The Cardinal’s Promise

Before I learned how to sit with dying people, I learned how to get back up.

I was a wrestler at Ramsey High School in New Jersey. Three-time District champion. Won the county championship at seventeen. But the wins aren’t what stayed with me. It was what happened between them.

The mat teaches you something no classroom can. When someone has you flat on your back with the clock running, you learn what you’re made of. Not in theory. In your body. In your lungs. In the part of your brain that says quit and the part that says not yet.

I got taken down hundreds of times. I got pinned. I got embarrassed. I came back to practice the next day.

That’s the thing about wrestling. There’s nowhere to hide. No teammates to carry you. No bench to sit on. It’s you and another person, and the only way through is through.

I didn’t know it then, but the mat was training me for everything that came after. The addiction that put me on my back. The recovery that taught me to stand again. The hospice rooms where I sit with people who are fighting their last fight and need someone who isn’t afraid to be close to the ground.

You don’t learn presence in a book. You learn it in a room where the outcome is uncertain and the only thing you control is whether you stay.

The mat taught me that first.

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