Tenacity: Stories about perseverance

As the great Rocky Balboa once said about life: “it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.” But in this week’s episode, both our storytellers share stories of their strength of will and persistence to keep going despite the scientific challenges.

Part 1: Coral reef conservationist Emily Darling is at loss when a journalist asks her if she still has hope for coral reefs.

Dr Emily Darling is a coral reef scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto. Her research has won international awards and been featured on National Geographic, Forbes International, CNN, and PBS Nature. She is passionate about the importance of underwater science and works closely with scientists around the world to measure the impact of coral reef conservation. In her spare time, she is (still) learning to sail.

Part 2: James Gordon readies himself for another one of his daughter’s heart surgeries.

James Gordon is an international award winning author and poet, champion storyteller, and acclaimed actor. James can be seen on Chicago Med as Kent Taylor, Detective Smiley on Amazon's The G, and PA Flanders in Background Extras.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I am an eternal optimist. I am such an optimist that I moved to an island and bought a sailboat to live on and I do not sail. I am such an optimist that I do all of my text messages by voice dictation and I don't even check them. I just send them.

And so you can imagine my shock, surprise and slight panic when I realized a few months ago that I had lost all hope.

Now, before I panicked too much about this sinking feeling in my chest, I thought about when all of us were in school and the advice was, “Well, where did you last see it?”

So I started thinking about the last few years that we've all been through. And I started thinking about pandemics and lockdowns and illness and death. And I started thinking about wars and suffering. And I started thinking about racism and injustice. And I started thinking about every single climate report that has come out calling for urgent action and there has been no action whatsoever. So I started to think there might be a few places I could have lost it, but I was going to just keep searching. It would be there somewhere.

At this time, even my car was depressed and needed a new transmission. So I found myself at my friend's dining room table waiting for a call from the mechanic. I was surrounded by my friend's kids’ daycare paintings. They were colorful and cheerful and I felt so much more like the gray and glumly melting skating rink outside the window after a really long, hard winter.

So I was aimlessly flicking through my emails and I see one that I wish I hadn't seen. It says, “Interview request today, NPR.” It was a woman named Lauren and she was wondering if she could get an expert comment about a coral bleaching event from climate change on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. It was bleaching again.

Emily Darling shares her story with an audience outdoors at Panemar Cafe in Toronto in May 2022. Photo by Glenn Pritchard.

And I just felt my heart sink. I'd seen the news headlines but I hadn't clicked on them. It was just too much. Between the pandemics and the wars and the suffering, I just couldn't understand that this was going to be happening to my corals as well.

It was a pandemic and I hadn't seen a coral reef in two years. I'd been here in Canada and I'd just been hoping in my heart that my corals had been doing fine. And this headline was saying that they were not fine. That they were exhausted. That they were tired. That they had had enough, just like me.

So I closed my computer and I looked away and I thought, “She's never going to know if I actually read the email, right?” And then I started to feel guilty.

I'm a coral reef ecologist. I've spent thousands of hours underwater. I study climate change. And I've been literally trained as a science communicator. So what they tell you in science communicator school is that you have to call the reporters back, especially if it's NPR.

So that's how I found myself on a phone call with a reporter from NPR. And Lauren is really lovely and probably has no idea what she's getting herself into. And so she asks with this bleaching event, with this stressful climate change event on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, they've been bleaching for the fourth time in six years. This is back to back. Is this bad?

And I go, “Lauren, it's really fucking bad.” And I say, “Corals are slow‑growing, upside down tiny jellyfish. They need years. They need decades to recover. And they are getting hit back to back by this bleaching event. They are not doing okay. No one is okay with this.”

She was very professional and so didn't seem too taken aback that her interview was going off the rails and so she carried on. She asked, “You know, I've heard that this is a cooler period. This is a La Nina. And typically, bleaching happens during an El Nino, a warmer period. What do you think about that?”

“Well, Lauren, I don't like it. The La Ninas are the only time that corals have to recover. This is supposed to be their window where they can struggle through. Where they can recover. Where they have a chance. And climate change is so bad that even the cooler periods are making them bleach and die. None of this is good.”

