The Game of Life...It's a $#@!*%

How long do you expect to live?

Is it something you've even thought about? I assume you may have pondered the question a time or two, but I don't know. Hopefully you haven't obsessed over it.

After all, life's too short.

As for me, I've contemplated the matter quite often ever since I was very young – especially once I realized that, as a child of the 1950s, it was entirely possible I could live to see the dawn of the 21st century.

("Two-thousand-zero-zero, party's over – Oops! Out of time....")

The late, great, Rev. Angelo Henderson

I'm a Christian, so I truly believe my life is entirely in God's hands anyway. But you can't help but wonder every now and then, can you?

When I was diagnosed with kidney failure (or the more sinister-sounding "end-stage renal disease") in 2008, subsequently went on dialysis and eventually received a 2011 transplant, I figured my final calculations needed to shrink by several years. I mean, my "invincible" body had shown its mortality, and now somebody else's strange spare part was wedged inside me, helping me live.

I have to take pills every day for the rest of my life to keep my natural immune system weak enough so my imported kidney won't stage a revolt, get rejected and screw up the rest of my body. I have been compromised in any number of ways.

Like my Mama used to say, "Once they cut you open and let the air get inside you, you're never the same." As far as longevity goes, this can't be a good thing.

But for now, I'm 60 (I've ever admitted to that until now, and I may never write it again), feel like 30, act like 20 (or so my wife insists) and relish my health and every sunrise. Life is sweet.

Every so often, though, an event takes place that smacks you between the eyes and makes you start recalculating your "out" number all over again.

Usually it's the death of someone very dear to your heart.

Recently, as I wrote in my post "Requiem for a Heavy Hitter," reality came biting with the passing of Rich Berkowitz, founder and president of the national organization Home Dialyzors United and a man dedicated to a noble cause: giving all dialysis patients a choice, and a voice. Rich was an acquired taste, but I slowly came to develop an appetite for his blunt, effective manner and discovered the warm heart beneath.

Rich died suddenly, and unexpectedly, but to be honest he wasn't in the best of shape. He had been on various forms of dialysis himself for many, many years, and over time the procedure exacts a heavy toll on your body. On the heels of losing Rich, however, has come a death that rocked me to my emotional core – and apparently, did the same to an entire city.

I've known Angelo B. Henderson since we worked together on the same newspaper staff in Detroit back in the 1980s. He went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize, journalism's version of the Oscars, at the Wall Street Journal. He hosted a weekday radio program on Detroit's WCHB radio, a station I worked for a generation earlier. His afternoon show, "Your Voice," became required daily listening for thousands of Detroiters and, some would contend, played a key role in helping to overthrow a corrupt City Hall administration.

Angelo with his lovely and talented wife, Felecia.

In other words, we were given the same raw materials, but Angelo used his to much greater advantage. In fact, he upped the ante by becoming a minister, a force in the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and a passionate community organizer.

Coming out of the Jay-Z concert at the Palace of Auburn Hills recently, filled with the joy of music, Angelo slipped on a patch of ice and jacked up his knee. Basically incapacitated, he was recuperating at home while others willingly assumed his public duties.

Bored of just sitting, I'm sure – the words "Angelo Henderson" and "inactivity" never found the same sentence – he reached out to me to help him play one of our mutual guilty pleasures, the online version of Family Feud. If he couldn't amass all 200 points in the "Big Money Round" by himself, he would ask me to play the other side of the board, and vice versa. We were getting pretty good at it, too.

One day we're channeling Steve Harvey. Overnight, Angelo experienced complications. The next day, he was gone.

Gone! Just like that. Gone. At the extremely tender age of 51.

That's barely more than a half-century. If 50 is the new 30 (and I'm declaring it is), Angelo was barely into middle age.

Gone.

For the better part of a week, the city of Detroit was in stunned emotional gridlock. Tributes and memories gushed forth on social media. The Detroit Police carried out a major drug sweep in his honor. They're laying him to rest Monday (Feb. 24), and I'm betting the homegoing ceremony is going to be a sight to behold.

If Angelo had to leave us, it almost seems fitting he should die during Black History Month, because he stood as a gleaming example to many of what African Americans today can achieve.

