Tag Archives: life
Hey Pete, With your birthday coming up Monday, I just felt like sending you an email. Don’t know what your address is up there, but hope this finds its way to you. To say that Mom and I and everyone else miss you would be a colossal understatement. I’d give anything to hear your van pull into the garage after work, hear your wheelchair come up the ramp and into the door, and ask you what sports news you’d heard…..
I was 27 and my wife 26 when our second son Peter was born with a serious birth defect. Looking back over the decades, we were just kids—kids who had just had a bomb dropped on us. I could write a book about the things I’ve learned in the intervening decades that would have been helpful to know. But here are just a few of the things that I wish the me of today could have told myself in those…..
In the prologue of my new book He Made Us Better: A Story of Faith, Family, Friends (and Football), I tell how our son Peter had incorporated legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne’s famous words, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” into the core of his being. Peter was born with a serious birth defect, which led to a lifetime of physical challenges and medical complications. Scores of surgeries and lengthy hospitalizations were a way of…..