Grandpa Joe and Secretariat: A Christmas story
This is a story from Rachel Estrada Ryan. It tells of the love over many years that her grandfather, Joseph Triano, has held for Secretariat. And how before he died he hoped to see the movie about the great horse. I haven't changed a word of her writing.
There's one thing I want to say. Rachel pays me compliments. The fact is, I only did one thing to help Grandpa Joe achieve his dream. I forwarded her e-mail to my old college friend Bill Nack, who is Secretariat's biographer. The movie is based on his book....
My grandfather went into the hospital on Friday, November 5th. He was very lethargic, more so than usual (he hasn't been in good health for a while), and my grandmother was concerned. Days turned into test-after-test, turned into weeks, turned into a transfer from Staten Island University Hospital to New York-Presbyterian. His vitals were such that biopsy was difficult, prolonging the definitive diagnosis that we all wanted. Finally, we knew. It was metastatic gallbladder cancer. They wouldn't give us a specific timeframe in terms of how long we could expect him to live, but if you Google "metastatic gallbladder cancer"...well.
...
He was sent home on hospice the day before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving Day he was in a wheelchair, oxygen prongs in his nose, but still he was able to make it to my aunt's house for our annual family dinner. On Black Friday, I went with my husband and our three kids to my grandparents' to spend the day with him.
This is when I first heard of his desire to see "Secretariat."
The movie was almost all he talked about during that visit. As I told you in previous emails, my grandfather hasn't been to an actual movie theater in quite some time--instead, he waits for movies to come out on DVD, then gets them from the library. We'd almost convinced him that we could wheel him to a theater and set him up in the handicapped seating section without too much trouble when we realized that the movie was no longer playing in any theaters near us! We looked up when the DVD was going to become available and realized we had a months-long wait ahead. We weren't sure how many more months he was going to have. We started getting nervous.
Link:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/12/grandpa_joe_and_secretariat_a.html This is definitely worth a read. I dare you to finish it without tearing up. :cry:
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