A journalism professor wrote his own obituary knowing that cancer was going to take him. He was 59.
Thyroid cancer killed me. It's usually treatable with a high survival rate, but I was blessed with a rare genetic mutation that allowed the cancer to shrug off the standard treatment and take a tour of my lungs. Drugs forced the cancer to behave itself for a few years and I continued to work while dealing with a host of colorful side effects and occasional pain. For treatment I traveled to MD Anderson in Houston, the top cancer center in the country, and my doctor there is an expert in the field.
Even an expert can only do so much. Eventually the cancer won.
I was a journalism professor at the University of Georgia for over 26 years, teaching basic and advanced reporting classes and, at the graduate level, public opinion. I never allowed my students to write their assignments in the first person, so it's ironic that my very last piece of published writing is in, of all things, first person. We'll come back to this in a moment.
To many in Athens I'm best known as Edith Hollander's husband. To put this in traditional obituary phrasing, I leave behind my wonderful wife, the very best part of me. It sucks that I won't get to grow old with her. It sucks that I won't get to watch our amazing children raise families of their own: Jacob (a geologist with Schnabel Engineering in Greensboro, N.C.) and Erin (an MD/PhD student at UPenn in Philadelphia). Both, just amazing. Just short of your first child arriving you think it won't be all that different, right up until the moment you hold him that first time and the entire universe reorders itself. You think with the second child it won't be that big a deal, and again when you first hold her, the universe changes again. Despite all my threats to send our kids to Jesuit military boarding school, nothing comes close to the delight in watching them grow into remarkable adults.
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Send flowers if you like, as Edith loves them, but in my memory raise a good glass of bourbon or single-malt whisky. In my memory, tell stories about me, especially the ones that make me sound like an idiot. In my memory, buy a young person a subscription to a good news source like The New York Times. And in my memory, watch out for Edith, the love of my life. I never deserved someone as good as her, and she doesn't deserve this.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/onlineathens/obituary.aspx?n=barry-hollander&pid=188024308&fhid=3631
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