Enjoy Life While You’re Still Here

Day 66 – My father and I were as close as a father and son could be when I was a child. But when my parents divorced, my father turned away from God and family and toward violence and drugs. We didn’t talk for years as he bounced in and out of jail until two years ago when he called to tell me he was dying of what started as colon cancer. He died last year after the cancer spread throughout his body.

A few years after my parents divorced, my mother married my stepfather, Robert. He and I didn’t like each other at all. He was a hands-on laborer and I was an immature geek who thought he knew everything about everything. As I grew up, Robert started his own company and as it grew, my respect for him grew also. When my mother passed away in 2004, Robert and I became extremely close and I learned how much it meant for a man to raise another man’s son. Robert died three years ago of brain cancer.

I don’t need to go on and on about how much Steve Jobs attributed to the world. I talk all the time about my MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPod, AppleTV, Elizabeth’s Air, Elizabeth’s shuffle and all the iMacs at Donehue Direct. If Jobs built it, we bought it. Yesterday he died of cancer.

My father, Robert and Steve Jobs were three completely different types of men. My father lived in poverty. Robert was a middleclass small business owner. Steve Jobs was one of the richest men in the world. Cancer killed them all before the age of 57.

My point – cancer doesn’t care about money. It doesn’t care who you are. It will come after you and end your life way too early.

If one of the richest, most technological men in the world can’t find a way to beat cancer, we are all vulnerable. His death scares me because it shows the strength of this horrible disease.

I hope you all live long, happy lives, but you all won’t. Like these three men, some of you will die way too early. Don’t spend your life working and building some retirement account you may never see. Take the time and resources to enjoy life now. Spend time with family. See the world. Experience this wonderful thing called life that God has given us.

- Wesley Donehue

PS – Take the time to read this post about colon cancer and then go get some instruments stuck in in your rear.