Let's Row Together

Live! Doing this fully, meaningfully, joyfully, and purposefully isn't as easy as it might seem. Passing along a wise lesson from the lived life of my friend who died last week.

Martha showed up at Jon Bon-Jovi concerts.

Away from concert halls, his lyrics sang to her.

“It’s my life. It’s now or never. But I ain’t gonna live forever. I just want to live while I’m alive.”

As Martha did in her 63 years of life. As she did from that day, five years ago, when she received her terminal diagnosis.

I just want to live while I’m alive.

She lived life to her fullest capabilities, inspiring those who were with her, even as illness subsumed her body.

My friend, Martha Fulham Brennan.

I’ll be at Martha’s funeral mass tomorrow, surrounded by those who love her, which is to say I’ll be with her fortunate friends to whom she leaves the greatest gift of all — a lesson in how each of us can truly live while we’re alive.

Though illness handed me this same lesson early in my life, I wholeheartedly embrace Martha’s refresher lesson as her grand gift to remind me of its essentialness.

When I was 29, a (mistaken) diagnosis of liver cancer awakened me to living.

During a surgery to biopsy my enlarged lymph nodes, located by the CT scan to be beneath my pancreas, pathologists at New York University Hospital read the frozen slice taken from my liver as cancerous. At this point, the operation ended. With my pancreas inflamed, my surgeon believed that my body already had told him what he had burrowed deep inside of me to learn.

A few days later, this surgeon was seated at my bedside asking to operate again.

It seemed, he told me, that the “permanent” liver section was not as clear in giving them the diagnosis that the less accurate frozen sample did. My doctors wanted him to go in again to find out what my lymph nodes would reveal.

They suspected, based on my symptoms, that I had Hodgkin lymphoma.

I said “no.” I’d go home. And wait.

To wait, I went to my beloved Cape Cod. It’s where I always find serenity. I curled my toes in the loose beach sand. Swam. Sailed. Walked alone and with friends. Live with my family. In those summer weeks, I regained much of the 40 pounds I’d lost during my months of spiking fevers, soaking night sweats and unstoppable chills which I’d endured before my lengthy hospitalization.

Not too long after my summer rebound, I left my husband, ending a marriage I hadn’t wanted but had gone ahead with as my hope for lessening the emotional turmoil I was experiencing in the midst of my widely publicized fight with baseball.

In the early 1980s, me with my longest-in-life friend, Mary Fulham, Martha’s older sister.

After I’d confronted my own mortality and was given a second chance, I set out to live each day demonstrating my gratitude for having it. I rededicated myself to valuing my friendships by nurturing them. I redoubled my effort to find meaning in purposeful endeavors. And I realized that for me to embrace life at its fullest meant embarking on fresh challenges.

Do I always succeed? Of course I don’t. Yet, my internal message imploring me to grab hold of living inhabits my being, as it did Martha’s. How she lived until her death is how I hope to live my life, even as when my death will come remains unknown. It is also how I also hope I’ll face my end, if its nearness is known to me, as it was to her.

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” Susan Sontag reminded us in “Illness as Metaphor,” as she urged us to not ascribe metaphorical traits to an ill person’s acquaintance with disease. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”

When we marry aliveness of the living spirit with the challenges of being sick, Bon-Jovi’s lyrics sing loudly in us.

“It’s my life. It’s now or never. But I ain’t gonna live forever. I just want to live while I’m alive.”

“Night Side Songs”

While Martha’s recipe for life re-nourished me this week, I read about an American Repertory Theater musical being staged as an intimate, in-the-round production that offers audiences the opportunity to “think and speak candidly about the end of life.”

The end of life is topic on which I act based on my beliefs. I correspond regularly with state legislators in Massachusetts about An Act Relative to End of Life Options. I do this because I believe each of us deserves – when confronted with a terminal disease¹ – the right to choose physician assistance to end our life.

This ought to be our choice. It ought never be a command.

For 10 years, this bill has languished in legislative committee as survey upon survey of MA citizens shows that a majority of residents want our state to be the 11th state, and the District of Columbia, to make medical aid in dying legal. Here, the Catholic Church exerts a strong lobbying force and remains the major pressure point against passage of this bill.

In China, even to speak of death is considered unlucky.

You remember the film, “The Farewell,” Lulu Wang’s autobiographical movie about her family’s return to China to be with her grandmother who is dying of cancer. The grandmother doesn’t know she has a fatal disease, since no one is permitted to tell her given the nation’s cultural beliefs about mentioning death.

China’s younger generation is trying to change centuries-old traditions revolving around death.

I also read this story this week: “Before the Dawn: Young Chinese Reimagine the Last Goodbye.” In it, I learned about 17-year old Bonny, who in her final months of life drew an anime girl she named Olivia “with cat-ear hairpins – someone who could keep going, even when she couldn’t.”

Her drawings inspired her friends to create a ceremony of living with her.

From “Before the Dawn”:

“On Jan. 19, her drawings came to life. The sterile white ceiling of her hospital room in Beijing lit up with stars. Olivia appeared on screen. Classmates read letters aloud. And cosplayers stepped quietly inside, bringing her favorite anime world with them. One, dressed as Diluc from the game Genshin Impact, stepped forward and gently took her hand before whispering: “Let’s travel together to the next world.”