So I'm just starting to have an out‑of‑body experience hearing myself tell her this. I remembered that I'm usually an optimist. This is not how I normally give interviews. And I knew I shouldn't have called her and I should never be trusted to call a reporter again. And what was I going to do? I was starting to have an existential crisis.

What I really should have been worried about, what I should have been terrified about was her next question. And it was, “So tell me why you have hope for coral reefs?” And I just froze. I just stared into the Zoom call blankly, like a deer in headlights, and I had no answer for her.

I started to think I have to have an answer. In science communication class, they say you have to have an answer. It has to be positive. You have to end on something hopeful. And I tried to think of anything hopeful and I couldn't.

I tried to remember, I'm sure I've answered this question before. Do I have any idea what I said? Maybe I can just pull that up. And I couldn't think of what I said. I started to reach deep down looking for any fumes of optimism I might have had and I was just coming up blank.

So as I start to panic and I start to freeze, I'm suddenly somewhere else. I'm suddenly on one of my first dives underwater on a coral reef. It's in northern Mozambique and I'm a brand new graduate student. It turns out that I'm underwater on the pages of a National Geographic magazine.

There are pink and purple and blue corals, healthy, stretching as far as I can see. They have clouds of turquoise fish who are just breathing in and out with the waves around these corals and it was just magical. I remembered thinking as a new graduate student who had actually read the scientific literature back then that these corals weren't supposed to be here. They were supposed to have died during the 1998 bleaching event and yet here they were. They had been connected to nature's air conditioning. Cooler, deeper waters that they'd survived, that had protected them.

And then suddenly, I am somewhere else while remembering this. I'm off the island of Sipadan in Malaysian Borneo. I'm on an oceanic volcano that rises from the depths of the ocean. I'm flipping backwards off a boat with my scuba tank and I'm falling into a tornado of silvery barracuda. There are sharks lazily patrolling this coral reef. The coral reefs are large. They are happy. They have their little tentacles out, loving life, and so am I. And I think, “Why is this reef here?”

This reef is here because it's a marine park. The government of Malaysia and local communities have decided to come together and protect this place, and so it's still here.

And then suddenly I'm in one last place. I'm in a reef in Fiji and it's feeling a little bit more like how I'm feeling right now. It's dark and it's brown and I really wish I wasn't there. I'm doing a survey of coral reef health in the mouth of a river and all this pollution is coming onto the reef. So I finished my survey and I'm ready to get out of there. The corals are just really sad. Their tentacles are out, sort of hanging off them, trying to get some kind of food. There's no sunlight so they're starving to death.

I have half-heartedly fan my hand over some corals. It lifts the sediment that's choking them off and then I look and it just falls right back on them. It's hopeless. I'm ready to go. And I'm also ready not to be eaten by a bull shark, which particularly likes those kind of reefs, so I'm out of there.

And on my way out of there back to the boat, I see a flash of golden blue. I turn to look and, at that moment, the sun streams through the reef and has a spotlight on this little tiny damselfish. He's got a sequined crown around his eyes, gold fins and gold fish scales, and he's got a bright blue body and he's dancing around the reef.

What he's doing is he's farming his little patch of turf algae and this is his life. So he eats the turf algae and, if the turf algae gets covered in sand and sediment, then he is not happy. And so he's dancing and he's moving the sand off and he's doing a much better job than I did. And then he's turning and he's plucking the sand with his mouth and he's spitting it out and I'm just mesmerized. I mean he is really trying. He is living life. And he has a shitty reef to do it on.

And I thought if he's not giving up, then who am I to give up. And if he is trying so hard, then who am I not to try hard.

Suddenly, I'm back in the interview. And poor Lauren has been sitting there for several minutes and asks, “I'm sorry. Is the connection okay? I was asking…”

And I said, “Lauren, let me tell you about how much hope I have for coral reefs.” Suddenly, out of my mouth, I'm blurting out these stories about the corals in northern Mozambique who shouldn't be there but they survived climate change. And I'm telling her about the corals and the sharks in Malaysia where people had come together to protect these reefs. And I'm telling her about this little tiny damselfish who, against all the odds, was not giving up. And if he wasn't giving up then I wasn't going to give up and no one should give up on coral reefs.

