Marshall - Home is burning: a memoir

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Dedicated to anyone who has lost a loved one to cancer or ALS

Hello. I was once told that the best way to make new friends is to compliment them, and I want you to be my new friend, so lets start with a couple of compliments.

First, you have nice eyes with which you read these words. Or, if youre blind and doing the whole Braille deal, then you have silky smooth fingers made from a thousand angels wings.

Second, youre the best thing thats ever happened to me. I love you already. Without you, dear reader, these words would just sit on my computer next to a folder called Graduation Plans where I hide some porno clips, and by some , I mean a lot.

Okay, now that were already best friends and you love and trust me like a brother, let me quickly go over a few other things before we launch into the crazy, crude, sad, intense, and slightly inspirational story found on these pages.

As you know, this book is a supernatural memoir set in the year 3928shortly after the first robot ghost was elected president, but before volcano monsters took over earth and added its second moon.

Just kidding.

Just a little goof up top. Sorry to stall. Its just that the subject matter of this book is pretty heavy, but fuck it. Here goes. This is the story of what happened to my family over the course of two years when my mom, Debi, was battling terminal non-Hodgkins lymphoma and my dad, Bob, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a terminal neurological disorder more commonly referred to as Lou Gehrigs disease.

Boom, there it is. Two terminally ill parents slammed with misfortune at the same time. Sort of an extreme situation, I know. Thats why I started with that bullshit about the robot ghost.

My four siblings and I had no idea what we were doing. No one really does when dealing with life-altering tragedy, but we did the best we could, which wasnt great.

Before you decide whether to take the plunge and dive into our family tragedy, you might want to know a touch more about me. Im Daniel Joseph Marshall. I have also gone by Danny, Dano, Danny Boy, Big Dick Dan (self-applied and untrue), Dickhead Dan, Mellow Yellow, Marshmellow, Marsh Marsh, D-Marsh, and Turtle Fucker, for reasons Id rather not get into right now. Oh, and DJ. My dad called me DJ, short for Daniel Joseph. This nickname was fine until Full House rolled around and created a female character named DJ Tanner. I then had to request that I stop being called DJ in public so mean kids wouldnt tease me so much. Though I went by Danny for most of my life, I made a switch to Dan recently, because I think its a little cooler and doesnt sound as childish as Danny.

Physically, Im five foot nine, though at a recent doctors visit, I was told Im closer to five foot seven. Its pretty shocking when you spend your whole life thinking youre one height and then find out youre another. I still consider myself to be five nine. That doctor and his stupid science measuring stuff were full of shit. I was born weighing six pounds, twelve ounces, on September 17, 1982, in Pekin, Illinois, though Ive gained a significant amount of weight since then. I currently weigh in around 175 pounds. With my semishort height and my weight, Im a little dumpy. One friend described me as being a sad little cannonball. I feel thats accurate.

My favorite foods are pretzels, beef jerky, gummy bears, sunflower seeds, and Hot Tamales, which might explain why Ive gained so much weight since birth.

Though I was born in Pekin, Illinoiswhere the high school teams were called the Chinks from 1930 to 1980, before being changed to the much less racist DragonsI grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. My family and I are not Mormon. Like most non-Mormons in Utah, I got out of there as soon as I could. Dont get me wrong, I love Utah. Its a hidden gem in this generally ugly world. Most people dont give it a chance because they view Mormonism to be a weird religion. Mormonism is certainly a weird religion, but arent all religions a little strange? And who really cares what other people believe, so long as they dont believe in rape or kiddie porn? Like Catholics. But no one should live in Utah his or her whole life. Its too much of a warped reality.

So I left Utah for college. I was looking for a place that was at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, so I decided to attend UC Berkeley. Berkeley is a strange mixture of academics and homeless people, and a refreshing place to livethe type of town where you can be as kooky as you like but also go completely unnoticed.

From Berkeley, I got a job working at a strategic communications and public relations firm in beautiful and scenic Los Angeles. I love traffic and pollution and assholes speeding around in BMWs, so Los Angeles was a great fit for me. I had started a pretty nice little life in Los Angeles. I lived in an apartment off Sunset Boulevard, had a job and a girlfriend I loved, and owned couches with built-in reclinerssort of the American dream in action. I was following that path were told to follow: go to college, get a job, start instantly planning for retirement, find a significant other you enjoy being around who makes you feel like the world is bright instead of dark, be fun and happy and successful enough to have said significant other fall in love with you and see you as a long-term-provider-type figure, get married, buy a home, start a family, stay away from drugs and alcohol so you can raise that family in a functional way and thus give them a shot at following a similarly safe and happy path and pass along your genes, be proud of your children for doing well with the opportunities you gave them, retire, watch yourself wither away while reminding young people to live it up and have as much sex as possible while they can, etc.

The whole dying-parents mess interrupted that path. I was pulled from what I thought was the real world into a situation that made the real world seem fake.

* * *

Full disclosure: there is a lot of bad language in the book. Best to explain that up-front so youre not completely shocked when you see words like fuck , shit , fart , hell , son of a bitch , asshole , and motherfucker next to words like dying , death , cancer , and Lou Gehrigs disease . Its very difficult for me to write a sentence without using a bad word. That last sentence, for example, was fucking impossible for me to write.

My family has a very crude sense of humor. Our swear jar was always filled to the brim. When times were stressful, wed take breaks where we were allowed to yell any obscenities we wanted at each othersort of a venting mechanism. Im sure some concerned neighbors would walk by our house and hear a burst of profanity-laced yelling flying out our front door. It was our way of dealing with the world and reducing some grief and depression.

And if Im really being honest, we just like to offend Mormon people. I know this sounds stupid and petty, but growing up in the Mormon-dominated state that is Utah, we were often made to feel like outsiders, The Other, which is an unusual thing for a prosperous white family in America to feel. When you are The Other, you begin to resent the majority and look for ways to piss them off. Swearing did that for us.