Yesterday I picked up a iced coffee from McDonald’s. I know all the cashiers, and they know how I like my coffee. I love them. As I stood there an older man ordered and turned towards me. I knew immediately that I knew him but couldn’t place him.

Me: You look so familiar.
Mr. S: I do?
Me: Oh, I remember. You are Mr. F’s friend.

He looked at me for a second and then a light went off.

Mr. S: That was you!
Me: If you mean at Dr. L’s office, yes. You came to keep Mr. F company during his chemotherapy.  You made me laugh the whole time. The nurses kept kicking you out, but you’d sneak right back in.
Mr. S: Oh boy, we had fun that day.
Me: Yes, thank you.

And then I asked him how Mr. F was and he said:

Mr. F didn’t make it.

And I was reduced to tears in McDonald’s.

Mr. S: Yes, he had a rough time. The cancer went from his throat to his lung and then he just went downhill.

We talked for a few more minutes and then I gave him a hug goodbye.  I saved the huge ugly cry for the car.

This is the dark side of being a cancer survivor.

I met so many people…and many of them didn’t make it. One of them was Sharon. Our treatment coincided on a few days.  I remember she brought this black and white floral handmade quilt that folded into itself.  I thought she might sew for a hobby so I asked her about it.  She was on steroids and she joked to her husband that she had chipmunk cheeks. I asked her about her small hometown in the middle of the desert and how she survived without a Target.

In May 2012 I got an email from her niece Kara:

I don’t know if you will remember a certain beautiful lady that shared time with you (while also receiving her own chemo treatments) in Palm Desert. Her name is Sharon E., and she spends most of her winter months in Blythe. But she sure remembers you! She was diagnosed with Stage 4 Waldenstroms Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in January of this year.

I am her niece Kara, and I just wanted to contact you to give thanks and love for keeping her spirits up while she was in Palm Desert getting her chemo. […] Poor babe was life-flighted from her hometown hospital on May 6 to her current location in Springfield, where she still is this very day (5 days of which she was on life support). You are probably wondering just why I am contacting you. Well, her mood has been more down than up, and there’s been several times we thought we were going to lose her (and we still may) but all logistics aside, I wanted you to know that she spoke to me of your website and of YOU when she was barely able to talk after she was taken off life support. She was very down, and had made the decision to die, was feeling hopeless, tired, frustrated, etc, but we had a rare chance to be alone for awhile, and through a whispered voice she said to me: Lil Blue Boo……of course I questioned…..or actually said, What?

Together we found your website on her phone. I asked her how she found your website, and she replied She’s my friend…from chemo. […]  She’s been very concerned about you during her whole ordeal, and I just wanted to share that love with you. I will never know the relationship of your talks or friendship, but I wanted you to know that somehow you made a big impact on her during your visits. I just wish she had the fight in her that you have, she did, but it seems to be faded now, as she’s stated to the family that she just wants “to go” and that she’s “tired.” She’s losing faith that she will ever be better. We, as a family, still hold our faith strong that she will get through this, but her will is what’s holding her back now. I guess all we can do is pray. Again, thank you.

I think about this email all the time.  She was concerned about me.  Nothing is more humbling than that.  What did I do to deserve her love?  All I did was flash a smile, make conversation, crack a joke or two. That’s what Mr. S did too, and I realized from the other side what an impact that made: he made my day more bearable, and he didn’t even know me. As I’ve said before: sometimes there is so much light in the world that the darkness should be very afraid.

On October 8, 2012 I got an email from Sharon:

I’m home after 92 days in the hospital, feeling much better and learning how to walk again. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated the necklace you sent me–you’re a sweetheart and each time I saw you at our treatments you managed to pick up the entire room with your positiveness. So glad to see your doing well–God bless and I CHOOSE JOY TOO!! Luv you Sharon

Sharon passed away 8 days later.

 

Looking back, here’s what I am thankful for: That I said yes to Sharon.

And:

That I said yes to Mr. F.

That I said yes to the cranky man who didn’t want to sit next to me.

That I said yes to the young girl who was scared just like me.

That I said yes to the man who yelled expletives in his sleep.

That I said yes to Mr. B whose wife safety pinned notes to his shirt for the doctor.

That I said yes to the woman who refused to let the hairdresser cut off the last patch of hair she had left.

That I said yes to the elderly woman who teared up when she talked about her daughter.

That I said yes to the man who used to sell encyclopedias in his younger years.

