The hero who won the war

It has taken me fifty-one years to understand what happened.

As I entered seventh grade, at the age of twelve, I found myself in a new school, in a new kind of schedule: seven classes and five teachers a day, beginning with “Home room” — and not a single friend from my elementary school was there.

Seated next to me was a strangely compatible stranger. Hello David, I am Richard. (I used my middle name then).

If I were more observant, I would have wondered: why was David even skinnier than me? Why did he favor his leg, sometimes wincing in pain? But I was just happy that he was as eager to participate as I was.

Every morning David and I started our day with orchestra. In study halls and after school, we often played chess.

In class, we were natural companions — excited about science, history, and even English the way Miss Potter taught it, as Olympic-level wordplay. [“Now people, you have ten seconds to diagram this sentence” as she wrote it on the board: “The little old lady … smashed her Ferrari … into the wall of the track.”]

We laughed our way through Miss Potter’s bracing instruction: serious about science, excited by history … and clearly meant to be friends.

A few weeks into the school year, Miss Potter kept me after school. “Kindig”, she said (she always addressed us by our last names), “Gregorek has leukemia and has been given 6 months to live.”

Remember, I was twelve and HIPPA did not exist. While I tried to decide what I was supposed to feel, Miss Potter fired a shot across my bow that I can still hear to this day:

“I want you to give him something to live for.”

The secret mission

Miss Potter had just graduated from Ohio State. Chronologically, she was barely older than my big sister, but emotionally she connected me to a world of adults, ideas and adventures. Plus I liked her. Maybe because she seemed to like me and the other kids in the class. This was a young woman — perhaps the first young woman — I definitely wanted to please.

So when she kept me after school and stood at the blackboard, motioned me to take a seat, and then told me the life and death truth about my new friend, she had my full attention.

Sandy — Miss Potter almost daily joked about having the same name as Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher ever — stood looking at me without a trace of her familiar humor, but without any visible sadness, either.

With clarity and deep conviction, her steady eyes pierced my soul.

“I want you to compete with David.”

“Compete in everything. Every day. Never show your sympathy for his tiredness and pain. Never let him think that you know about his illness.”

I looked down, wondering what to feel. How could this work? When I looked back at her, she must have seen the question in my eyes.

“When you play chess, beat him. When you do science fairs or book reports, try to make yours better. Compete in music of all things.”

“Of course he can’t play sports…”

That one stung, because … what excuse did I have? Congenital clumsiness?

“… and he’ll probably miss a lot of school for medicine and radiation. Don’t make fun of him if his hair falls out. But be his friend and expect him to compete on a level playing field.”

I’m not sure if I said anything at all that October day as I walked the two miles home. But my new friend had become something strange and frightful. He was no longer just a kid I liked or didn’t like, a guy I could tease or ignore. He was now my secret mission. My over-arching goal. My responsibility.

Our daily journey

Almost every day after school I walked two miles out of my way to go home with David, where we built rockets, watched box turtles, built rockets, played chess, argued, and built rockets.

Why wasn’t I with my family? My mom worked late and my dad worked all the time. My sister was in college. So the Gregoreks became my family.

His mom, Rita, was always there, quick to offer me a sandwich or a bowl of fruit. She seemed to like having me around. I must have been starved for affection, because I ate it up. Rita would gently rebuke David sometimes, when he poked fun at my primitive rocket-modeling skills. But mostly she was busy attending to the needs of his little sisters, Jeannie and Susan.

David’s father, Gerry, was a lot like mine: an affable workaholic. By day he kept a demanding schedule as a graduate assistant and instructor of most of the 1st and 2nd year aero students. Nor was he around much in the afternoons when I was hanging out. He was goal-oriented: busy writing his Ph.D. thesis, which required working evenings to get access to the hypersonic wind tunnel at Ohio State’s Don Scott Airfield.

I didn’t understand the pressure they all were under back then, but when I had kids of my own I began to realize what it was like for the Gregorek family to face a lion and run from a bear.

Everything Gerry earned as an underpaid instructor must have gone toward his family. Everything, except the payments on a brand new midnight blue Mustang — he was a Korean war fighter pilot, after all. If he couldn’t fly high, he could fly low.

Before he had the Mustang and his son had the cancer, Gerry had been busy coaching his son’s baseball team, most afternoons and weekends. But now he took his mind off things he couldn’t control by chasing his career … fast.

And once his dissertation was finished, he took his foot off the accelerator to coach all of us in a rocket club. We called it CSAR — the Columbus Society for the Advancement of Rocketry.

Competition to be the best

Every year we dueled each other in science fair. The first to years I got superiors and he got excellents. He did real science, but I had better graphics.