Now, don't get me wrong: You'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who rejoices in life as much as I do. I wallow in the wonder of every day, especially after being given a second chance at it through a selfless organ donor. If I could, however, I'd willingly give a few of my years to Angelo. He would have used them well and wisely, I think.

God took Angelo to be by His side, a good and faithful servant. He leaves behind a beautiful wife and partner, Felecia, a gifted journalist in her own right; and a son, Grant, whom he should have been able to see walk proudly down the aisles of graduation and marriage. We are greedy folk: It feels like Angelo deserved his 70s, at least.

My transplant experts tell me that if I take good care of myself, do what they tell me and eat my Wheaties, this rented kidney of mine could last 20 years or more. So, let's say 82. That sounds like a nice round lifespan number. Eighty-two it is.

And in every one of those remaining years, Angelo Henderson never will be far from my thoughts. My hero and everlasting inspiration. Rest well, brother.

Could This Be Called a Cat-astrophe?

I've just returned from a successful and intense week in Detroit, a trip that included discussions on ghostwriting a new book, interviews with the cast of the ABC fall cop drama Detroit 1-8-7 and spending quality time with my writing mentor over a lunch of fried chicken. For some reason, however, every day in was in Motown, I couldn't seem to get Carolyn Krieger-Cohen out of my mind.

You may remember Carolyn from previous episodes. (If not, you can glance through my November 2009 entry "Detroit" here.) She is the extremely gifted and dynamic PR professional who owns CKC Public Relations in West Bloomfield, Mich., a Detroit suburb. I've known her since she did promotions for local radio stations in the '80s while I covered radio for The Detroit News, and we've maintained a wonderful friendship over the years.

                                                                        Carolyn and me.

I thought my preoccupation might be due to the fact that we missed connecting with each other during my previous trip to Detroit, or because her office is less than four miles from the West Bloomfield condo where I reside when I'm working in town. Whatever the reason, despite my vacuum-packed schedule, I kept having the overwhelming sense that I needed to see Carolyn in person before I left the city.

Finally, I could stand it no longer. On the morning I was leaving to drive back to Illinois, I called her office.

She answered her own phone on the first ring, which should have told me fates were at work.

"It's Carolyn."
"Are you in this morning?"
"Yes."
"Are you free?"
"Who is this?"
"It's McFarlin. I have to see you before I leave town."
"Yes, you do. And I know why."

Oooo-weeee-ooooh.

Let me mention right here that Carolyn Krieger-Cohen is one of the most...oh...transcendental people I've ever met. She claims to communicate with the dead, one of her more prominent clients is the acclaimed psychic Rebecca Rosen, who does the same, and Carolyn possesses a calming and intuitive spirit. She just seems to know things.

I arrive at her office, beaming and breathless, 10 minutes later and leap into the chair opposite her desk. "I know why you've been thinking about me," she announced.

"This is the weirdest thing, and you probably won't believe it. But just this week, my cat was diagnosed...with chronic kidney disease."

I didn't know whether to laugh out loud or express somber sympathy for a beloved family pet. So my mouth compromised by dropping open.

She explained that the aging house feline, Jaac, had been acting strangely and urinating constantly, so it was rushed to the vet hospital. "And $3,000 later," she said, it was determined that kitty's kidneys were starting to go.

"Can cats undergo dialysis?" I asked.

Not exactly, Carolyn replied, but she and her husband, Jason, were instructed to give the cat injections of liquid solution on a regular basis to balance its rapid loss of fluids. Holding down your dear house cat so you can stick needles into it? "It didn't go too well," Carolyn deadpanned. "We had to go back to the clinic so the vet could do it."

Well, that just seems silly. Couldn't they just install a cat-heter?

Am I Thankful? Are You Kidding?

Last weekend was just about as wonderful a Thanksgiving season as anyone has a right to enjoy. On Thursday evening, seated around our sumptuous dinner feast, we instituted a new holiday tradition: We went around the table and asked each person to say what they were most thankful for this year.

A few tears were shed in the process, and I'm not ashamed to admit I may have dropped one or two into the turkey gravy myself. I think they finally had to ask me to shut up before the meal got cold. What am I most thankful for in 2009? How about everything?

You know how some years seem to blend into each other with the passage of time, and it becomes difficult to remember exactly what milestones happened when? That certainly never will be a problem for me when it comes to 2009.

