How Should We Think About This: A Memoir

By Ted Case

In a world where the pressure to conform and excel in predefined roles often leaves us feeling stuck and unfulfilled, "How Should We Think About This" emerges as a poignant memoir for those seeking meaning beyond societal expectations. The author, who has long pondered life's profound questions, draws from his diverse experiences as a restaurateur, an entrepreneurial consultant, a personal coach, and a father. His life, rich in inquiry and exploration, is suddenly put to the ultimate test with a life-altering diagnosis of an incurable brain tumor. This critical juncture forces him into deeper introspection, challenging the philosophies he's held onto for years. The memoir is framed around a vital question that gains immense significance in the light of his health: in our most critical moments, how should we think about our circumstances to move forward?
In his memoir, Ted Case shares his journey of self-reckoning, exploring the delicate balance between cultural pressure to achieve and personal resonance. As he recounts his experiences, from his early days in a family of "blue bloods", to wild times in the restaurant industry, to meeting the love of his life and becoming a father, he reflects on the importance of living authentically. The book is a blend of touching personal stories and philosophical musings, illustrating how life's unexpected challenges can awaken our deepest selves. It goes beyond a mere recounting of one man's life; it serves as a roadmap for those feeling stuck or aspiring to break free from life's constraints. It guides readers to shift their thinking in harmony with their evolving energy, rather than solely relying on logic.
"How Should We Think About This" is more than a memoir; it's an invitation to embark on a journey of self-discovery and to courageously embrace life's complexities. It's about finding beauty in imperfection, strength in vulnerability, and meaning in the everyday. The author's entertaining and insightful stories will move readers to think about their own challenges and experiences in a new way, and encourage them to find their unique path to authentic living. This book is a celebration of the exhilaration of being alive, and an ode to the transformative power of embracing our unique experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350955637

Ted Case

Ted Case grew up playing football, making trouble with his brother, and getting lost in the woods of Redding, Connecticut. He attended Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania for three years. Ted traveled throughout Europe with friends and spent a winter skiing in Aspen, Colorado before moving to Cape Cod, Massachusetts to open his first Mexican restaurant. Soon after, he met the love of his life, Rose, and her young daughter, Tiffany. They later married and moved their growing family to Connecticut, where they raised their daughters. Ted and Rose later relocated to Denver, Colorado, because after over 25 years in the restaurant business, they were ready to try something new. After losing his wife, Rose, in 1998, he launched Expanding Dynamics, a business development company. Ted coached and trained entrepreneurs, wrote his first book, Inspirational Gravity, and developed his three-minds philosophy. Ted was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in October of 2022. He sold most of his belongings and has been living among his three daughters in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Wilmington and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Along with writing, Ted likes to spend time with his family and friends, sit by the fire, take walks, enjoy a beer, and throw the ball for the dogs. He has spent his entire life thinking about life's questions.

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Cover of How Should We Think About This by Ted Case

How Should We Think About This

Copyright © 2024 by Ted Case. All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Julie Kaplan

[e-mail]

ISBN (Print): 979-8-35095-562-0

ISBN (eBook): 979-8-35095-563-7

Edited by Barbara DeSantis

Printed in the United States of America

For those who came before me, and for my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren…

Our family circle is expansive, it reaches both forward and back. All of those, past and present, those whom I have known, and those whom I have only heard stories about, have influenced and shaped me and what I share in these memoirs. Our family didn’t begin with me, or even us, but began many generations ago. I always loved to hear about those who came before me, and that inspired me to write this for my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren… and for all of my family who are yet to come.

contents

acknowledgements

preface

chapter 1 : a penny for your thoughts

chapter 2 : take your pick

chapter 3 : flying solo

chapter 4 : mornings at jerry’s

chapter 5 : when things go sideways

chapter 6 : parenthood and the myth of learning

chapter 7 : look at your hand

chapter 8 : santa’s back in town

chapter 9 : race through the village

chapter 10 : catch and release

chapter 11 : an unexpected kiss

chapter 12 : what goes around

afterword

I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

acknowledgements

With heartfelt thanks to Kristi, Abby, and Julie, my daughters. Collectively, the three of you participated in pulling all of the people together. Always, you were all encouraging - thank you for giving me as much encouragement and optimism as I hope I have given you.

Barbara DeSantis: My editor, you helped me sort through my jumbled thoughts and made it coherent. Thank you for helping me find my main point along the way and keeping me on track.

The team at Duke Cancer Center: Dr. Johnson, Dr. Reitman and Dr. Friedman, the nurses, and staff - thanks so much for believing I could do this, for your unconditional support, and exceptional care; to my niece Dr. Emily Gilmore - thank you for your guidance and for caring so deeply; and to Jen Richards, who said we need to check that out, as a friend.

preface

I spent the first twenty or so years of my career learning the restaurant business and then running my own Mexican restaurants. After that, I transitioned out of the restaurant industry, and have spent the last 20 plus years as an entrepreneurial consultant and personal coach. Along the way, I played college football, supported my dad through rehab, met and married the love of my life, and raised four daughters. These and other various undertakings, both personal and professional, have kept me satisfyingly engaged throughout my life.

This memoir, How Should We Think About This, is aimed at capturing some of those experiences that called out to and transformed me over the years. One of those experiences occurred toward the end of 2022—I had just completed a rough draft of the first three chapters of this book when I noticed a funny feeling in my body. That funny feeling turned out to be the first signs of an incurable brain tumor. And that quickly turned into brain surgery at Duke University Hospital in just a matter of days.

