Crossing Another Kind of Border

My good friend and former business partner is about to cross one border that all of us will only cross once. Diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease, he is traveling in the borderland where crossing the line means going from everything we know to everything we don't know.

Most of us don't get to choose that journey. He is one of those who will and has. ALS is incurable, it is a matter of when, not if, you die from it.

Bob was diagnosed a few days after he qualified to run the Boston Marathon. They gave him four years then, it won't be half that. He ran in Boston, finishing near the last with nearly useless arms and shoulders drooping in exhaustion.

Some months ago he agreed to have a ventilator put down his throat into his lungs so he could breath. He has decided to have it removed on a certain day in September. He'll cross that border shortly afterward.

We haven't talked much on the phone lately. Not much really since we sold our newspaper company and his powers of speech were stricken. When they put the ventilator in, Bob had to have them take it out to talk with anyone. It was talk or breathe. He was understandable only to his son Dan and some of his other four kids and his wife Deb. Although his mind is as sharp as it ever was, the muscles that control his speech and most other parts of his body are sapped.

Having a business partner is a crapshoot mostly. I had one of the best. I'm putting some things on hold in about ten or fifteen days to go down and visit him.

When he told me, through Dan, that he had decided to have the ventilator removed on a certain day, all the air seemed to go out of my own body. I just couldn't wrap my head around the idea of knowing that particular border was visible not too far ahead, and that everything across that border was at best a dearly held belief, and even in that circumstance shrouded in the impenetrable blackness of high country in a summer thunderstorm.