The last of three blogs about a man who showed up early, saw everything, and made his own case to the very end.
Wally is gone. If you’ve been reading my last few blogs on Wally, you know why. It isn’t because he dropped dead of a heart attack, got hit by a car, or just grew old and faded away. No. Wally killed himself. He said he would, before dementia could take the choice away from him, and he did. This is the third blog I’ve written about him, and the last, at least for now.
The Man in the Front Row
I met Wally in May, at my book launch. He got there an hour early and sat in the front row, just beaming. Joie de vivre, life force, whatever you want to call it. My kids found me afterward and asked who that guy was. I didn’t have a real answer. I just knew there was something in him most of us spend our whole lives chasing and never catch.
He’d read the book. He asked if we could get coffee. We didn’t have parallel lives, not really, but our lives had intersected geographically in a way that surprised us both. There and here. Israel and Denver. He’d spent most of his adult life there. His family still was. He’d gotten divorced, stayed connected to his kids, and had to rebuild a life on this side of the ocean. Man plans, God laughs. But somewhere in that unplanned life, Wally found something he never expected. His heart.
What Dementia Gave Him
He had to get past other people’s opinions to find it. Their fear. The doctors and their diagnoses, and everything doctors think a diagnosis is supposed to mean. I can only tell you what Wally told me, over and over, sitting across a coffee table from me. He was grateful. Genuinely, not performing it, not talking himself into it. He said it moved him out of his head and into his heart for the first time in his life, after decades of building a business and a life that never really had much Wally in it.
He refused to call it cognitive decline. He called it emotional incline, his mind going down while his spirit, he’d say, was going up. He said it with a straight face and a clear mind, which was the whole paradox of the man. He was sharper in those final months than most people I know at full capacity, sharp enough that we turned a couple of our coffees into podcast episodes. And sharp enough, unfortunately, to build an airtight case for ending his own life on his own terms, before the disease could make that decision for him.
Where Wally and I Part Ways
I don’t agree with him. I’ve never needed to. Nietzsche said it best: you have your way, I have my way, and as for the right way, the only way, it doesn’t exist. Wally had his way. Mine runs through Viktor Frankl, who found meaning in the middle of the Holocaust and never let go of it. Life has meaning under all circumstances, Frankl said, and suffering may hold the greatest meaning of all.
I hold a religious view too, for whatever it’s worth to anyone but me. I don’t believe this body is ours to own outright. Think of it like an apartment instead of a house. You can rearrange the furniture, repaint the walls. What you can’t do is tear down a load-bearing wall, and you sure can’t break the lease early. That’s my way. It was never going to be Wally’s, and honestly, one of the things I loved most about the guy was that we could sit in that disagreement without either of us needing the other to fold.
The Bumper Sticker Theology Doesn’t Work
The things that actually matter in a life never fit on a bumper sticker. Not the meaningful ones. Not the ones that shape you. Whatever theology you’re driving around with taped to your car, it wasn’t built to hold something like this. This isn’t yes or no. Right or wrong. It’s nuance, and I mean actually nuanced, not the fake kind people claim right before they tell you exactly what they think.
Not all suicides are the same, either. My father’s is the bookend on the opposite extreme from Wally’s. His came out of the dark, no warning, no clarity, nothing lucid about it at all. Wally’s came out of months of conversation, coffee after coffee, a man who could still out-argue me on a good day. That doesn’t mean I agree with what Wally chose. It means I’m not going to flatten two very different men into one word just so my own position feels tidier.
You won’t find any of this on a bumper sticker behind somebody’s car at a red light. You’re reading it here instead, because some things take more than a slogan font to hold. Who am I to say what meaning looks like inside someone else’s dementia? All any of us can do is stay present and keep choosing. That was Wally’s argument, and it was a good one. If I’m no longer choosing, he’d say, am I even still me?
I don’t have a clean answer to that, and at some point I stopped pretending I needed one. Staying in the room with someone whose conclusion you reject, without needing to reject the man too. Disagreeing with somebody all the way to the end and still showing up for the next coffee anyway. I don’t know how else to say it. Anyone who hands you a tidy philosophy that survives contact with an actual dying man probably hasn’t sat with enough dying men.
A Name, Not a Number
There’s an old teaching that a person dies twice. Once when the body goes, once when his name is spoken for the last time. The Kabbalists say a name was never just a name. It’s a story, still being written by everyone who carries it forward.
Wally, your body’s gone but I’m not done saying your name, and I don’t think the people who’ve heard your story are either. I don’t get to close this one out clean, and I’ve stopped trying to. I’ll probably be arguing with you in my head for years. Some debates aren’t supposed to end. They just keep making you a little more honest for as long as you’re still around to have them.
Ram Dass used to say we’re all just walking each other home. For a few months I thought that’s what I was doing for you, Wally. Turns out it was the other way around, and it still is. Thank you for walking me home.
Wally spent most of his life leading with his head. It took losing his mind to find his heart. You don’t have to wait for a diagnosis to ask the six questions that get you there first. The Guy in the Glass: Six Questions to See the Man You Were Meant to Be is built for exactly that. Get it at GuyintheGlass.com.
If you never got the chance to hear Wally for yourself, watch our conversation here: https://youtu.be/09tPRBoqp_w
