A FUNERAL, A BIRTHDAY AND A DOG

I had one of those days yesterday where I bumped up against the goal posts of life.  One announcement of the sudden death of a little boy, another old friend’s funeral and then I capped it off with a friend’s 50^th birthday party. 

The vicissitudes of life.  I like that particular word, not only because it is chock full of consonants and sibilant sounds, but it captures exactly what it means to be in this middle place in life.   The dictionary defines it this way -- “of constant change or alternation, as a natural process, unpredictable changes or variations that keep occurring in life.”

I didn’t know the little boy.  I only know his grandparents and I know that kind of pain has no words attached to it.  There are no dictionary definitions that can accurately describe the loss of a child.  It’s not the natural progression of life.  No parent should ever outlive his or her children.

As I watched the elderly mother of my friend Jeff, whose funeral was yesterday, I saw the pain etched there too.  He was 52, had made it through the better part of his life presumably, the parts where he’d filled in most of the blanks.  He had wonderful friends, a successful career, had married a great gal and been the father to three beautiful and generous daughters.  But there was so much he wouldn’t get to do now.  And that pain was just as fresh and as real for that mother as it was for the mother of the 11 year old.  A child is a child.  And a mother’s job is to protect, even though none of us can fashion armor against the randomness of cancer or a drunk driver, a blood clot or an accidental fall.

As we all remembered Jeff yesterday, some of us who had not seen one another in too many years, it was really what all good funerals are supposed to be – that clichéd celebration of life.  And so it was. He touched many lives.  He seized it by the neck and left his mark.

Later that night at the birthday of my friend David, we raised a glass to his life.  A birthday is less about looking back than it is about looking forward.  Yes, we celebrated his three beautiful sons, his wise choice in a wife, his accomplishments.  We roasted and jabbed, poked at self-confessed weaknesses.  But a birthday says, “I made it this far and I’m still going strong.”   It was hard not to see the juxtaposition as I thought of Jeff’s family, sitting, I imagined, with the left-over’s from the funeral reception.

There is no takeaway from a day like yesterday other than the old chestnut about living life in the moment.  It’s a lot harder to do it than to say it.   But those of us who’ve made it this far have to give it the old college try.  Loss is something we get more comfortable with over time.  We respect it.  And if we’re good and wise, we let it remind us to live a little lighter, worry a little less about the silly things and tell the ones we cherish how much we love them.  Whenever we get the chance.

Today will be another day with both a birthday and a funeral.  I'm about to head out to the disco bowling alley for my twin's 11th birthday party.  As they move into "tween-hood," this might be our last goodie bag gathering.  Next year they will be in middle school and they are already needing me in different ways than they did eight months ago.

Our little dog Tucker was hit by a car three weeks ago.  It was very traumatic for everyone and it happened in front of my eyes.  I had to wake my girls that morning and tell them.  At 10, they haven’t really experienced much loss.  They have all four grandparents and all of their aunts and uncles.  They were too young to remember the scary parts of their Dad’s injury.  They only see the recovery.  Today we will plant a bush in the yard to remember Tucker and his absolute zest for life and unconditional love.  My girls will each read things they’ve written about how much they loved him.

Today will be a lesson in celebration, like all rites and passages are.  They are one year older.  And they have also lost their puppy.  Today will be an opportunity to remind them that they, too, can survive the vicissitudes of life.

Article in Parade: Coming Back to Life

Hi there!  I recently published an article in Parade on the importance of struggle, survival, and staying positive.

As the nation roots for Gabrielle Giffords’s recovery, the wife of ABC’s Bob Woodruff talks about the long road back from brain injury

By Lee Woodruff 

After my husband, Bob, called to tell me about the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 bystanders in Tucson on Jan. 8, I stopped and said a prayer. Then I immediately thought about Mark Kelly, Giffords’s husband. In 2006 I was the one who got that phone call out of the blue. While on vacation with our four kids at Disney World, I learned that Bob, an ABC news anchor on assignment in Iraq, had been riding in a vehicle that struck a bomb. Shrapnel was lodged in his brain, and he lay in a coma. Doctors didn’t know if he’d survive, much less function normally. 

Today, though, he’s back—back at work and back in my life as a husband and father. Many Americans are hoping that Giffords has a similarly successful recovery. We’re thrilled by every positive report—she watched an hour of TV! she spoke!—and devastated by the setbacks. 

Still, she and her family may be in for a long haul. In the world of brain injury, the work is hard, the recovery process painful and painfully slow, and the miracles few and far between. Progress comes in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it increments. 

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The New Yorker on 'Heroes'

Tad Friend of The New Yorker recently published a wonderful profile on the work we do for Remind.org.  You can read the full article here and I'd love your feedback!

We admire people who can do something we can’t. If we wish we could do that thing, too—or are very glad we don’t have to—then we call those people heroes. Hero worship beamed in all directions at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre the other night during “Stand Up for Heroes,” a benefit for Bob Woodruff’s foundation, which aids wounded veterans. (Woodruff, an ABC News correspondent, was himself badly wounded in Iraq in 2006.) The show’s array of stars had other stars crowding in backstage to watch. “It’s a little Rat Pack-y thing,” Max Weinberg, Bruce Springsteen’s longtime drummer, said. When Tony Bennett sang “The Best Is Yet to Come,” Springsteen was humming along, just offstage. “Fabulous,” he said about Bennett’s swingy, catfooted phrasing. “Fabulous! I do not want to follow Tony Bennett.”

But he did, ripping into “Open All Night,” backed by Weinberg’s fifteen-piece band. Bob Woodruff stood in the wings, bobbing on the downbeats. “You can’t top this,” he told his wife, Lee, who was shimmying in a purple dress. Nearby, Jon Stewart, the evening’s host, was pounding the air drums alongside a wary Jerry Seinfeld, who stood with his arms crossed. When Springsteen hopped onto the Steinway to play a few licks, the crowd went crazy, and Stewart leaned toward Seinfeld and said, “If you could do that, you would. That’s what you would do.” After a moment, Seinfeld nodded.

Keep Reading on The New Yorker