Some people are born to lead and destined to teach by the example of living life to the fullest, and facing death with uncommon honesty and courage. Peter Barton was that kind of person. Driven by the ideals that sparked a generation, he became an overachieving Everyman, a risk-taker who showed others what was possible. Then, in the prime of his life - hugely successful, happily married, and the father of three children - Peter faced the greatest of all challenges. Diagnosed with cancer, he began a journey that was not only frightening and appalling but also full of wonder and discovery. With unflinching candor and even surprising humor, Not Fade Away finds meaning and solace in Peter's confrontation with mortality. Celebrating life as it dares to stare down death, Peter's story addresses universal hopes and fears, and redefines the quietly heroic tasks of seeking clarity in the midst of pain, of breaking through to personal faith, and of achieving peace after bold and sincere questioning.

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Not Fade Away
A Short Life Well Lived

Chapter One

You can tell a lot about a person by his nickname, right?

Mine's Hawk. I've had that moniker for as long as I can remember, and it still tickles me. I just love the word. It conjures images of soaring flight against a cloudless sky. It implies a majestic independence, a raptor's uncompromising realism ....

Except that's not the kind of hawk I'm named after.

I'm named after the Studebaker Hawk, a market flop of a sport coupe that was manufactured in the middle 1950s. I just loved the name of the thing. It seemed to summarize all that was cool and jaunty.

Besides, it's really more fitting that I was named after a cat As a kid, I didn't soar, I rode around. I fantasized about automobiles, but what I rode was bicycles or motorized dinghies that I cobbled together from spare parts. Mine was a down-to-earth, nuts and bolts, tinkering kind of childhood.

Then again, kids are always soaring. For them, there's no boundary between the down-to-earth and the heavenly. Mud is a miracle. Snow is pure chilled joy. A pile of leaves is a sacred altar. Why do we lose that feeling, that sense of wonder, for so much of our lives?

Anyway, I was born in Washington, D.C., but while I was still an infant the family moved to Painted Post, New York, a tiny upstate town complete with maple trees and dappled cows and a beautiful white steeple. And pregnant women! Pregnant women carrying toddlers; pregnant women pushing strollers. There were a million kids to play with. Nice kids, nasty kids, gentle kids, bullies -- all of human nature was represented in our little neighborhood.

Our family, in almost every way, was typical. My mother, in those years, was a housewife. My father worked too hard and wasn't around as much as I'd have liked. We were neither rich nor poor; I don't think I knew those categories existed. Everyone was middle class. Life got better for everyone together. One year there was television, the next year there was color television. One year Dad drove a shiny new Dodge, the next year there was a DeSoto with even bigger tail fins.

Kids don't know from economics, but here's the lesson I absorbed: Money needed to be worked for but not fretted over.

It would appear when required. In the meantime, better to climb trees and build snowmen. In other words, to live.

But I want to tell you about Painted Post's one claim to fame. It is very near the Corning Glass factory, where my father worked.

In case there's anyone who doesn't remember, Corning did not begin with the fiber optics business. In the 1950s, Corning manufactured plates and platters and Pyrex pans. What the company was best known for, though, was casserole dishes. Everybody had them, remember? Their trademark was an abstract blue flower.

Since my dad worked for Corning, my mom had every casserole shape ever made. We had one for stew. We had one for soup. We had one for potatoes. If they'd made one for individual spaghetti strands, we'd have had that one too! I can still see the metal cradles that the dishes sat in at the table ...

But wait -- why am I going on about casseroles? I think it's because the approach of death has made me realize that there are no unimportant details in life. That childhood sense of wonder is somehow coming back to me. How can I put it?

Things, and the meanings that they have, are being reunited in my heart.

Those old casseroles -- maybe they're just chipped and battered pans, but for me they're connected with incredibly precious things, giant notions like Mother, Kitchen, Family Meals.

So cut me some slack if I get nostalgic now and then over trivialities. The thing is, they don't seem trivial to me. I've come to feel that the big things in life are best understood by way of small things. Ignore the small ones, and the big ones just seem like fancy words, slogans without the truth of something you really know, and really feel.

Who knows how or when a disease is actually born? Who knows what cancer is like in its appalling infancy, when the first disastrous cell divisions are just starting to occur, before detection is possible?

For all I know, there may be something beautiful in the process. Under a microscope, in time-lapse, it might look like flowers opening, mushrooms burgeoning. Maybe that sounds creepy-but just because something's bad for us, that doesn't mean it can't be beautiful on its own terms. Nature is full of gorgeous and deadly things.

Whatever my disease's early history was like, here's how I first learned of it: My doctor called me on my cell phone.

It is Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1998. I'm forty-seven, and I've been supposedly "retired" for a year and a half. But I'm as busy as I've ever been. I've started foundations. I've been teaching a seminar in business school. I sit on boards of various corporations and advise many friends who are still in midcareer. I feel a joyful obligation to help out where I can. And, to tell the truth, I still love the action.

Today I'm in Silicon Valley, at an informal board meeting at Yahoo. They've asked me to become a director. This is flattering, but I pass -- mainly because their business model scares me. How can they actually make money? That's what we're talking about on this particular afternoon: formulating an economic model for a big aggregation of e-commerce businesses. This excites me. What I like is creating things, adding value, shaping the big picture. I'm there to brainstorm, to enjoy the company of some really smart people. And to suggest to them some big ideas -- which, I conclude, they're not ready for ...

Excerpted from Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived by Laurence Shames, Peter Barton
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