our bedroom. Intimacy of any kind with my wife would not be possible for the foreseeable future.
    I went to take a shower, and I was not at all prepared for whathappened. At the hospital, the only thing I ever saw in the small vanity mirror was my face. In our bathroom, we had mirrors large enough to see my body from the waist up. Undressed, I turned to get a towel and caught a full glimpse of my naked body. The sight took my breath away.
    I could see every rib in my chest, my shoulder bones jutted out in sharp points, and my arms and legs looked like sticks. My butt was gone, my back just connected to my legs in one seamless line. And I was hunched over like a ninety-year-old man.
    What had I done to myself?
    I sat down on the toilet seat and sobbed uncontrollably in deep heaves. The visual reminders of the changes were just too overwhelming. For weeks, I had thought of myself as the same strong, fit, army soldier I’d always been, and I had wondered where this silly potbelly had come from. Now I realized my stomach was about the same size it had always been; the