That I said yes to the elderly woman who announced she was wearing a diaper to the entire infusion center.

That I said yes to the man with lung cancer and his friend Scott who asked for my autograph. I was famous for a day.

That I said yes to Mr. W who once won the lottery, but had already lost 2 wives to cancer.

That I said yes to the woman with pancreatic cancer who said she was worried about her husband, because she knew she was going to die.

That I said yes to the woman who said she wanted to throw up every time she had to step foot in an oncology office.

That I said yes to the man who wished he could send a ham sub through his stomach tube.

That I said yes to the young man who had testicular cancer for the second time.

That I said yes to the woman who could knit in her sleep.

That I said yes, yes and yes.

And that every single one said yes back to me.

Because I could have said no. I didn’t always feel like saying yes. I could have felt sorry for myself. I could have sulked.  I had the right to. I had cancer. I felt miserable. I said no to cancer, but I said yes to the rest. The cancer patients and their families and friends that I met along the way are precious to me. They are part of my story, and I am a part of theirs. And they woke something inside of me.

 

Farewell Mr. F, for now.
Rest in peace.

 

 

The last 30 days of posts for the Year of Joy can be found here.

 

Could I ask you a favor? And maybe you’ll say yes 😉
Please sign up for my weekly newsletter.
I send it once a week, with a summary of all the week’s posts.
Your info is safe with me…..never shared with anyone else…..promise.

 

 

 

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I’m scared to see the movie Wolf, because I’m worried it might trigger PTSD.  I read the recent NYT article for For the Love of Money and I had flashbacks of an earlier life.  It would take years to tell the whole story. It’s all a huge circus under a tent called “investment banking.” But I can condense some of it into a quick short story…with a few pages from my journal at the time:

Imagine you are in a conference room with a deal team making a $50 million dollar pitch based off of a spreadsheet that has been together in haste. It’s a small amount compared to other deals you’ve worked on, but you are completely unqualified to be doing this.

Very rarely is an idea pitched to a client over the phone, but this happens to be one of those rare occurrences. You don’t have any real world experience in finance, you don’t even balance your checkbook. Your boss starts going through the numbers for the client. As he speaks to someone thousands of miles away through the speakerphone in the center of the conference table you suddenly realize in horror that the numbers he is going off of are wrong. It’s a stupid mistake but the math is incorrect because a formula didn’t copy correctly into the cell below it as it was put together in Excel. You try to comprehend how this could have happened and how you are going to prevent a decision from being made based on what your analyst and you have put together. Dear God, a fire alarm would be great about now. You write the words MATH WRONG! on your copy and slide it over to your boss. He keeps talking into the speakerphone and you see his face slowly turn bright red in anger as he realizes how far off the numbers are. You are slightly relieved that he knows about the error but then he begins to stutter and stammer and you realize he’s trying to do the math in his head to recover. You’ve forgotten your financial calculator and you try to do the math quickly by hand but your boss beats you to it. You glare across the table at your analyst, a young girl just out of college who doesn’t have any experience either.  “I’m going to kill you,” you mouth at her and she quickly avoids the issue by glancing down at her papers.

This is my boss’s fault you tell yourself. He’s put too much faith in me. I am human after all. He should have at least glanced over this before sending it to the client. You hear your boss apologizing for sending over the wrong version of the analysis and then he mutes the phone. “This is a shit show,” he yells at you and his face is beyond the shade of crimson at this point. He un-mutes the line to continue thanking the client for their time. When the client hangs up you dart out of the room and run to the nearest bathroom to throw up. You sit on the toilet seat and put your head against the wall. You drift off to sleep for a few minutes because you’ve slept a total of 4 hours in the last 72. You wake up to the sound of the door opening and, thinking you’ve blacked out, you wonder if there’s a certain point where 4 cups of coffee and a Red Bull backfire.

As you make your way back to your desk you run into one of  your other bosses.  You have several bosses, managing directors or MDs are what they are called.
“Hey, I need you to catch a plane to Atlanta in a few hours for this Project Pea.” You nod okay because that’s what good associates do.
You finally make it back to your desk and you pick up the phone to call your analyst just to re-enforce how bad she should feel about what happened.
“What the f@%k,” you say into the phone before you realize she’s crying.
“My grandmother just died…” she begins.
“Well she has horrible timing.” You slam the phone back down and think about crying too.