I couldn't believe the words coming out of my mouth. I don't think Lauren could either. And suddenly we both just had this hope again for coral reefs. Nature is plucky and resilient, I was telling her. If we give it a chance, they can survive. We have to do better, but there is still so much hope out there.

Then I hung up and I thought, in the space of this conversation, I'd found my hope back. I didn't think I'd be able to. I'm really pleased to tell you that I still have it today.

Thank you.

Part 2

I have got Angelo Bronte tied up in the boat with the rest of my cohorts and we are in this shootout. There are more of them than there are us. All of a sudden, I hear my phone buzzing and I don't answer the phone when I'm playing PlayStation, when I'm playing especially Red Dead Redemption 2. Because this fire fight is going on and we're ducking and losing guys and they're losing guys and the phone just keeps buzzing.

I'm like, “Shit,” and I pause the game. It's from my daughter. Everything stops for the daughter.

She says, “Dad, this is exactly what I'm having done. A cardiac catheterization. That's the first step. With balloon dilation. That's the second step. Or an implant of the pulmonary valve transcatheter, worst case scenario.”

Out of everything in that text message, the only thing I understood was worst case scenario. As if on cue, the daughter calls.

“Dad, I know I may have confused you about what was going on but this is what's happening. They're going to take the tube and…” and she goes through it.

James Gordon shares his story at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, IL in May 2022. Photo by Storyographers Seed Lynn.

I said, wait. My child teaches special ed. I didn't know she took a minor in medicine because she's explaining the heck… and we're on Duo because it's May 25, 2020. We're in the midst of a pandemic. My daughter, because of her heart condition, she was born without a valve. So every few years as she grows, she has to have a shunt implanted. The problem is, as she grows older, the shunts have become less and less effective making an entirely new heart necessary. So we have kept ourselves spaced.

She's a grown woman, of course. Has her own condo and such. She loves to tell me, “Dad, I'm grown,” and she is. And we're on Duo every day and she's going through and explaining this to me.

And she says, “Dad, on May 28 we've got a Zoom meeting with the specialist.” I said okay.

She says, “Are you going to be there?”

I give my daughter this look through the phone. And because it's my daughter, I don't tell her what I'm actually thinking in my head but I'll tell you all. Where the fucking else am I going to be, Sweets? Sweets is my nickname I have given my daughter. Her name is Morgan but ‘Sweets’ is what I've always called her.

And she says, “I know, Dad. I know you'll be there. I was just playing.”

The morning of May 28, my daughter calls me. “Dad, I'm on my way to the meeting,” because she's there with her mom and I'll be on Zoom with the rest of the relatives. “But look at this,” and it says that the doctor who's going to perform this surgery had been sued for $12 million.

And she says, because my child is grown, “Dad, we got to ask him about this shit.”

And I said, “Yeah. I guess we do have to ask him about that, Sweets.”

We go in there and the meeting starts and the first thing she asks and said, “Hey, you were in the midst of this lawsuit. What happened?” And he explained that the child was a 10‑year‑old boy. His heart during the surgery had exploded and there was nothing he can do. But of course there are lawsuits and they prepare for stuff like that. And we were like, “Okay. At ease.”

So we're going through it and the doctor is almost, if you've ever seen the Twilight Zone, he reminds me of Rod Serling. And the next thing he's about to say, he says, “You are a remarkable young woman.” Something we all know. He says, “I don't see how you're even walking around. In 18 years of medicine, yours is the worst heart I have ever seen.”

My daughter being a bit cocky, I don't know where she got that from, but she says, “I'm just built tough like that.” My daughter could barely walk down a block at that time without pausing and catching a breath but yet somehow or other found the will to go in and teach special ed kids. She says, “I can't let my kids down, Dad,” until one day she just couldn't make it out of the house. Of course she had to resign, retire, whatever you want to call it.

And here we are and the doctor's saying these things. And he says, “Okay. We've done everything. You're scheduled for June 1st. Are there any more questions?”