“Bonny’s mother, Carrie Xin, stood nearby and wiped away tears. She had asked for something gentle: no black clothes, no silence, no mourning. Just a way for her daughter to say goodbye — in a world that still felt like her own.

“With her parents’ consent and support from Lu Guijun, Bonny’s doctor, a small team from Beijing-based Guicong Studio took on the planning — the lights and projection, animating Olivia, the music, even the cosplayers."

“On the day itself, his team adjusted her medication to keep her as comfortable as possible. And before the farewell, Lu spoke with Bonny’s classmates, urging them not to talk about strength or resilience. Just tell her what she meant to them, he said.

“‘The truth is, illness isn’t a test of courage or determination,’ Lu said. ‘The outcome isn’t dictated by how brave or persistent someone is. What patients really need is not pressure, but love.’

“That idea sits at the heart of Guicong Studio, a team working to rethink partings in a country where death remains a cultural taboo. Founded in 2023, Guicong specializes in personalized ceremonies for the dying and the bereaved, hoping to encourage open conversations about mortality. … Gao started Guicong Studio in 2023, not long after losing his parents. A designer by training, his goal was simple: to help people talk about death. But in China, the word “death” alone is considered unlucky. Among older generations, even saying it out loud is taboo. …

“Back in Beijing, that night after everything was packed away, Bonny’s mother sent a quiet message to everyone involved: ‘Bonny said this was the happiest day of her life.’”

Then yesterday, as if on cue, I watched a Reel on my Facebook feed. It’s an uncanny reminder of what living into death means. Here it is:

He wanted to ride his horse one last time.

He did just that with the help of his friends. Watch!

A Few Book Notes

After a jam-packed Women’s History Month of book events, I am no longer acting as my book’s promoter, event planner, media maven, and frequent traveller. Since last February, those tasks represent the sum of what has been my full-time job. No longer.

But I also realize that in deciding to design my book tour as a FRIENDS’ TOUR, I got the chance to nurture cherished friendships while on the road with my book. What cherished memories I have of our time of reconnection! That is living.

None of this means I’m done talking about Locker Room Talk. Now, it will happen in different ways as I respond to invitations that come my way. On Wednesday, for example, I spoke via Zoom with an OLLI (college for “seniors”) class in Asheville, N.C., where former Sports Illustrated staffer Larry Griswold is teaching a four-week class that he created based on my legal case, Ludtke vs. Kuhn. Thank you, Larry!

Next week, in the final session of his class, my friend Lesley Visser will join us. She is the first female TV NFL analyst and the only sportscaster to work the Final Four, NBA Finals, World Series, Triple Crown, Monday Night Football, Olympics, Super Bowl, the World Figure Skating Championships and U.S. Open network broadcasts.

The evening before Larry’s class, I was on Zoom with book club members who read Locker Room Talk talking about topics of greatest interest to them.

Next week, I’ll moderate two panels of young women working in sports media for journalism classes at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. I’m also doing an in-person book event with Boston-area women journalists who are members of JAWS (Journalism and Women’s Symposium). On May 3rd, I do an online book talk with members of the SABR Women in Baseball Committee, and on the first weekend in June, I will teach again my baseball case at Judge Louis Schiff’s two-day Law and the Business of Baseball course at Mitchell Hamline School of Law.

Last week I was in Philadelphia, by invitation of Temple University, speaking on a panel about women in sports media, as part of the university’s investiture ceremonies for its 15th president, John Fry. And staying with dear friends!

Pictured at Temple University, left to right, David Boardman, dean of the Klein College of Media and Communication, Lauren Bullock, professor and director the B.A. in Sports Media program, Claire Smith, the first woman to be honored with the Baseball Writers’ Association of America Career Excellence Award in the National Baseball Hall of Fame for whom the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media at Temple is named, me, and Breland Moore, sports anchor of Philadelphia’s Fox 29 news.

On I shall go. For as long as people want to learn about my legal case and talk about Locker Room Talk, I’ll show up. By invitation.

To buy Locker Room Talk at a 30% discounted price, go to my book’s page at Rutgers University Press and apply this code RUSA30. You also get free shipping.

When you buy a book, if you’d like me to inscribe a bookplate for you, e-mail me – melissa.ludtke@gmail.com – with info about the person to whom I will write the inscription, along with the mailing address.

If you are a member of a book club and your book group reads Locker Room Talk, I’d be happy to join you in discussing it via Zoom or in person, if you meet nearby. Be in touch, and we’ll work it out.

Want a Locker Room Talk baseball cap in white, black, blue or green? SHOP on my website, melissaludtke.com, to place your order.

1. This MA bill, modeled after Oregon’s law passed 30 years go, states that for a person to avail themselves of a physician-assisted death must have “a terminal illness and six-month prognosis must be confirmed by two doctors. Individuals are not eligible for medical aid in dying solely because of age or disability. … The individual must be able to self-ingest the medication.