“Does anyone know what Project Pea is?” You yell loudly over the cubicles but no one hears you. The bank uses secret code names for projects that are a merger or acquisition. You are forbidden from using the actual company name.
You pick up the phone and call your administrative assistant across the floor. “Can you book the next flight to Atlanta? Hotel too.”
You scramble to staff an analyst, pull materials together and figure out what the Project Pea meeting entails. You speed to the airport and barely catch the plane. The plane is half empty and you actually lay down on the bench of three seats to nap for an hour.

In Atlanta you catch a taxi to the hotel and ask hotel management if they can dry clean your suit and shirt overnight. The concierge picks up the clothes and you are left wearing nothing but a bathrobe until the morning. You try not to think about the possibility of a fire alarm.

At 8am the next morning you are in a meeting at a company you’ve never heard of before and you pretend to be an expert while asking questions of management. “Is the auto accessory industry seeing stronger consumer support this year?” The more generic the question the less chance of making yourself look like an idiot.

Afterwards you catch a taxi to the airport which is a piece of cake because you have zero luggage. When you get back home you find your car in the overnight lot and you have to pay out of pocket for half the parking but you wouldn’t have caught your plane otherwise. The bank only pays for a certain amount a day. The second you sit down into the driver’s seat you check your Blackberry and you have an email from a third managing director asking what your plans are for the weekend. You already know: You’ll be working.

 

That’s a true story. Every bit. Just a typical day. A glimpse into my life ten years ago in investment banking. I used to think that being an investment banker was all about the pursuit of money, but I think it’s also about arrogance, and the competitive need to prove you are ruthless and super human.  My doctor said she had more young investment bankers come through her office with heart attack symptoms than any other profession. I got my first taste of money when I was an analyst right out of college. I worked in foreign exchange and I kept track of the traders’ profit and loss.  I remember the head trader had about $60 million in profit at one point on the books and he would make millions from that in bonus. I knew I wanted to come back and do something like that. Everyone told me that was the right track. I applied to business school and graduated in the top of my class with an MBA.  I was offered a full time investment banking position back at the bank in between my first and second year. I worked my ass off. They threw money at me. I say yes. more. yes. more. thank you. but mostly: more.

By my third year as an associate, I was one of the highest paid associates in the bank.  I got the “sleeping bag” award for spending the most time at the office. I was in the top 5 of my associate class. My husband, at a competitor down the street, used to say that I was “un-firable” because I was a woman, a rarity in the IB world at the time. Sad but true. It seemed so wrong. And I was miserable:

I had two bosses who ran the investment banking division I was in.  One had come from a competitor bank and they threw loads of money at him. He drove Lamborghini or Ferrari….some type of flashy car. (Update: hubby says it was a Ferrari. I can’t even find my Prius in a parking lot, so shows how much I know.) He had a huge house with an impressive poker table and bar.  The other boss was more humble. He didn’t drive a flashy car.  His house wasn’t what I expected.  He cared if I was overworked.  He stood for something.  I was torn between the two lifestyles.

It would take the equivalent of an entire novel to explain what happened, but basically I slowly lost it.  I was raking in the money, but I was miserable.  It was a soul-sucking job.  It owned me. I slowly began revolting against the bank machine.  There is even a day I can point to when I basically cracked:

I was working for several managing directors by this point, this particular one I’ll call MD5.  MD5 had a trophy on his desk from one of the airlines for traveling an astronomical level of miles in one year. He asked me to put together an analysis of a telecommunications company, but it wasn’t a simple request. He wanted me to prepare an analysis that would require complex financial risk scenarios run twenty times over. I looked up from my paper where I was taking notes and as if I was bored out of my mind replied, “Um, no.” The room went quiet and I wondered who had the balls to say no to MD5 and then I realized it came from me. The analyst in the room put his head down to avoid any eye contact. MD5 looked at me with a funny little look on his face and said in defeat, “Oh. Um, okay.” The meeting was adjourned. Everyone was silent. It was like there was a glitch in the matrix. I was the glitch.

The interaction with MD5 made me a rock star for a few days. “Hackshaw said no to MD5,” quickly became floor folklore. I remember another MD saying: You are turning into a real bitch. He was joking but I agreed with him. I was.

I started paying attention to the people above me on the investment banking ladder and none of them seemed happy. They made gazillions of dollars and it never seemed like enough. It was an addiction.

