Monday, June 7, 2010

More Than Baseball

After celebrating life all weekend––Wife's and Son's birthdays, respectively––the other side of the life chain takes place tonight.

Tonight, I will pay my respects to Mark Fisher. Mark passed away Memorial Day weekend from cancer. I didn't get a chance to say good-bye to Mark, as I had just found out he was fighting the disease only a few days before. I was also fighting a nasty virus and didn't want to go see him and get him any worse. I now regret that decision.

I coached baseball with Mark for 3 years. That's a lot time. We also sat in the stands for another 4 years, watching our Sons play for the high school team. That seemed like an eternity. And he and his Wife, Roberta, would come and join us at our Annual Halloween Party. But as I look back, it was not enough time. You see, we spent an awful lot of time together, going over baseball strategy, working on new drills for practice to keep the boys from getting bored and asking each other to talk to each other's Son. We found that we could get our Boys to get better––as a player and a person––if they heard it from someone else as well as ourselves. And it worked. Worked very well. Little did we know we both would "get" cancer.

This is a tough loss for me for many reasons. I feel for Roberta, Tim and Bob. Good family and friends. I feel for all those––family and friends––who will miss Mark. And I feel blessed, as strange as that my seem. Because I survived cancer, well enough to be able to write down my thoughts for whomever to see. I'm extremely lucky to have a family that loves me and cares for me. And when I see another friend lose the battle to cancer, I can't help but think of my own mortality and place in life. Yes, it's more than baseball that brought us together.

Forever, we will be bonded by a killer disease. RIP, Captain Fisher.