It isn't every year that a guy gets married, loses a job, leaves the city where he's lived for 30 years, moves three times in six months, relocates to his in-laws' basement, becomes a co-parent to 9-year-old twins, passes out on the bathroom floor and gets hospitalized for a gash on his forehead, and has a catheter implanted in his midsection in preparation for kidney dialysis. Yeah, it'll be a hard year to forget.

Through it all, I'm extremely thankful for my health, odd as that may sound. I don't have to look too far to find people in much worse shape than I'm in, Vicodin is a miracle in terms of lessening the pain from my recent surgery, and all in all I'm feeling great. People who oughta know tell me I should
begin feeling even better once my dialysis begins and my body receives the help it needs to cleanse my system properly. I'm looking forward to finding out if they're right.

I'm also thankful for a wonderful, caring family that has taken me into its fold as if I was a prodigal son, expressing love for me in so many ways despite the physical infirmities I brought along as baggage.

But what am I most thankful for? That's easy. Anyone who has met my wife, Karen, comes away remarking about what an amazing person she is, and if you haven't met her, my sincere hope is that you get to someday.

Regretfully, I've had a bit of experience assessing wives in my lifetime, and no man could ask for a more supportive, loving, objective, cheerful, committed partner than the one God has blessed me with. There is no doubt in my mind that the Lord brought us together, because I cannot think of another possible scenario where a guy living in the 'hood on Detroit's East Side could meet and fall in love with a woman residing and working in central Illinois.

Karen is truly one of the nicest individuals I have ever known, and I am a better man today for having her as such an integral part of my life. Happy Thanksgiving to me.

And she can make some mean stuffing, too.

Detroit

I had a most productive and interesting five days in Detroit last week. In addition to meeting the dynamic and compassionate philanthropist Doreen Hermelin (see recent "Doreen" and "Rootlessness" posts), I spent a fascinating afternoon with a Detroit historian, John Green, who seems to be waging a valiant – but losing – one-man war to ensure the achievements of African Americans throughout Michigan history aren't forgotten.

I spent one evening "receiving visitors" at Dino's Lounge in Ferndale, MI, and caught up with two beloved friends I don't see hardly often enough: Bill Jentzen (left), my former assistant at Wayne State University, and Santiago (why he prefers "Jimmy" I'll never understand!) Martinez, who had been part of my life in Detroit for decades.

I spent an extremely enjoyable and constructive Wednesday morning in the office of my longtime friend Carolyn Krieger-Cohen, one of Metro Detroit's most creative and effective PR executives. In the course of three hours we came up with at least a half-dozen ways we could work together to support some of her clients and make me some money!

            
Thursday morning may have been the unexpected highlight of my trip. Got a call from my old friend Brian Pastoria, who with his brother Mark runs the Harmonie Park recording studios in downtown Detroit, asking if I could squeeze in time to come in and record the voiceover introduction to "Christmas in Detroit 3," their annual benefit CD featuring holiday songs recorded by local artists. He wanted me to do it because of my many years working with Detroit musicians in my role as a music critic. It's very nice to be remembered for past accomplishments, and may I add that I nailed the intro in one take! Yeah, I still got it!

I also ran into another great guy at the studio, Jimmy Risk, currently publisher of the online publication Your News Detroit. All in all an extraordinarily delightful visit!

               Jimmy Risk, Mark Pastoria, me and Brian Pastoria

And just before I dashed out of town, I got the chance to have lunch again with my "media lunch bunch," including Specs Howard School of Broadcast Arts VP Dick Kernen, marketing exec Michael Seltzer and the always delightful Terry Bommarito Holmes, who I've known since I first moved to Detroit in the late 70s. Let me tell you, we laughed until we cried – especially when I went into my shtick about the differences between Detroit and my current life in central Illinois.

             Me with Yoda (Dick Kernen), Terry Holmes and Michael Seltzer

Wherever I went, it seemed, I would hear someone say, "You look great!" as if they were more than a bit surprised. They would say it the way people say it to someone who's returned home after major surgery, or a person who'd dropped 40 pounds since the last time they were seen. And the people who made such exclamations later said that they had been reading this blog.

