When did you first realize that he was ill?
The first real indication that something was going on manifested itself in October 2005. He was on the last signing tour in Philly and took a day of private time and visited with my family at West Point, where my youngest son was a freshman. We did a backyard barbeque at a buddy’s house who was stationed there at the time and Jim inhaled the biggest steak you’ve ever seen in your life. It was a good day. And, sidenote, when Harriet and Jim left, a buddy of mine who I graduated with back in 1974, who was at that time the parish priest at West Point, said, “Oh man, Will, I’m glad they’re gone.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “Those are the smartest people I’ve ever been around. It’s hard to talk to them.” He was laughing, and he said, “They stretch you, don’t they?” I said, “Yeah, they do.”
Anyway, West Point is located in an area of New York, the central Hudson valley, that is all hills. And him walking around, he’d have to stop occasionally and lean against something, or lean down on his knees and catch his breath. And he’d get dizzy, and see spots. We realized that he needed to get this checked out. It was within a week or so after getting back from the tour that he called me and said, “They know what it is.” And I was thinking it was something not as catastrophic as it turned out to be. You know, maybe he’s not eating well, not enough sleep, something. So I say, “OK, what is it?” And matter-of-factly, he says “It’s amyloidosis, and it’s fatal, and I intend to beat it.” Just that way.
He thought he had seen it then, but in fact he had seen it years earlier when we were doing a walk in the Charleston area, across the Cooper River Bridge that they do annually. I reminded him that, on that walk, he had some breath issues. He thought about it a moment and said, “Ah, you’re right.” And the moral of that was that amyloidosis, which is now on everyone’s radar, is because of Jim, and the work Harriet has done since losing Jim. The V.A. now recognizes it, it is service related, so servicemen can be checked. It is being taught to doctors early on, so when they are looking at patients and they are talking about this or that symptom, and they see something that looks like a common cold, it may not be a common cold. It may well be the onset of amyloidosis, and if it is caught then, it is treatable.
So Jim told us then, “I intend to beat it.” He didn’t know that he would personally succumb to it, but in fact, through his efforts and through his notoriety, he is going to beat it.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.