THE PROMISE - Chapter 2

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be offering a taste of my memoir, The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God, published by TouchPoint Press, here on my blog. It is my true story of first faith and first love and how the two became almost fatally intertwined. Keep checking back for additional chapters.

2–MyDeath 

JULY 2011.

My name is Sean Paul Murphy. Welcome to my life. And my death.

As the summer began, my life could have hardly been better. I was married to a lovely woman named Deborah Lynn Crum who still delighted and inspired me after eleven short years of marriage. While I must confess we have more than our share of silly fights, my main complaint about my wife is that I didn’t meet her ten or twenty years earlier. She felt the same way. 

I was also blessed to have both a satisfying vocation and avocation. By day, I enjoyed a lucrative career as a film editor. I edited some independent feature films and cable network shows, but I mainly edited television commercials because they paid more money. On nights and weekends, I labored as a screenwriter. At the time I had seven produced feature films under my belt and numerous award- winning shorts.

Was I rich? No, but I was my own boss. I hadn’t held a full time job in over twenty years. Financially, my wife and I were comfortable, despite some rather large swings in my income on a yearly basis due to the nature of my work. We had a small two- bedroom house in the quiet, leafy neighborhood of Hamilton in northeast Baltimore, a scant few blocks from where I was born. The original owner told me it was always a happy house. I kept it that way. Christine Fry, one of my three stepdaughters, shared the house with us, giving me a welcome taste of fatherhood I had missed in my younger days.

I was popular. I had lots of friends, but I must admit none of them had any clue how emotionally withdrawn I was at my core. I tried to hide my inherent shyness behind a practiced mask of extroversion. I was always ready to perform, and I consistently attempted to fill every silent moment with chatter of some sort. Silence was my greatest enemy. I felt dangerously vulnerable in it, as if the silence could reveal how many words I used to say so little. 

What was I hiding? Well, nothing and everything. I could pontificate endlessly on practically any subject. I just never felt capable of discussing the deeper things of my heart like my feelings and my faith, which, in the end, are the things that define us all as human beings. I felt sufficiently transparent with my wife. If she asked a question, I would always answer with some degree of straightforwardness. That said, I wasn’t one to volunteer too much information on my own. 

I truly despised this quirk of my nature. Here I was, by profession a storyteller, yet I was emotionally unable to tell the story of my life. Granted, most of my life was dull as dishwater, but I believed I had experienced some extraordinary moments well worth discussing. But I couldn’t. My stories, like the other treasures of my heart, remained bolted down and locked away.

I didn’t like it, but it seemed only natural to me, a byproduct of either my familial nature or nurture. I saw the same trait on conspicuous display throughout my mother’s maternal family the Rosenbergers. 

I once met a cousin researching the Rosenberger family. His first question to me was: “Have you noticed that people in this family don’t get married?” 

Yes, I had. The evidence was all around me. In fact, at the time, I could have been considered Exhibit A. Men in my grandmother Rita’s immediate family rarely married. Her brothers died as bachelors living in the same house they shared with their parents. Only the girls, Rita and her sister Helen, married and had children, but their male children and grandchildren proved equally averse to it. 

“Your grandsons are all gay,” June Pollock, my grandmother’s best friend and sister-in-law, used to tell her periodically in the years before I finally married. “And ugly, too.” 

While I must concede beauty to the eye of the beholder, I must take issue with dear June’s assessment of my three brothers and myself. None of us were gay despite the fact that none of us were married at the time. We were just Rosenbergers. 

This marital abnormality was not an isolated phenomenon in my grandmother’s branch of the family. It is systemic throughout the greater Rosenberger clan as a whole, which definitely falls well outside of the statistical norm. But I think it is more than a question of marriage. It was a question of emotional intimacy. My grandmother Rita once asked her father George why he never talked to his older brother Frank. “I didn’t talk to him when we slept in the same bed together,” he replied. “Why would I talk to him now?” 

Those words might sound harsh, but I’m reasonably sure George said them without any animosity. When brothers and sisters refused to talk on my mother’s Italian side of the family, the Protanis, it was because they were angry at each other. Grudges were held for years. Curses were dutifully intoned. That wasn’t the Rosenberger way. If they didn’t talk to someone, it usually meant they simply didn’t have anything to say. If my grandmother had asked her father if he loved his brother Frank, I’m sure he would have said, “Of course!” Loving is one thing. Talking is another. 

I interviewed my grandmother Rita right before her ninetieth birthday. She made an interesting admission. She said she never really knew her brother Butch despite living with him for over seventy years. I didn’t know him either. He’d talk about his work. He’d talk about sports. He’d talk about politics. But he would never talk about himself: his dreams, his goals, his loves. He was a Rosenberger. 

Don’t get me wrong. I loved my Rosenberger uncles. They were great guys who’d give you the shirts off their backs, but I didn’t want to be like them. I didn’t want to stay at home with my parents, yet I did until I was in my thirties. I wanted to share my emotions, yet I couldn’t. I saw my own fate in my uncles, and I fought it. I didn’t want to be a Rosenberger. I wanted to be a Murphy. One in particular: Paul James Murphy, Senior. 

