"The End of an Era" -Hopesfall My searching eyes have never been so intrigued to see you. I guess you found a way to make ten minutes last forever. With each passing moment we drift further away, Closer to our chosen paths
But I can't help remembering what was, what might have been. But I have been warned by those who have passed this way before. And to them I am grateful; and as for you, I am hateful. And I pray that you find the peace you have been longing for.
John Gunther was a successful journalist and author. Death Be Not Proud is called a memoir, but Gunther himself acknowledges in the foreword that this is really a relatively brief journal that documents his 18-year-old son's fast and fatal struggle with cancer--a brain tumor.
Johnny, Gunther's son, was a bright young man who had every opportunity in front of him. This precocious young man was attending a private academy and was destined for Harvard when he lost a summer feeling tired and with a pain in his neck. Quickly diagnosed with a brain tumor, the prognosis was grim from day one. Hopeful moments erased points in this timeline of struggle. Johnny, with what sounds like a mix of naivete and courage, stayed motivated, eager to keep up with the academic, promising life he had been living.
Johnny sounds like a brilliant blue-blooded young man. His precociousness, as represented in his father's biographizing, is a bit rich. Nevertheless, how can your heart not ache a little when reading lines like this, describing the difference between a son's relationship with his mother versus what he has with his father:
She read him poetry on meditative and religious themes, and he made his own anthology of poems he liked by reciting them into a transcribing apparatus, and then playing them back when the mood was on him. Here, too, the sharp demarcation he made between Frances and me, based on his solicitude for us, became manifest. With Frances he talked of Death often; with me, almost never.
