About six months ago, my brain cancer diagnosis tossed me into semi-retirement. Glioblastoma is an illness mystery, with median survival of 15 months. Which makes my choice of “semi,” including this very essay, also a bit mysterious.
My best explanation: I want to go out as a Johnny Appleseed.
My condition could be worse. My symptoms were, and so far remain, less serious than suffered by many glioblastoma patients. But my stamina is permanently limited. I went on disability just before the surgery that removed about 95 percent of an egg-sized tumor. (You can read a series I wrote about my battle with brain cancer at dallasnews.com/jeffweiss.)
If my personal reaction had been to leave journalism entirely, that would have been legal and logical. Everyone is mortal, but my path to the Egress is probably going to be a lot shorter than I’d thought before my diagnosis. (My current prognosis is maybe 20 months total, but the odds aren’t anything precise. Maybe longer, maybe shorter.)
At 62, retirement isn’t a unique move for people even without illness. Plenty of people my age shift to bucket-listing and leisure.
And yet I never even considered completely retiring.
My personal adventure
I'm writing occasionally for The Dallas Morning News about my personal adventure with health care for an incurable disease. And I'm tossing columns to the Religion News Service about how my proximity to death makes me think about various religious and spiritual approaches to such.
And inshallah, I'm headed to my DMN office once a week on most weeks. I've called it, with some self-deprecation, "Thursdays With Jeffrey."
It's a seemingly slightly cynical grab at the theme of the Tuesdays With Morrie book by Mitch Albom about his former professor, Morrie Schwartz. But it's not really cynical. Schwartz was dying of ALS, but continued what he hoped was a benefit to others as long as he could. That's a pretty good goal, I think.
Doing some good for others has always been part of my motive for sticking with professional journalism, frankly. When I was in college, I’d originally thought I’d want to be a physicist. A “C” in freshman calculus made that unlikely. So where, other than science, did I have some interest and skills?
I liked to write.
Some forms of professional for-profit writing were tied, even back then, to major bucks. A successful PR writer could do very well. Instead, I aimed for journalism.
Even then, in a cloudy way, I’d decided it was a way to improve the world. Mostly incrementally, to be sure. The work I eventually did for my college newspaper didn’t usually make a big difference. But a few of those stories splashed. And many of the others trickled a bit.
So I stuck with it as a professional. As a rookie in 1981 with a crappy but full-time job at the Miami Herald, listening to police scanners from 5:30 p.m. until 2 a.m. To low-level community beats. To a regional bureau. To a new job in a city, Dallas, I'd never even visited before applying for the job.
And sticking 29 years at The News. During which the economics of print journalism moved many of my colleagues out voluntarily or by having their jobs axed in a series of painful layoffs.
Whacked away
But last December, my plans were whacked away.
I'd been a business reporter since February. And the challenges of working for The Dallas Morning News had transformed fascinatingly from dead-tree to digital-first. But the surgery and diagnosis made it clear I was done with the ability to do that full-time job — and my date of dying might not be particularly distant.
And yet here I still am, occasionally. I don’t use the word “joy” much to describe me or my experiences. But what I’m doing with journalism and journalists remains high on my current list of what I enjoy, even with my limits now.
I’m an explanatory writer at my core, so I think about metaphors to explain complex ideas. Johnny Appleseed is pretty good, for me.
The Disney-fied legend is basic: He was a nice but nutty guy who wandered early America tossing great apple seeds in random places. Hoping to create a legacy that would outlive him.
Often when a true story is softened into legend, a motive is polished or added. The real life of Johnny, however, had a shining good-legacy goal. But his plans were much more specific than the legend.
Biographical stories about him are even easier to find than harvesting apples. (Smithsonian Magazine's version is one of several well-sourced and fascinating examples.)
John Chapman was born in Massachusetts in 1774. He grew up during the American Revolution and the early organizing and growth of the United States. He became an expert in horticulture. And yep, he started to wander on foot from Pennsylvania to Illinois carrying a bag of apple seeds.
But scattering randomly was far from his practice. Turned out that settlers into some of that pioneer territory could own 100 free acres if they homesteaded. And planting a bunch of apple trees qualified as proof of homesteading. Chapman ended up owning a lot of land.
Chapman used seeds rather than grafting because of odd horticulture rules of his unusual tie-in to Christianity, the Swedenborgian Church. Chapman did much of his wandering in bare feet, summer and winter. He preached to anyone who would listen. Some land he gave away, some he sold for relatively low prices. But he wasn’t poor.
He died at 71. The obits were quite positive, even though he was considered kinda nutty in some of what he did. He’d picked up the “Johnny Appleseed” nickname. And those apples were definitely part of his legacy. But not what you’d expect.
He planted a particular kind called a “spitter,” all but inedible. But they made great hard apple cider. That was a region where much of the water was contaminated by bacteria and apple cider was a healthier drink than many other alcohol-safe choices.
The cider-making lasted a while. And some accounts say his plantings inspired future farmers to grow better-tasting apples. A nice legacy, I think? In 1996, he became the official state “folk hero” of Massachusetts.
Legacy
Like Chapman, I have two focused areas of legacy.
Public stories about what I’m going through contain, I hope, thought-provoking ideas that could be useful to people who don’t even have a connection to my flavor of cancer. The way I’m battling to figure out my future might help others — long after I hit my exit. That would be a legacy something like Johnny offered to homesteaders and future tree-planters.
My “seed,” though, is what I hope I’m planting on Thursdays as I’m kibitzing with my fellow journalists. As I tell them, I have no authority. Nobody has to obey me. But I can also say whatever I want. Heh.
So I try to mentor casually: Hi! How you doin'? What's new? And: What are you working on? I'm a geezer who wrote about lots of things. Maybe I can suggest an angle or a contact?
But my widely scattered seed is much more specific: For most of my career, the most important paragraph in a newspaper story was sometimes called the “nut graph.” Who, what, when, why and how. That long tradition is still as vital for reporting as the mortar holding an old brick wall together.
But it’s not the most important, now. I call the top priority the “so what?” graph. Why should a reader care about the story? In the digital world, basic facts often flow like a river, with streams from many sources. But what’s the context? If a reader clicks into a story on their smartphone and can’t figure out why to care in about 20 seconds, they are gone and may never come back.
What’s your "so what?" is the seed I plant with every conversation.
It’s particularly relevant today, given the enormous need for good journalism under the Trump administration. Like him or not, he is the first American president ever who had zero governance experience when elected. (That’s not an alternative fact or opinion. Check the record. Some had relatively little experience. But zero?)
The changes Donald Trump is trying for or that are being tried by his supporters have huge potential impacts — good or bad — that could affect the entire nation or the smallest town. Journalism is more important today, I think, than it was throughout my full-time career.
Lots of what Trump does is getting attention. But lots of what he does is like the "Squirrel!" distraction in the plot of the great movie Up. Entertaining? Yeah. Significant in impact? Maybe not. And our resources are limited. What's the "so what?" Focus on the ones that have a big answer to that question.
How much longer will I be able to wander and plant my seeds? I have no idea. Chapman left a legacy about that, though, that I find a bit useful.
I can’t find many quotes attributed to him. One is remarkably on target:
“Do not worry about being worried; but accept worry peacefully,” it says. “Difficult but not impossible.”
I’ll buy that. And I’ll plant more of that seed.
Jeffrey Weiss will discuss his series on brain cancer at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference on Saturday, July 22. More information at themayborn.com.