My paternal grandfather was my role model from my earliest days. He was a big, balding, boisterous man who everyone loved and respected. His full, hearty laugh still rings in my ears. He was a born leader of men, although not in a dictatorial or military manner. You didn’t follow him out of fear or obligation. You followed him because you wanted to see what he was going to do next so you could be a part of it. Time and time again, my desire to be more like him forced me out of my limited emotional comfort zone. 

It was a conscious decision I made as a child. I knew I wasn’t like him, but I wanted to be. In a very real sense, I was playing out, in my personality and heart, the theological battle between Determinism and Free Will. I seemed predestined to be a Rosenberger. However, I was using my free will to become a Murphy. It was a battle I fought every day. 

Eventually, I compromised. I maintained the façade of a gregarious Murphy on the outside, but remained an introspective Rosenberger on the inside. I learned to accept those walls around my heart as inevitable. They certainly didn’t prevent me from being happy. I had friends. I had a loving family. By any objective measure, I was a success. Little did I know my life would soon be demanded of me.

My decline started on the evening of July 2, 2011. My wife and I were at the home of my Uncle Richard and Aunt Phyllis for their traditional Fourth of July party. They lived at the end of Wilson Point, a thin peninsula jutting out into Maryland’s Middle River. From their property, which even possesses a small sandy beach, the waters of the Chesapeake Bay can be seen just beyond the mouth of the river.

My uncle, who inherited his father’s keen sense of hospitality, is a consummate host and the party was always widely attended by friends and family. The highlight of each party was the river walk. Everyone would wade into Middle River and walk out to a large metal pole marking the boat channel. With floating coolers filled with beer and Jello shooters bobbing around us, everyone would circle the pole in the warm chest-to-neck-high water. Then we would all touch it at the same time and scream at the top of our lungs. Needless to say, this ritual often elicited the concern of the nearby boaters. 

After returning to shore I began coughing. A lot. Enough that even my wife noticed. She suspected I had a summer cold. But it didn’t go away for days. It got worse. 

I didn’t let it stop me from working, but it proved to be a hindrance. I would spend hours editing a project but I would have to step out of the room when I played it for the clients because my coughing competed with the dialogue.

I continued to decline. I was building up so much phlegm and mucus in my lungs that I would wake up in the middle of the night literally choking for breath. I responded by using a wide variety of over-the-counter drugs to battle each individual symptom. That only made matters worse. I didn’t take into account that not all of the drugs worked well together. Their plentiful side effects also began taking a toll. I soon became paranoid. My main fear was choking to death in my sleep. As a result, I only slept in a sitting position, and then for only two or three hours a night. Now I was battling exhaustion as well. 

Eventually, my family convinced me to go to the doctor. He listened to my chest and didn’t like what he heard. He said I had pneumonia. Thank God! That was a relief. I hated thinking I was being waylaid by some stupid, little summer cold. That would have been an affront to my manhood. Plus, pneumonia was no big deal. I had it before and beat it. Yawn.

The Doc prescribed some antibiotics and told me to get an X-Ray. The X-Ray, however, returned with no sign of pneumonia. Uh-oh. Now it was time to visit the specialists. I was sent to a pulmonologist who made me take an MRI. The result: Swollen lymph nodes. I was told not to jump to conclusions, but everyone was thinking the same thing: The Big-C. Cancer. Lymphoma. 

Strangely, the diagnosis did not worry me. Despite my intense and sincere Christianity, I did not suddenly find myself beseeching the Lord for healing. Nor did I question Him whether I would live or die. It seemed unnecessary. While I often found myself in prayer concerning the inconsequential things in life, I had long ago learned to trust the Lord entirely in the greater things. If it were His will for me to die now, then I would die. What was I going to do? Say no? I don’t think so.

To know for sure whether I had cancer, they needed to do a biopsy. Not a needle one. They needed to make an incision down below my throat and yank out just enough of a lymph node to see what was really going on. It was a routine operation. Out-patient. I would arrive at Union Memorial Hospital around 7 a.m. on Tuesday, August 10th, and I would be home in time for lunch. No big deal. 

But it didn't quite work out that way. After they lifted me onto the operating table, the last thing I remember was the anesthesiologist saying, "I'm going to give you a little of this."

The operation proved to be a success, but I died. With all of my stories locked inside me forever. Gone.

Until now.

So let me, the brand new Sean Paul Murphy, who was yanked back to life from a premature date with death, tell you my strange story about a boy and girl and a God and a man.

I will attempt to be as open and honest as possible. If I do hold back, it won’t be to protect myself, but rather the privacy of people I care about. I have changed some names and places to protect the innocent. If I make any mistakes concerning the events in this book, or their chronological order, please credit the long years that have passed rather than any intent to deceive.

Other Chapters:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6

You can get a copy of the whole book here:

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