A grieving father scrolled his son's phone and found the talk about dying they never had
After Mac died, his father, Gary Sinise, looked through his phone and found late-night videos about dying they had never discussed.
All There Is with Anderson Cooper · Gary Sinise: ‘The Hole In The Heart Is Always There’In the days after his son Mac died, Gary Sinise, the actor and foundation head, found himself scrolling through Mac's phone. He did not know what he was looking for. He just wanted to feel close.
He started with text messages, and found notes people had sent Mac just before his death. After that he opened the photos, and found videos. Mac, by then badly disabled by cancer and living from a hospital bed set up in the house, had been staying up late and recording himself, sharing messages and thoughts he had never put into words with his father.
The videos were the talk about dying they had never had, after years of fighting for treatment. Mac had chordoma, a very rare cancer of the spine that can begin low in the back or high near the skull. He was diagnosed at 27 after two or three years of tailbone pain, and the disease slowly took more and more from him.
For years, Sinise had been the fighter beside his son, spending every minute trying to find drugs, doctors, and other ideas that might help.
Sinise said he never wanted to sit down with Mac and talk about final days and what to do if things went badly. Intellectually, he knew how serious the cancer was, and he had watched it paralyze his son and grow worse. But he worried that raising the end would signal to Mac that he was giving up. As Sinise put it: "I didn't give up until the night before he died."
Finding the recordings was profound to him. In them, Mac did not talk about death head on, his father said. Sinise described him this way: "He was practical and realistic about the fight that he was in." Sinise later said part of him wished he had asked Mac in those last days if he was scared and whether he had come to terms with everything.
Sinise described the time Mac began thinking about death most as a little more than a year before Mac died, when Mac spent 10 days in intensive care. Doctors spoke to Mac privately, while his father was not in the room, about his body failing. Sinise later found something Mac had written and a video in which Mac said he had thought the intensive care stay was the end. Sinise said he thought that stay got Mac's attention, and from that moment on, Mac started writing and making video messages, saying in the quiet of night what he had not discussed with his dad.
Questions people ask
How does Sinise describe living with grief now?
Sinise rejects the phrase time heals all wounds. He says the hole in the heart is always there, and what changes is that you learn to manage grief better. The missing person stays with you, and grief can surprise you, like when he pictured Mac sitting beside him in church and was overwhelmed.