After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a man launched a podcast with his son. But the men didn't talk about his illness. Instead, they talked about the movies he taught his son to love, calling their show Westerns With Dad.
That was cool.
What a great gift for both of them. And an “enormous gift” is exactly how the son described the podcast in his farewell episode this month.
“This was a means for my father and I to work together on something, to be speaking to each other frequently, but not about his diagnosis,” the son said on the last episode of the podcast, which they did 50 episodes of over the past 50 months.
I was introduced to the podcast by my husband, who also loves westerns and liked the men’s easy rapport. But when he saw the farewell episode explaining that “Dad” had died, he did not want a sad blanket of reality dropped on one of his means of escape.
I had a very different reaction.
I had a very different reaction.
“What a great idea,” I said. “That must have been why they started the podcast.”
I knew how I would treasure having so many conversations with my mother to listen to any time I wanted.
She died long before we could record every second of our lives with the phones in our pockets, so my only hope at the time was a training video shot recently at her work. She only told me about it because she had been surprised by how many of her facial expressions she recognized in her own.
I called to ask about getting the video, and I still remember the pain in the man’s voice as he told a teenager he already taped over perhaps the last footage of her mother.
So of course I think the episodes are wonderful for the son to have, but what better gift could he have given his dad than to just sit down and talk with him?
I read once that the amount of time your adult kids want to spend with you is a direct result of how much time you spent with them growing up. Take the song “Cat’s in the Cradle” by
Harry Chapin. It’s about a father who can’t get his son to hang out with him because he never stopped to hang out with him when he was a boy.
This podcast is the opposite story. And if my son had done that for me, it would tell me I raised a great human being who thought I was pretty great, too.
Here is a link to the last episode they did together:
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Harry Chapin. It’s about a father who can’t get his son to hang out with him because he never stopped to hang out with him when he was a boy.
This podcast is the opposite story. And if my son had done that for me, it would tell me I raised a great human being who thought I was pretty great, too.
Here is a link to the last episode they did together:
