For approximately two years before his hospitalization, Derek suffered one health problem after another, and the culmination of that progression was a two-year stint in various healthcare facilities that eventually ended with his death. But part of the joy of his experience, if such a thing could even be claimed to have existed, was simply that Derek continually looked at the positive and focused on hope, all in the belief that he would someday get better.
One of his pre-hospital experiences involved a debilitating episode of constipation. It lasted for weeks and caused him tremendous pain, and doctors worked furiously to treat it while also trying to resolve it. By the end of the treatment when the problem finally went away, Derek was so relieved—literally and figuratively—and spent much time joking about the whole incident. A few days after he began feeling better and was assured by his physicians the problem was fixed, I received a text message from him that said, “I can go poopies all by myself.” It was a joke between us as he’d been so excited about going to the bathroom and not requiring medicine or medical procedures to get his business taken care of, so he’d been walking around for those few days saying that in a baby voice as though he’d just learned how to go potty. It was rather funny because his childish manner effectively diminished the anguish he’d been experiencing while simultaneously justifying his eternal optimism. It also reminded us both of Kako‘s repeated urinary tract problems and the tremendous relief you could see in her appearance when she was finally able to use the bathroom productively and without pain. Needless to say, the phrase was juvenile but effectively appropriate in both cases, and its connotation was not lost on either of us.
I laughed when I got the message from him, but then I forgot about it. Several days after that, he was giving a training class to new employees (remember, he worked in the cell phone industry). That particular training session was on a new phone being released. It was the same phone he’d been carrying for a few months (this company always had the trainers hooked up with the latest before it hit the marketplace since they’d be expected to bring everyone else up to speed, so letting them use them in their daily lives was the best way to make them real experts).
As Derek later explained to me while recounting the tale with more than a little embarrassment, the number of training devices he had was insufficient for the size of the class. In response, he had the students get together and work in teams of two when it came time for hands-on activities. Even so, he was still one phone short. Being the always-on-top-of-his-game kind of person, he offered his own phone to the last two students.
When it came time to practice text messaging with the class, he walked them through sending, reading, and finally reviewing sent messages. Laughter erupted at the back of the class as he was talking about the “sent items” view. He made his way toward the two students and asked them what was so funny. Neither of them could speak, to hear him tell it, so they simply held up the phone and showed him what was on the display.
Message to jason: “I can go poopies all by myself”
Later in the day after we’d both arrived at home, he laughed uproariously as he told me what had happened. Personally, I laughed my ass off too, and who wouldn’t under the circumstances. He never told me what he said to those two kids after that. What he did say was that he’d probably owe them for the rest of his life.