My daughter said, “Yeah, one more question.” And she asked him, “Doc, if I die, will I feel anything?”

Now, as I told you earlier, all the relatives and everybody are on this Zoom call and they immediately start logging off, because they just got the shit shocked out of them. Like, “Oh, no. Die? No. Nobody wants to know. No, no, no, no.” And I'm still here.

Then the Zoom meeting is over. I immediately called my daughter on Duo. She's smiling like the joker. Just big grin. And, “Hey, Dad, it went pretty well, don't you think?”

I said, “Yeah. “ I said, “Sweets…”

She says, “I know. You want to know why I asked him about dying, right?”

I said, “Yeah.”

She said, “Dad, you always taught me to ask the tough questions that nobody else would ask. And it's my life. I want to be in control as much as I can.”

I forgot to mention my daughter's a badass feminist. Takes no shit off anybody.

And I said, “All right. I'm with you.”

June 1st comes and before she can be fully admitted she has to take a COVID test and pass. Then she does and they admit her. She's on the Duo and she's got her Black Panther build‑a‑bear that I gave her. She's got them and she's, “Dad, you know what I really want when I get up out of here?”

I said, “What?”

She said, “A corned beef on rye cut in half with French fries with mayo sauce and a Coke Zero.” I know some of you all are wondering about Coke Zero. It is the shit. I'm telling you. Diet Coke is a lie, Coke Zero is the truth. Believe me.

And I said, “No. We're not going to wait till you get out of there. I'm going to bring it to you.”

She said, “What?”

I said, “I'll see you in a bit.”

So during 2020, as some people did, I was heavier. I was like 35 pounds heavier. I put on a hoodie and I'm tucking sandwiches and shit like that. So I'm walking in like… the freaking visual of myself, I had to laugh at that shit myself.

And I walk in and the security guard looks at me like, okay, dude. And I go up and I sit with my daughter and we have corned beef on rye cut in half, fries with mayo sauce and drink our Coke Zeros. And we're laughing and talking and talking about the things we're going to do when she comes up out of there.

Visiting hours were cut off at 11:00 PM and so I left and I snuck back in. I stayed till 2:00 AM and we were sitting there and just watching some Netflix until the nurse said, “You have to go.”

I said, “Okay,” and I hug my daughter, kissed her forehead and I said, “See you soon.”

She says, “See you soon.” Then I left.

She went in and did the procedure and everything. Her mom was there and came back and told me she was fine. That was the second.

The third, they said they had to put her— they had to induce a coma because they had to sort some things out. The balloon that they had placed in there had burst. It didn't hold. The valve that they tried to fix, of course, failed. And now we were on step three.

I arrived on the fourth and went in the room with her. Was talking to her while she was under. Her mom said, “Okay. It's fine. You can go. I know you've got to film.”

I said, “No.” She said, “No, you’ve got to film.” I was working on a film at the time.

And I was talking to her the next couple of days and then June 6. I kind of say, “You've been here. Let me come and stay.”

And I'm there and the doctor comes and he says, “Things aren't going as planned,” yada, yada, yada.

I said, “Okay. Sure. Everything's going to be fine.”

He comes back 30 minutes later, “Yeah, you know I told you before and now her lungs aren't working,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I said, “Doc, do me a favor. The next time you come back out here, if you don't have good news or definitive other news, don't tell me shit. I don't want to hear that. Just do your thing. All right?”

He says, “Yes,” and he goes through the day. He comes out somewhere around 10:45 and says, “Well, she's holding on but a lot of her functions are failing.”

I said, “Okay. All right. Thank you so much for your diligence and your help.” And I sit a little bit longer because I can't move.

That night, June 6, that day the curfew had been instituted. I don't know if a lot of you all remember that in 2020. Mayor instituted a curfew. I was in violation of that curfew at that point and I didn't give a shit. But, currently, I was at our Company of Mary in Oak Lawn, so I was safe.

