Caddy for Life Read Free Page B

had first come up with the idea to get everyone together and Gwyn who had pushed everyone else to make sure it happened.
    Technically this was not a reunion but a chance to celebrate the wedding of Jay and Natalie’s son Bruce. Bruce, the second child and the first son, had married Marsha Cummins Moore on a beach in Hawaii in February, almost thirty years after they first met and five weeks after they had become engaged.
    The engagement had caught the family a little off guard; they hadn’t known there was someone serious in Bruce’s life. The wedding had been a complete surprise, because it had all happened in less than a week. Hilary Watson, whose husband, Tom, had been Bruce’s boss for almost his entire adult life, had suggested it to Marsha on a Monday and the ceremony had taken place six days later on the beach. Friends had commented that it was typical of Bruce to find a way to get married in his bare feet.
    Tom Watson was Bruce’s best man. In his toast to the bride and groom he had commented that this was a marriage that was beginning under very difficult circumstances. “The groom,” he said, “is a lifelong Eagles fan. The bride is a devoted Cowboys fan. That’s why it took so long for them to finally get together. Clearly, they are going to have a lot of work to do.”
    When the rest of the family heard about the wedding, they were taken by surprise, but they also understood. Everyone talked about getting together at some point at Bruce and Marsha’s home in Florida to celebrate. But there was no specific date or plan. Late in March, as was almost always the case on weekends, Gwyn and Lenny had the TV tuned to that week’s golf tournament. It was the Players Championship. Gwyn was walking through the living room when she heard NBC’s Jimmy Roberts mention the name Bruce Edwards. She stopped and sat down. A moment later her big brother was on the screen. She took a deep breath when she saw him and tried not to cry.
    Bruce’s voice was thick, his words difficult to understand, almost as if he’d been drinking. That wasn’t a surprise, because she’d talked to him on the phone frequently in the weeks since the wedding and knew that was how he sounded now. “But I hadn’t seen him,” she said. “When I saw how thin he was, when I saw how different he looked in just a few weeks, that’s when it really hit me. That was when I first thought to myself, ‘We have to get everyone together—soon.’”
    Months later, sitting on a couch in the living room with Lenny next to her, she still found it difficult to say exactly why the thought had crossed her mind that day. “I don’t honestly remember if I thought it specifically,” she said. “But obviously it was somewhere in my mind.”
    Somewhere in her mind was the thought that couldn’t be avoided—not on that afternoon in March nor on that spectacular Saturday in September: If we don’t get the family together soon, the next time might be at Bruce’s funeral.
    Three weeks before Bruce’s wedding, at the age of forty-eight, an unsmiling doctor at the Mayo Clinic had said to him, “Do you know what ALS is? It’s also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In all likelihood, you have one to three years to live.”
    Just like that. No ifs or ands or buts. He had issued what was, essentially, a death sentence, almost as if he were a judge telling a criminal his decision based on the facts before him.
    That had been on a cold, snowy January day in Minnesota. A lot had happened since then, much of it good, some of it extraordinary. Bruce had been to many different doctors and had been told many different things about how he could get better. But the disease was still progressing. Bruce knew it, Marsha knew it, the family knew it. When Bruce and Marsha arrived at Gwyn and Lenny’s house that Friday night in September, there was a plate of mussels, courtesy of Brian and Laurie, sitting on the table on the back patio that Lenny had managed to finish