What I Learned From Bruce

One night in January of this year,  very near my birthday, I was called awake to join my wife, her mother and her siblings at her father’s bedside as he took his final breaths. He had spoken his final words to me several days earlier.

“I love you too, son.”

My wife and I had temporarily moved in with her parents earlier this year as her father-in-law, Bruce, rapidly declined in health due to pancreatic cancer.

We had found out about his diagnosis in November 2017. Bruce had suffered some moderate abdominal and back pain on and off that had been largely downplayed by him and brushed off by his doctors – in November, the pain finally culminated in an emergency room visit and a terminal diagnosis.

Even with treatment, Bruce was told that he probably had less than a year to live. My wife and I began discussing the difficulties of chemotherapy and radiation and making lists of oncologists and specialists and procedures he could try. We were told that his primary tumor, due to its location, was inoperable. Beyond traditional chemo- and radiation therapy, Bruce could also try promising new treatments in immunotherapy. Then we had heard that radiological studies appeared to confirm lesions on his liver. His cancer was likely at stage four, metastasizing throughout his body.

Bruce opted not to treat his cancer at to let nature take its course, saying something along the lines of “I’ve lived a good life and can’t really ask for anything more.”

My wife and I considered driving down to be with her family right away, but decided to wait until the holidays to maximize our paid time off.

On Christmas Eve, Bruce sat down with my mother-in-law, my wife, her two siblings and myself to discuss the family finances. Most of us had been in the dark about what was going on – I had a rough idea of how much he had saved and with which companies he was doing business.

Let me take an aside here to talk about who my father-in-law was. He was a child of a military man, actually one of the first men to formation-fly jet airplanes. Born in Colorado, he was an ex-Navy man himself, entering the military after a failed attempt at college. While in the Navy, he met my mother-in-law in Charleston, South Carolina. They lived a lower middle class lifestyle in the early days as Bruce moved from station to station, somehow avoiding overseas deployment.

After leaving the military, he went back to school and became a rather talented electrical engineer. As a young man, he invented what appears to be the first working remote car starter, an invention which he unfortunately never patented. He took a job with IBM in Lexington, Kentucky and went on to work for their printer division, which later became LexMark. He had a long and successful career with the company.

As far as I can tell, Bruce and his wife were deeply in love almost from the day they met, all the way until the present, because if one iota of that man’s soul is left anywhere, it’s loving his family.

At the dinner table on Christmas Eve, before we started the family celebration, Bruce laid out for us how he had saved diligently through most of his career, leaving his spouse in total financial security. Being a baby boomer, he had earned a pension from his work, but he had also carefully saved in a 401(k) that had been rolled over to IRAs. He had also bought two low-cost indexed annuities, the income from which would cover almost all of my mother-in-laws fixed expenses.

He had left a modest but fair inheritance for his three children, with stipulations on how it should be spent – for his son, he wanted to help buy a brick-and-mortar storefront for a self-owned locksmithing business. For his youngest daughter, he wanted to help her buy a house as she was single and living in apartments. And for my wife and I, he wanted to help her improve our lifestyles with medical procedures, new furniture, a second vehicle and more ergonomic work equipment.

He had done all of this by himself, only going to a financial advisor for affirmation. Being an engineer, Bruce had everything planned out except his own funeral, which he considered more for us than for him. There were few questions left unanswered for him. He was ready to die in almost every way possible – but he was still afraid.

Bruce had a painful, but happy final Christmas. He played Twister with his grandson and bumbled through a hilarious candy cane “pick-up” game, cracking jokes with the family. He listened to his favorite modern Christmas special, sung by Faith Hill. He danced around the house and smiled. He was in pain, but he was not going to let pain ruin his family’s Christmas.

Days after the celebration, we gathered for our last family photos with Bruce. I knew he was in pain. He smiled. He joked with the photographer. He was miserable inside, but outwardly joyful.

We left to return home shortly after the photos were taken, but were soon summoned back to Kentucky to help see Bruce through his last three weeks. He was brave, smart, stubborn and strong-minded. After the first week, he could no longer get out of bed on his own. After the second, he stopped eating entirely. Soon after he stopped talking, but would still sometimes respond to sounds and touch. He didn’t like that I spent a lot of time with my mother-in-law and brother-in-law cleaning, lifting and clothing him. It was as much that he felt embarrassed and undignified by his own nudity and dirtiness as him disliking being helpless and served by others. He always wanted to be the one giving advice and help, not the recipient. Being cared for drove him crazy.

That night in January, very near my birthday, before I fell asleep, Bruce's wife and daughters circled around his bedside, holding his hand, looking into his eyes and softly petting his hair and arms, singing along to a mix-CD of his favorite songs, like Andy Williams' "Blue River" and Mel Carter's "Hold me, Thrill me, Kiss me." Tears of joy and sorrow streamed from his eyes, but he was paralyzed and unable to speak. I couldn't sing - I quietly fell apart and excused myself to bed. Less than four hours later I was roused because Bruce's respirations had become irregular. He stopped breathing within moments and had no pulse. Tired, with a mixture of sorrow and relief, I poured myself a glass of Irish whiskey and waited with family for the hospice nurse to arrive.

My experience as one of Bruce’s caretakers and going through his death left me forever changed. It confirmed to me the value of planning. It brought home to me the importance of communicating about finances early and often because I may not have the luxury of a terminal diagnosis and a dining room conversation with my family (though it’s odd to call it a luxury). It made me realize that I need to keep my family and friends closer, because they were the ones that carried Bruce through his most difficult days towards the end.

Most importantly, it made me wonder whether I would be able to decline treatment if I was ever placed in Bruce’s position. Would I be able to look back over the years that I’d lived and say I’d lived them well? Bruce had a full life- he raised a great family, fell in love and stayed there for more than four decades. He restored old jukeboxes and television sets as a side hustle and hobby. He went bowling every week with good friends. In retirement, he had a meticulously planned lunch schedule, enjoyed fairly frequent long motorcycle trips across the country, went boating, took his wife on cruises and trips to Las Vegas, and kept up a vibrant social life.

I can’t say that “I’ve lived a good life and can’t really ask for anything more.” There’s so much more that I want – and if I want to live as well as Bruce did, I’d have a very long way to go to get there.

I feel like experiences, not luxuries, are the key to a life well lived. Financial independence is a great gateway to living well, but the aim of retiring early through intense frugality sometimes seems to fly in the face of enjoying the days we’re blessed with on this planet. Experiences come with a cost, and we should not forego every potential experience because we’re trying to avoid the costs.