Pencils down (2019)
The fast-moving, fast-growing company where I still work comes to a halt between Christmas and New Year’s. Nearly everyone has vacation time to use, and we all stop working just before Christmas Eve. Pencils down. During the rest of the year, two weeks is the cost of one week’s vacation—a week preparing to leave plus a week catching up after you return. But this week nothing gets done. All the action and reaction freezes, like a video in the middle of a scene. Then it all starts moving again, the day after New Year’s, as everyone comes back on line.
On the Thursday before Christmas, late in the afternoon, my last call ends. I stop staring at the objects under my monitor—the mug of stones I collected with Rosalind when she was a toddler, a framed photograph of Suzanne and me at our wedding, and a gift from a friend in India, a statue of Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. My feet come down off the desk. I close my laptop, unplug it, and put it in my bag. Then I stand up and walk out, leaving my office door open. I walk past rows of cubicles that are already almost empty, saying goodbye to whoever is left, and find myself wondering, as I cross the parking lot, how long it will take me to stop thinking about work. Immediately I remember three things I forgot to do. I pull out my phone.
Route 128 circles Boston like a clock. I live at about six on that clock. I work at about eleven forty-five. Almost forty miles each way. I am still on the phone as I crawl past the Mass Pike, then speed for two exits, and then creep through the series of turns and the hill near Route 9. Traffic comes to a complete halt above the intersection with I-93, where I-95 turns south toward Rhode Island. These are the last two miles before my exit. They often take the longest. My phone sits in the cupholder. But I am still thinking about work.
We are exploring a new product for a new market, and we have a lot of questions. What do customers want that they don’t already have? How much will that cost to build? How much staff will we need and how much time? I am organizing how we answer these questions. I have just finished organizing January, and most of February. I am flying to New Orleans the week after New Year’s. We have trips planned to California, Mississippi, and Tennessee. My calendar is full of meetings about research—market research, user research, competitive research—as well as conversations with experts and time to synthesize what we are learning. I have also planned time to build budgets and schedules while helping the team create prototypes.
I can see my exit now. Exit 2B: Route 138 North, Milton. I think of someone else I need to call. She is already gone. I leave a message. I will wake up tomorrow and remember a few more calls and a few more emails, but I will start to relax maybe in the afternoon. I have eleven days until Tuesday, January 2, and I will spend more than half of them in the woods at the farm, celebrating the holiday and setting up for sugaring.
My fevers started the next day, Friday. By Saturday, I was shivering so violently that I couldn’t sign a credit card slip. Sunday was worse. On Wednesday, I sat on a gurney in the emergency room and heard the word “leukemia” for the first time. And then from Thursday forward I lay virtually locked in a room on the Hematology/Oncology unit, visited only by people in masks and gloves and talking with my children about whether I would die. It was still the same week—that same wonderful, restful week—and my company remained paused like a movie. No one knew. As I passed through New Year’s weekend and drew closer to Tuesday, my dread grew. I wouldn’t meet my obligations. People would need and expect things from me that I could no longer deliver. So I wanted to be as clear and as definite as possible when I told them. Except I had no clear and definite information.
“When do you think I can go back to work?” I asked one of my doctors.
He looked guarded. “As with everything else related to your disease, that is hard to predict.” He spoke slowly and cautiously. “It is almost impossible to provide you with reliable, step-by-step guidance about the next several months.”
“The next several months? That wasn’t what we talked about last time.”
“The coming weeks and months,” he corrected himself.
“I thought you said one month.”
“That’s our best guess. But we can’t say for sure. We simply don’t know how long you will be here. It depends on a wide array of factors that we can’t anticipate.”
This intensified my dread. I had to say something, but whatever I said would be wrong. Being out for just a month would disrupt the commitments I had made, and I could tell now that a month was optimistic. A month and half? I wanted to insist on that. Mid-February. I would make that happen. So this is what I finally sent my colleagues. I sent it Monday morning, New Year’s Day.
Then I canceled or declined fifty-five meetings, many of which were recurring, and I disappeared from company calendars.
When I’m stressed, I sigh. The more stressed, the louder and longer my sighs. My team might be on a conference call. I might join and not announce myself. “Ask Doug,” someone will say after a minute. “I can hear him sighing.” My daughter Isabelle has worked at my company, summers and a gap year. We shared those forty miles back and forth on Route 128. I remember the drive home after one devastating day—a day when I realized that a major project would not be as effective as we hoped and that we also wouldn’t deliver it on schedule. She drove. I stared out the window and sighed. When we came home, she sat down at the kitchen table with her coat still on and drew this cartoon. I sighed twice in her cartoon. Once inside the office.
And once in the parking lot.
We started as a small company. And when you work in a small company that grows quickly, especially in a changing industry, you make many mistakes. Most of what I think about, when I sigh, are my mistakes—what the company needed and what I didn’t deliver. So on the Tuesday after New Year’s, as everything started again without me, I felt guilty. I was failing people by falling sick. But I also felt a deeper sense of insecurity. I am maybe ten years from retirement. My experience is only as valuable as my continued ability to change. As I imagined the movie starting again, questions ran in the crawl across the bottom of my mind. Am I still helpful? Do I make the contribution I think I do? Or will it all be easier without me?
The answer to my email was an avalanche of cards. “You’ve given so much support and encouragement and strength to so many of us,” someone wrote, “and it’s coming back to you now with interest.” The emotion in the notes, how worried people were and how deeply they cared, surprised me.
This was a theme, What Would Doug Do? (WWDD).
Someone sent a photo of a book that I had given her oldest daughter soon after she was born.
Someone teased me about including a link to a helpful booklet about Acute Myeloid Leukemia. “Only you, Doug. Only you would worry whether we had the right information.” One of my managers sent me this card.
The inside read, Because there aren’t that many people I like. And he wrote, “Get well, Doug. We need you.” My other manager sent me this.
Every card made me cry, or laugh. “I’m sure you’ll have the Beth Israel staff charmed in no time,” someone else wrote, “and we’ll try not to burn this place down while you’re out.”
This has been my village five or six or seven days a week across the last seven years. Yet their reaction surprised me. Why? Because we don’t understand our own life as it happens. We don’t know who we are or what we mean to other people. I expected my accomplishments to be something permanent I left behind—if not a novel then a new product that met market needs, or at least one project completed without so many mistakes—but they are instead these simple friendships. What you did for someone. What someone did for you. That awful meeting you both attend once a week, or maybe the memory of laughing together, feet up on your suitcases and sandwiches in your lap, stuck at Gate F6 in Fort Lauderdale on a Friday night.