One of my first questions to my surgeon after waking and looking up at him was, would I be able to keep writing this book. That might seem like an odd first question, but my wife had died of the same type of brain tumor twenty some years before, so I knew a good deal about what lay ahead for me in treating it. Specifically, I knew that with brain surgery things can get dicey depending on what exactly is affected—it was my brain after all. Would I still be able to think clearly and write after the surgery? Or even think at all?

The short answer was yes, I could write, at least for the time being, with a little work and the support of great doctors and medical experts. My cognitive abilities, however, had changed overnight in several ways from surgery. For example, I could still write a sentence, but I couldn’t always remember what I had just written or what the topic was. It called for some work-arounds on my part if I was going to continue writing something on the scale of a book. Fortunately, the medical staff encouraged me, and friends and family were happy to help me with finding the right word or following a line of thought—it just required more time for me to get it all to make sense in the way I wanted.

This book isn’t primarily about medical issues however—it’s simply a continuation of the stories I started to write when I began those first three chapters before the tumor showed up. I deeply wanted to finish it, and I am noting my current health changes here to remind readers that we are all in the same ever-unfolding evolution of new experiences. The reality is we are all here for an unknown period of time, and the bigger focus of my book is in some ways on that subject of time and change. That’s where it started and where it has stayed for me, throughout my own changing this past year.

So, yes, this book isn’t about dealing with disease, but rather the more expansive topic of everyday life and its ever-evolving nature—not about life as a problem to be solved, but engaging in what famed mythologist Joseph Campbell called, the rapture of being alive. It’s about being eternally present and aware through everyday experiences—it’s about focusing specifically on how those experiences naturally feel before they become buried under layers of logical conclusions—it’s about what the experience was like.

In that sense, my stories aren’t meant to reveal a knowing as in a set of facts or acquired learning. Rather, my stories reveal the miracle contained in the intuitive, an internal kind of knowing that comes before any logical interpretation of events. A knowing that is simply a calling or feeling of resonance, a reflection of our energetic nature.

Just like a bird somehow knows that flying is part of the endless possibility of its nature, not what it is but what it does, so I simply know that I am always in some flight before I make any effort to be so. That awareness and honoring of our nature is, to me, what makes for satisfying experience. Not in terms of happiness or goodness, but in presence and engagement.

That eternal knowing is my starting place from which all else originates in my book, and in my life. When your brain has a challenge as mine does, the fact that you know anything at all seems like a pretty big deal—a continuum of miracles—before and after those cognitive, physical, mental, and spiritual challenges come and go. In other words, what do I know before logic and culture and thoughts and obstacles change it? How do I feel, what do I see, what do I know before I try to describe or give meaning to any of it?

As such, my stories are fundamentally about being fully aware rather than selectively aware and denying parts of that phenomenon for convenience and/or comfort’s sake—trying to avoid the parts we don’t like and want to erase. I’m not sure how aware we all are, since often we are so filled with editing our thoughts that we don’t remember what the authentic experience itself looked and felt like.

How Should We Think About This is my collection of personal stories that for me are myth-like, somehow providing unexpected insights with no explanations needed. They simply uncover what I (and you) already know, not as fact but as the reality of what it means to know anything—to be aware in the most whole sense—for me that means the evolving reality of friends and love, discovery and heartbreak, bee stings and full-on disasters.

If there is something notable to gain from reading my stories, I hope each reader will discover what that might be for themselves. Discoveries that lie beyond any efforts to describe them.

We are forever digging for deeper meaning in how we organize and manipulate things, often losing how things are naturally organized in the process. The thing that is often lost seems to be the essence that is so naturally ours to experience. I find it’s just simply there when we allow ourselves the time and courage to notice it.

chapter 1

a penny for your thoughts

It was sunny but cold in Denver that December afternoon of 1997 when I was driving home with my friend after attending a Denver Broncos football game at Mile High Stadium. It had been an exciting game. The Broncos had won and were on their way to becoming the next Super Bowl Champions.

We had just left the stadium and en route to my house in the suburbs when I got a call from my twenty-one-year-old daughter who was at home with her younger sisters, my wife, and my wife’s friend. My daughter sounded panicked when she said, Something’s wrong with mom. She told me I should go straight to the emergency room to see her.

At the hospital I found my wife Rose in one of the ER cubicles, looking very scared. She said that she had trouble that morning buttoning her shirt and brushing her teeth, that her right hand felt somewhat paralyzed. When her symptoms continued as the day progressed, her friend drove her to the ER.

After a brief exam, the doctors did a brain scan. They told us they found a small mass. It was either a small stroke or tumor.

The doctors waited a few weeks before doing another scan to see whether changes to the mass occurred. That would help them diagnose what was going on. After a second scan done later in January of 1998, a very serious, no nonsense brain surgeon informed us that surgery was imminent. A few days later, they operated on Rose. After surgery the doctor ushered me and my wife’s sister into a small private room to tell us that he had found a glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of cancer that begins within the brain.

In a compassionate and yet straight-forward way, he got right to the point—my wife had about a year to live. She was fifty-one years old. We had been together for twenty-six years. She had always been in perfect health.

I remember that I had trouble processing what he said. It was so alien to my assumptions about how that day would unfold and about my future with Rose, that it simply made no sense. My first reaction was I must have heard him wrong. I looked at my wife’s sister sitting next to me in that small room, and her expression reflected the same shock that I was feeling. The room was very quiet as the surgeon let his terrible discovery sink in.

As we began to ask the surgeon the obvious questions like, are you sure, attempting to shape his message into something more bearable, my thoughts went to my four daughters waiting at home for the results. How am I going to tell them that their mother is dying?

As it turned out, 1998 proved