Made me think: I've got to start emphasizing the fact that despite my kidney ailments, I'm still feeling fine. I'm getting the sense my Detroit friends and acquaintances expect to see me on crutches, hooked up to filtration devices or rolling through in an iron lung!

Rootlessness

Well, I had an amazing first evening back in Detroit Sunday. Drove seven hours to spend 30 minutes with my interview subject, an amazing woman named Doreen Hermelin who I'm profiling for HOUR Detroit magazine. (See "Doreen," Friday, Nov. 6 post.)

A half hour was literally all the time she could squeeze in for me, as she was dashing to fulfill family commitments and business details before boarding a flight to Argentina this morning. I was happy and thankful for every moment. Writers know that face-to-face contact, however brief, still is infinitely better than telephone or Internet communication when you're assignment is to capture the essence of a person through words.

When I arrived at her home for the interview, however, I literally could not believe my eyes. You hear so many Chicken Little stories about the doom and death of Detroit that, even though you know better, you sometimes tend to forget that everyone here is not in foreclosure or waiting for their government bailout.

This is the view from the front gate of her home:

And yes, like a goober I stopped to take a picture, like those gawking tourists on the Hollywood home tour, because little brown people who grew up in Spring Lake, Mich., just don't get invited to places like this every weekend.

As I drove down the long, winding road, over the bridge for the creek that runs through the property and past the gigantic lawn sculptures, I kept looking over my shoulder waiting for security guards to demand some identification, then escort me off the grounds. When I finally got to the door, Ms. Hermelin took me into her dining room, an immense space dominated by a long table surrounded by 12 chairs. And there, in one corner of the table, was a tuna fish sandwich on rye she had prepared for me.

Now, in the 35 years or so I've been interviewing people for a living, I cannot remember any subject ever making me a sandwich. She said she was going to make it when we spoke on the phone as I was racing to her house, but I genuinely thought she was kidding. But as she repeatedly said, she knew I had driven a long distance just to speak with her, and figured I had to be famished.

(Problem with eating tuna fish sandwich while conducting an interview: hard to ask questions when your mouth is full, and you don't want to appear ungrateful by not eating it.)

As I drove away from this magnificent residence, though, I got to thinking. I love Detroit, and I always will; I became a man here, and there are so many fantastic people who live here that I'm proud to call friends. One of them, Larry Kaplan, who was the photographer for the first rock concert I ever reviewed for The Detroit News back in 1979, has devoted a room in his condo exclusively for me so I'll never have to worry about accommodations in my travels back to Detroit.

But this isn't home anymore. I'm so thankful to have a place to stay when I'm here, but I don't have an address to call my own after 30 years of living in this city. When I'm here, I long to return to the pastoral surroundings and endearing chaos of my home in Decatur. When I'm in Decatur, I'm girding up to return to the bustle and intensity of a working visit in Detroit. Right now, I feel like a man without roots. That will change with time, I'm certain, but it's a very strange sensation I've never experienced before.

About the only place I truly feel at home these days is behind the wheel of my car – usually driving between Decatur and Detroit.

The Man From Glad

On the road again today, driving back home to Champaign from Detroit. Can't wait to see my wife's smile and sparkling blue eyes again. You know, when we were dating, I would always play the Elton John song "Blue Eyes" at some point while traveling to see her, sing along with gusto and get all geeked up to be with her. (I'm not sure she knows that.)

These long road trips are wearying but necessary, since most of my major clients are still located in Motown and many of the stories I write demand I be here for research and interviews. When I think about it, though, I'm glad I have the ability to make these treks.

When I go on dialysis (which will be sooner than later, so I'm told), the journeys will be more challenging – I'll have to lug along a suitcase-sized blood cleaning machine along with several large bags of filtering solution – but I'll still make them. I refuse to let my condition define my lifestyle.

Besides, I remember a couple of years when I couldn't seem to land a job if my life depended on it and was living in Detroit too broke to afford a car. You want to talk about desperation, I was the definition. Detroit, for all its wonders, must have the worst public transportation system of any major city. I've always believed it was by design: We make the cars, and by thunder, everybody here is going to buy at least one.