I remember running late to the airport in late 2006. The bumper sticker on the car in front of me read: The aliens have just landed and they are eating the skinny blondes first. I passed the car and expected the driver to be brunette and overweight, but she was actually blonde and skinny. I arrived at the entrance to the airport at 7:15 and my flight was supposed to depart at 7:10. I made it through security and two terminals and the plane was somehow still there waiting for me.

“Wow, cutting it close this time,” MD6 said. It was this first time I was working with MD6 and this was not a great first impression to make.

“Well, I guess I’m just really supposed to be on this flight,” I joked, “because I did everything I could to try and miss it.” It was a fairly short flight to Norfolk, VA. We were on our way to meet with the private military company Blackwater located in Moyok, N.C.

A wood sign posted in front of a chain link fence marked the entrance to Blackwater. As we entered the 6,000 acre property the chain link fence ran to the right all the way to the horizon and the gravel road in front of us did the same. A small red sign read 3.8 miles and had an arrow pointing to the left showing which way we are supposed to go. It felt a little like we were entering Area 51.

In my company research I had scoured article after article about the four Blackwater contractors killed in Fallujah, their bodies burned and dragged through the streets but I also learned a more personal side of CEO Erik Prince. Erik Prince was an ex-Navy SEAL, and the heir to an auto parts fortune. His wife had died in 2003 from cancer and he was left with seven children to raise. When Erik joined us in a conference room and he was humble and gracious, nothing at all what I expected. I was not sure why I was so surprised that he was human.  I learned that Erik Prince started Blackwater after the Rwandan genocide. I had just watched Hotel Rwanda.

When our meeting concluded, Erik asked one of his employees to take us to firing range to test out a few weapons. A weapons specialists showed me how to shoot an M-4 and with the first pull of the trigger I was almost thrown backwards. I replanted my feet and I killed my target 10 times over.

“You’ve shot a weapon before,” the Blackwater guy whispered and I winked at him. I heard MD6 make a long whistle sound from behind me.
“Beginner’s luck,” I said but I didn’t let on that I just happened to frequent the shooting range. The M-4 was so heavy that with each shot the bullet holes hit lower and lower towards the abdomen of the target sheet. “Why are you aiming for the groin area?” MD6 asked, “should I be worried?”

All of the sudden I felt ashamed of where I was. I was sure that every investment banking group that had paraded through here was taken to the firing range because that’s what we expected, entertainment. We were important. We had the money. They needed us. And my life consisted of flying first class, staying in nice hotels, working late hours, drinking in excess and boasting about how little sleep I could go on. It was a guy’s world, and I had been overly proud that I could hang with them.

Shortly after the trip to Blackwater, I was flipping through a National Geographic magazine and I came across a photo of a dead bird:

Victim: Albatross Chick, Age: 6 Months, Cause of death: Starvation due to full stomach. Contents of stomach: cigarette lighters, pump-top sprayer, nutshells, shotgun shells, broken clothespins, hundreds of plastic bits.

The photographer had taken the time to dissect the bird and lay out every single content that was in the baby bird’s stomach. I was overwhelmed at the mass collection of items the bird had eaten and was not able to digest. I felt kind of like that bird.  I was trying to amass money, things, anything I could….and I couldn’t even digest it.  Worse, I helped recruit new analysts and associates with the promise of a never-ending feast of money and glutton. I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.

 

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

When I read The Love of Money the other day and it put all of this into words for me:

The satisfaction wasn’t just about the money. It was about the power. Because of how smart and successful I was, it was someone else’s job to make me happy.

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made in her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had remarkable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted. -Sam Polk

The only difference between me and the author is that it wasn’t as hard for me to leave. You see, I quickly saw myself as just a miserable person to be around. My life was empty. I neglected everything that mattered. My husband and I never saw each other. He worked at the competition across the way. I wasn’t doing anything except for creating money from money. I just woke up one morning and I knew it was the right day to quit. I left all my deal “trophies” and belongings behind at the bank. I left my desk and didn’t even clean it out. I walked away. I was, in a way, a starving baby albatross. My husband walked away soon after.

 

Now we struggle to pay the bills sometimes, especially those large medical ones. Both self employed we have to worry about things I never thought I’d have to worry about. But we are doing things that are fulfilling and that matter. And we keep making changes. We keep simplifying day after day. We want less and less. And we always have enough.

P.S. I started writing this yesterday as Day 22 of 31 for The Year of Joy series….but it just kept growing. So let’s make this Day 22 & 23.  Thanks for the slack.