In eighth grade I convinced our Latin teacher to let me debate David on evolution vs creation. I argued for a young earth, and David thought science proved an older earth. The class voted me the winner, much to the chagrin of the teacher. Years later I realized that David was right.

“Gregorek” and I competed in a dozen ways through 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th grades.

In August of 1968 David set a record in Parachute Duration at the NAR rocket meet at Wallops Island, Virginia. I didn’t even go — he had long since outdistanced me in model rocketry.

In March of 1969, our sophomore year, Gregorek for the first time beat me at music — he earned a “I” at the State Solo and Ensemble Contest, and I received a “II”.

Soon after that David also completed an 8-inch reflector telescope that he had been building. He had worked at it almost every day for a year, grinding the concave glass with ultra-fine abrasives in the science lab closet, while the rest of us went to gym class.

That May, David also for the first time won Superiors at the school, Regional, and State Science Fairs.

David’s cancer was clearly in remission. His hair was longer, his skin less pallid.

In May he went back for his fifth annual chemo and radiation blitz. On his last night at University Hospital, the doctors checked his white blood cell counts. Though the leukocyte numbers were low due to the treatments, there was no sign of cancer!

Gerry and Rita celebrated this great news with David that night, and as was customary Gerry napped in his room with him. Towards dawn, his dad kissed the sleeping hero on the forehead and went home to freshen up in time for work. He planned to visit Dave at noon, and bring him home for good.

In the bed next to David, another kid had been served a banana cream pie. He offered it to Dave. My best friend said, “Sure!” By the time he got around to eating it the pie had been sitting for a couple of hours. When he ate that custard a few microbes found a new, congenial host with no white blood cells.

In another hour David was in septic shock.

When the doctor called his parents to hurry back, bright David was already flickering out.

He had beaten cancer, the world of model rocketry, and me, but he couldn’t fight off a bacterial infection with one arm tied behind his back.

I woke up at David’s wake

David’s church was filled with children on that sad, rainy day at the end of May. Eight rocket club members served as pallbearers.

After David was buried a few of us went to his house, where the sun came out and the funeral flowers decorated every corner of the house and patio.

Cindy Simon was another close friend — she had accompanied David on the piano when he performed his violin solos. As we sat on the patio and reminisced about our friend, she told me that a few weeks before, after his last, winning performance at the contest, he had handed her a folder of music. “What’s this?” she had asked.

“I may not be here next year, but if I am, this is what I’ll be playing. I’d like you to accompany me again.” That was so like Dave, to think ahead. Something I never did.

Then Cindy told me she had asked David why he might not be back to school in the fall. And he had said, “I have Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and I may not make it. But don’t tell Kindig.”

Immediately my eyes, which had finally been drying after days of fighting back tears, filled up all over again. I began to sob.

For four years, I had thought David did not know what ailed him. And he did not know that I knew. So in one moment I learned that though we were each best friends, we were also desperate to hide our most important thoughts from each other.

Within a moment, I was crying like a baby. Not the bitter tears I was wiping away when I burst in, slamming doors, on the Friday before to tell my parents, “He’s gone!”. Then I was angry at the Universe, angry at God for making an obvious mistake.

This time, in David’s kitchen, I wept with Cindy. Soon Rita, a mother-figure I had bonded with more closely than my own mom, had heard my voice and joined our circle at the table. I was now the closest thing to a son she had left, and we were both in distress. So I cried with her, too, while her little girls sat by my side, treating me like a brother.

A life-long quest to understand

For fifty-one years I have carried this story, sure there was something I could not understand.

Back then, it was vital to two young rivals to keep our best friend in the dark about our real motivations. We couldn’t imagine a transparent friendship. Competition and victory were more important than emotional connection — at least in those critical areas where our ambitions overlapped.

Now I can see that I wept because David never knew how much I loved him.

I wept because his parents, like me, missed out on a chance to be in close communication on the weightiest issue in each others’ lives.

I wept because no matter how hard I worked to play the role I felt obligated to perform — to give him something to live for — he didn’t need me for that. He had plenty to live for and ignorance was not necessary. Nor was sympathy.

And I wept because the best parts of friendship — understanding, empathy, acceptance … the things most worth living for — never became part of our relationship.

Now I can see cognitively what in some ways I already “got” on an emotional level — just how crippled our friendship had been. Competition is meaningless. Communication is everything.

Looking back through the prism of memory, that experience defined the purpose of my life — to get closer to people through open communication and emotional transparency, and to get closer to God through honest questions and careful listening.

For decades I have pursued that quest. A couple of years later I stumbled upon a quote that seemed to define what I was seeking:

By friendship you mean the greatest love, the greatest usefulness, the most open communication, the noblest sufferings, the severest truth, the heartiest counsel, and the greatest union of minds of which brave men and women are capable. — Jeremy Taylor