“I’m to go home and get my affairs in order.”He was frightened, not just for himself, but knew he couldn’t give up.His checklist of credits for survival includes strong family connections and innate character. So Abbott starts with his childhood. He was one of 10 – five girls and five boys; he was the youngest son – born to Ron, a Second World War vet , and Alice, “a beautiful patient woman.”
In fact, he broke several bones roughhousing as a youngster, unsupervised and often dangerous recreation being the norm; unimaginable today also is his mother walking him to school the first day of Grade 1 and then leaving him to find his own way home.Kids could fail classes back then and he had to repeat Grade 1, but from then resolved to keep his academic house in better order.
That doesn’t happen, but he graduates with an economics/business degree and enters federal civil service.In recounting their honeymoon in Florida, he tells a couple of funny stories about overheated rental cars and botched fast-food orders . In fact, it’s only when taking Josh to the family doctor that he thinks to ask for some blood tests. Unexpectedly, they flag a problem, and he is headed for prostate surgery.Accompanying Bobby to a motorcycle shop he impulsively buys one himself. “Darlene was, shall we say, somewhat displeased.”
It looks like a ruptured appendix, urgent enough, but the CT scan shows something much, much worse: colon cancer that has metastasized to his liver and lungs.This news is delivered in a curtained ER cubicle by two doctors who then abruptly leave “without uttering another word.”