I drove out and I had this feeling. I'm an optimistic guy. Those people who know me will tell you I'm smiling, laughing, happy, skipping, singing. I can't sing worth a lick but I tell you I'm singing and I'm dancing all the time and I didn't feel that at that moment. I knew it had gone bad, so I stopped at the 7‑Eleven. I got a six-pack of Heineken and Jameson and I went home and I started drinking before I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning. A call from my daughter's mother said my daughter had passed away. I howled. I don't know if a man, unless he was the guy in American Werewolf in London or one of those Lycans in the Underworld movies, I don't know if a man has ever howled but I did. And just sort of went into my attic and turned on my video games. It was just there.

But then I got another call that said, no, she wasn't gone. She was hanging on. She's coming to the hospital, so I go to the hospital and we spend the day. She's fighting.

I said, “Oh, shit. This is some sort of miracle happened. Oh, my God.” She's fighting and fighting.

There are a bunch of doctors and nurses and they're working feverishly. I appreciate the hell out of them because we're in the middle of a pandemic. The doctor comes out. It's 5:45 PM.

He said, “Listen, you might want to go in now. These are her last moments of life.”

I go in, kiss my daughter on the forehead and I say, “I love you. Thank you for being my daughter.”

I walk down the stairs. I get in the elevator and I collapse. And in my life, I've never collapsed. I played sports and I’ve never collapsed. And I collapsed. I immediately said, “Get your ass up.” I got up and I went home and I went on a Zoom meeting for a film I was supposed to be in.

8:45, I got two phones. In the one phone I'm on the Zoom call. The other phone rings. It's from the hospital. I already know. The doctor says, “I'm here to inform you Morgan has passed away.”

I said, “Thank you.”

He says, “I want to tell you thank you for your cordiality and your professionalism, the way you talked to us and thanked us and what have you. Some people lose it.”

I said, “Well, that's what Sweets would have wanted.”

I got off the call and went back to the Zoom call, but before I went to the Zoom call I went to the refrigerator. I got two Heinekens out, poured me a triple shot of Jameson and finished the call. I didn't tell my mom or my brother till the next day.

From that point forward Uber Eats and whoever it is, Dash or whatever it is that delivers alcohol, they were my friends. I was VIP membership for the next days, which turned into a week and several weeks. I kept asking myself, “Did the doctors mess up?”

And then I said, “Lord, did you mess up?” And I kept saying, “Did the doctors mess up? Lord, did you mess up? Did the doctors mess up? Did… wait. Maybe I messed up? Maybe I was a shitty dude and this is my payback? Maybe this is the karma coming in and reaching and taking my daughter away from me.”

And I look, and there's her picture which I've avoided, with a card that she gave me for Father's Day. I avoided all that shit all the time and I just, ahh. I just drink.

Then I read the card. “To the best father in the world. Thank you for always being there.”

I said, “Shit, I'm the worst father in the world right now.” Because I had custody of my daughter since the seventh grade so I was at all the PTA trips, all the shit that moms typically do, because mom's out of shit. I was doing it so we were very close. I was always there no matter what.

And here I was failing because I was selfish. I looked at that card and I touched it and I touched her picture. I said, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

Right after that, maybe a couple of days, the Moth started virtual SLAMs. I said I needed a channel. Some of you all may not notice but I'm one of the best storytellers walking the planet. I have the highest score record in Milwaukee and I said, “I needed this.” I needed something to channel and so I started. I won like seven in a row and I dedicated everyone to Sweets.

And I said this drinking shit is not working, so I cut that back. I didn't stop. It's still the pandemic. I cut it back.

The gym opened back up. I started taking out the anger that I had in the gym. You see it. I mean, you see it? I got better.

I told my agent, “I'm back in. Put me back in rotation,” and I started booking. I booked the Chicago med gig and some other stuff.

I've come to the realization two years later, as the anniversary of my daughter's ascension comes in a few weeks, my daughter's heart, the physical one, wasn't strong enough to contain her heart, the spiritual one. She always went to the hospital and came back every time. This time, she didn't come back in the physical, she came back in me and made me the best man I've ever been in my life.

My life, like it said on the card, the end of the card says, “Dad, my life for yours,” is the thing we said with each other, and that's what has happened. Her life for mine, to make it better.

Thank you.