Johnny Gunther was the pride and joy of two loving parents—a brilliant young boy, fun and funny, headed for Harvard. And then, suddenly, there was a diagnosis, then a fifteen-month battle with a brain tumor, and ultimately a life that ended too soon.
At the end of Death Be Not Proud, the moving memoir by John Gunther about his son Johnny’s short life, John’s wife, Frances, reflects on the loss of her son. What is left, she asks, what does a person think and feel, looking back on the all-too-brief time they had with their child? “I wish we had loved Johnny more.”
That was it. That was what she kept coming back to. It’s not that they didn’t love him—no one can read the Gunthers’ memoir and not be struck by what a wonderful family they were. It’s that, when everything is stripped away, all Frances could think of were the opportunities she could have seized to appreciate him, and their time, more.
Let us hope that we never have to experience such a loss. No parent should ever have to bury a child. But still, let’s try to think about the end of our own time here on Earth. What will we think then? When we are reflecting on our lives, what will we wish for? We’ll wish we had loved them more. Even if we told them a thousand times in a thousand ways every single day, we’ll think about how woefully short we came up in expressing just how much our kids mean to us.
So let us try, right now, while we still can, to love them more.