So even something as unremarkable as having a late-model American automobile to drive on these multi-state commutes makes me glad, and thankful. I'm also glad to have:

The most remarkable wife any man could hope for – funny, smart, beautiful, organized and a more knowledgeable sports fan than I could ever hope to be;

In-laws who are genuinely good and nice people, and who have accepted me into their lives;

Emma and Madison, the twins, who keep me active, engaged, and constantly fascinated;

A friend like Larry Kaplan, who has reserved a room for me at his condo in West Bloomfield, Mich., providing me a place to stay and work whenever I'm in Detroit;

More assignments than I could have dared to wish for in this troubled economy, and most important,

My health, now and for whatever form it may take in the future. Because, like the old folks say, when you've got your health, you've got everything.

How can one man be so blessed?

Can't Forget the Motor City

Today is a travel day for me. I'm driving from Champaign back to Detroit, about six hours, to spend a few days conducting interviews, checking in with editors, reassuring clients and assessing the progress of my new Web site, coming soon to an Internet near you. It's a round trip I take at least once a month.

Detroit is a rush of mixed emotions for me now. It's the city of my greatest victories and my naughtiest iniquities, the place where I became a man, the location where my career soared and swooned. For so many years, it was home. My residence now, in central Illinois, is as far removed from the Motor City as the east is from the (Mid)west. And in the few months since I've relocated, many acquaintances from Detroit and elsewhere have said something to the effect of, "So! You decided to move to small-town Illinois and leave your wild, flamboyant life behind, huh? Huh? Huh?"

While that was not the reason behind my address change, my simple response to them all is, "Yeah." I am far closer today to retirement age than drinking age. I spent my formative young adult years as the rock music critic in the home of Motown, Seger, Nugent and Aretha, writing for the largest evening newspaper in America at the time. I had the coolest job in America, if I say so myself. I sowed so many wild oats, I should buy a couple of acres around my new house. And if you're going to sow 'em, I say do it young, do it till you're satisfied and, if you survive, sit your butt down somewhere and cherish the memories. Cherish mode now.

I'm sublimely happy and calm in my new surroundings, and I believe my best writing is yet to come. Welcome to my Walden phase. I was saying the other day that I still get a rush of excitement when I  return to Detroit, but I predict there'll soon come a day when I arrive and can't wait to escape the noise and tumult of the metroplex to return to my little nest amid the cornfields. When that transition arrives, I truly will have more than a new address. I will have a home.

How It Happened

One of the many remarkable things about our kidneys – and believe me, I've done enough reading and research to go for my master's in kidney – is that they can go right along performing their vital functions –  filtering the blood, producing urine, eliminating toxic wastes, reducing excess sodium and potassium, manufacturing active Vitamin D – until they lose up to 80 percent of their normal function. Don't you wish you could do your job at full capacity while only exerting 20 percent of your energy?

Anyway, that's where I am now. At my last visit to my nephrologist (kidney specialist), warm and straightforward Dr. Abdel-Moneim Attia (ah-TEE-ya) at the Carle Clinic in Champaign, I learned that my lab work revealed my total kidney function had declined from 24 to 19 percent. Yikes. One doesn't suddenly regain function; kidney damage, I'm told, is irreversible. The trick now is to maintain what I have left.

How the heck did this happen? Some people damage their kidneys due to injury or trauma, diabetes, genetics, abuse of painkillers or other drugs. I, however, basically did it to myself, because I ignored for too long a condition all too common to African American men 30 and older: soaring, uncontrolled hypertension, or high blood pressure.

Your blood pressure should be somewhere around 120/80 to be within the normal range. Even with a battery of medications (and we'll talk more about pills later), mine is running around 135/90, but it's coming down steadily.

An emergency room physician at Providence Hospital in Detroit once explained it to me best, I think. "When your blood pressure is too high," he said, "blood just pounds against your arteries with every beat, as if you kept pounding your fist against a wall. Now, nothing might happen to that wall right away, but over the course of time if you keep pounding away, eventually you're going to damage that wall. Same with your blood pressure. Eventually, something's got to give." For me it was my kidneys, and what a mook I feel like today for not having manned up and dealt with the problem sooner.

People – especially men, especially black men – please do not do as I have done. If you are diagnosed with high blood pressure, do something to control it. Diet, exercise, medication – something. Believe me, ignorance is not bliss. Not forever, anyway.