As far as powerlifting goes, I can’t be of much help unless you’re really weak or really inexperienced. I’m pretty weak myself after a 50-lb weight loss and I wasn’t strong by competitive standards to begin with. But I don’t have to squat 1000 lbs—or even 500 lbs—to tell you what I learned about life, death, and strength in just a few email messages from Bob Youngs.
First off, I don’t know him personally, but as many of you know, Bob recently survived a horrible ordeal with leukemia. His book, Extraordinary Resolve: Six Months for the Rest of My Life, is an intense account of suffering, determination, and family support throughout the experience. Organized around his fiancee’s day-to-day family blog entries with Bob’s post-recovery reflections on events following each entry, it tells a brutal but inspiring story of guts and teamwork.
Personally, much of it is sickening. Nothing in Stephen King, Clive Barker, Richard Matheson, or any of the horror masters combined could equal what cancer and its treatments do to those living with it. I’ll take Hell House over chemo any day. Anyway, here is how our emails started.
My cousin is fighting brain cancer. He lives out of state away from family. He has survived cancer twice before and never asked us for any favors. He had just gone through treatment for lung cancer when doctors found a tumor in his brain. We knew this wasn’t good, but we didn’t know how bad it had gotten either. A little over a week ago, he emailed my wife asking if she could fly down and “hang” with him for a few days. She’s a go-to person in my family. It couldn’t have come at a busier time, but she looked into hooking up a buddy pass through a client of hers and told him she could come down in a couple weeks. They emailed over logistics (and costs) a few times until finally he just sent her his credit card number and said, “Just f***ing charge it to my account. I’m serious!” or something like that. So she did and flew down the next morning.
From her account of her stay with him, this latest bout is kicking the crap out of him. He’s a starving artist basically, so his health care isn’t great. She says many of his friends won’t visit him. It’s like his brain tumor is contagious. I know it’s bad but not firsthand. I really struggled with this while my wife was away. What do you say? What do you do? I knew of Bob Youngs through Elite Fitness and of his book. I hadn’t read it though. I hadn’t kept up with his struggles. I hadn’t bought a “Lift Strong” product. But here I was asking him on the Q&A if I could share some thoughts about my cousin and about my whacked out state of mind while my wife was out of town caring for him.
Bob responded within an hour or two on the Q&A and to my own email. I sent him a long, long, very personal account of what was going on and how messed up I was in all sorts of ways having nothing to do with my cousin’s cancer. Over the next few days, he continued to respond to my emails and invited me to write him whenever I needed help. If the man dealt with everyone touched by cancer like this, he’d never eat or sleep. I’m still amazed that he did this.
It’s odd how a loved one’s suffering can make you dwell on your own baggage. I was prepared to get a message from Bob that said, “Get your head out of your butt.” Instead, in a nutshell, here are two key points from what I took away from him:
1. Any significant thing you undertake in life you must do as a member of a team. You don’t have to have everyone there with you in person, but you have to know you aren’t struggling alone. Your family and your friends are there for you as you must be for them. Strength comes from people believing in themselves and in one another. I train alone. I work mostly alone. My real passion, not my day job, is something I do alone. So I was used to thinking of taking on many of life’s challenges alone. Now I know I’m walking with others even if in spirit. I have the world behind me. You’d need it if you were about to face what Bob went through.
2. You don’t have to have an ailment to support someone going through cancer or whatever horrible disease afflicts them. In the weight room, I knew I could coach my partners and challenge them because I knew what it was like to grab or get under a bar. But I knew nothing of having cancer. I felt there was no way I could tell my cousin to stay positive, to keep fighting. Bob freed me of that notion. “Just be there for him,” he said. “Have love for him.”
He also told me that I was seeing death all around me—something he knew firsthand—but that I needed to see life around me as well and that any given day is a second chance. I can’t tell you how much this helped.
Outside of family and close friends, only a handful of individuals come to mind when I think of those who gave me guidance when I needed it most. I don’t think I’m being melodramatic in putting Bob Youngs on that list. Being there for me, having never met me, listening to my crazy talk, and guiding me out of my fog of negativity was very important in steering me in the right direction. In a sense, I consider him to be a part of my “team” now (and no, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stalk him on the internet and expect him to come up with a cure for my cousin’s illness).
His advice and life coaching made me see that everything I do and want to be has to be grounded in the people and things that matter to me. You’d think that’s obvious, but it wasn’t, not where I was at. He didn’t have to contact me personally. As I said, he wouldn’t have time to eat or sleep or see his family if he spent all day dealing with people in my position. But he did, with compassion and respect.
So thanks, Bob. Lift strong.
Update: Sadly, my cousin didn’t survive his struggle with cancer. The world lost a first-rate writer whose stories appeared in Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen mystery magazines and whose screenwriting credits include the story and script for the 1980s cult film Critters. While I wrote the article without knowing certain details (such as why few of his friends saw him while he was sick), the chief point remains the same—if you have a friend or loved one who is fighting cancer, please don’t give up on them. Support him or her in whatever way you can. There will be many doomsayers. Don’t listen to them.