Hi, friends: I’m moving around my calendar this week. I promised an interview with Argentinian artist Marta Singh today; she will appear next week, instead. Thanks for bearing with me as I one-woman plan/write/edit this weekly show.
Sam Anthony lay on his back in a suit and tie in the middle of the marble floor of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and told us to join him.
We were in the rotunda, the room that houses the founding documents of the United States, and Sam was attempting to persuade my then-middle schoolers to loosen up, to chill out, to look up.
The kids looked at my husband and me, and they looked at Sam, and they slowly eased themselves down onto the floor with what I recognized as grave concern that a security guard might rush in and haul them away. That wasn’t going to happen. The guards knew that Sam, the special assistant to the archivist of the United States, was just being Sam.
He would do anything to make history come alive, to tell the stories that needed to be told, to make every minute count. It was September 2018, and I was there to profile him for a magazine feature. Although the perks of being the child of a part-time freelance writer are few, this event was one of them: a private tour of the archives that was usually reserved for celebrities or visiting royalty—presented by the only extrovert who worked in the building.
Sam was perhaps the only extrovert to ever work at any archives.
“You have to come down here and see what this is like,” he had implored my hesitant teens, gazing skyward at the rotunda’s awe-inspiring ceiling of repeated octagonal shapes. “You really get a different perspective from down here.
“Also, you learn that, if you’re going to sleep here”—which Sam had done once to test the space for an archives slumber party program—“bring a sleeping bag for sure—but for heaven’s sake, also bring an air mattress. You’re going to need some padding.”
This week marks three years since Sam passed away, at age 52, from oral squamous cell carcinoma, a smoldering cancer that had been a part of his life since he was first diagnosed at age 35. Before I met him, he had undergone six surgeries that had removed more than a third of his tongue, leaving this ebullient, talkative, wickedly funny man with a speech impediment, among other daily challenges.
It had also left him with even greater generosity, wisdom, and deep kindness.
Sam’s profile was published in March 2019. Soon after, we ditched our reporter/interviewee roles to become friends. I knew that we would. He had spoken with me nonstop for two-and-a-half hours that morning, in addition to leading an energetic 30-minute tour. It was a remarkable day. In the audio of our conversation, I can hear him quickly catching his breath between long spells of talking. I believe he was both physically and emotionally exhausted by the end. And yet, standing outside the archives following our interview, as I prepared to head home to North Carolina, Sam stopped to ask me one more question.
It was a question that no one had ever asked me before.
“Do you,” he said, “like your job?”
It took me by surprise—not just the question but the sincerity and insight with which it was asked. Though I certainly hadn’t wondered during our interview, I had been asking myself for a while if I did, in fact, still like my job, if perhaps I wrote exclusively about the lives of others as a way of hiding from what I might do with my own, if I was still protecting the shy girl I once was. I wondered if Sam was some sort of mind-reader.
In fact, he was simply driven to help others lead a fulfilling life. Perhaps because there had always been a little hole in his.
Sam was adopted as a baby by loving parents, Agnes and Lyndon Anthony, both now deceased. They gave him everything he could want in his Wilmington, N.C., upbringing. But when he was diagnosed in April 2019 with a sixth and final recurrence, when it became apparent in the year that followed that this go-around would be tougher, he quietly began a quest to understand the other parents who were out there somewhere.
With help from archives coworkers, he found and contacted his birth mother, whose response was disappointing for Sam. But his birth father met the moment differently. The October 2021 New York Times story of Craig Nelson discovering the son he had never known is one of the most moving reads you’ll ever experience.1 The profile I wrote of Sam in 2018 is linked in the piece, too, as is an emotional virtual tour Sam gave for a terminally ill youngster.
How that search for his birth parents impacted Sam and what it taught him is not my story to share in this space. But I draw from what he told me about it often. In the last months of Sam’s life, when speaking grew difficult for him, I struggled to find a way to express his outsized impact on me. Finally, I wrote it down. Here is part of that letter:
It took me a long time—it took until I started asking that question that you posed to me—to fully realize that I was already doing what I wanted to do. Already doing what I was meant to do … What I wanted was a purpose and to understand how others define their own purpose, how we all move together through humanity to make this life richer. That’s what you’ve been doing for years, Sam. That’s what your friends told me when I talked to them, that’s what I see in every post and message that you and Sharon share, in every text you’ve sent. You have made life richer for those around you. I count myself among them. And every time I sit down to talk with someone new, I think of your insight. I come to the conversation with that same question: Not, “What have you accomplished?” but “Do you like your job?” Not, “What fortunes have you amassed?” but “What lessons have you learned?”
I don’t say, “Tell me about your triumphs.” I say: “Tell me how you’ve grown.” “Tell me what you love.”
Tell me the story that matters most.
You taught me that. And now, everyone I ask those questions of becomes my teacher, also.
Sam didn’t know until very late about my challenges with my family of origin, and even then, I shared only broad strokes. I had noticed during our interview in 2018 how quick he was to absorb others’ pain and problems; I did not want him to waste an ounce of energy on mine. I wanted him to survive. I wanted to meet him for that burger and beer he had promised many months earlier. I never wanted to miss his courage and humor.
Sam managed to help me with those challenges anyway, though he never knew it.
In June 2021, I called my parents to ask about bringing over a Father’s Day gift. It would mark the beginning of the end of my relationship with them; by November, I would be disowned. That routine phone call turned into a bruising verbal assault on my so-called “hell-in-a-handbasket” values; it was the kind of emotional artillery barrage that usually would have prompted me to dive into a make-believe foxhole in my mind.
“No one,” my mother had asserted, “knows who you are anymore.”
But I knew who I was. And there were plenty of other people who knew, too. I had just visited one of them the previous day in Virginia: Sam, who was by then at home in hospice care. Here was a man who had been fighting for his life by appreciating and accepting everyone he had met along the way.
“See you, Beth,” he had said to me with his whispery voice as he took my hand to say goodbye at his home, looking straight at me once more with that incomparable gift he had for connection.
“See you, Sam.”
Everyone Sam touched wished like hell he could stay longer “on this plane of existence,” as he once called this life. And I know how much he wanted to.
So what would I do now with my own plane of existence? I thought about the good life I had built with my own family and the friends who loved me. I thought about Sam and the life and family he would leave behind: his wife, Sharon, who had helped him find perspective throughout his illness; their daughter, Maddy; and her fiancé, Drew, all of whom I had met when I visited. I finally realized that my plane of existence deserved better treatment and kinder days. I told my mother as much in the seconds before she hung up on me.
I would be lying if I said it doesn’t hurt still. But not as much as it would have hurt to ignore the lesson I learned from Sam, with whom I shared a (biological) motherless void and a driving desire for connection:
Time is short. Let’s make it count for something. Let’s make it good.
Sam’s heart runs all the way through this newsletter; Other People’s Parents would not exist without his influence.
He would have loved learning from my next few interviewees, including next week’s issue with oral storyteller Marta Singh. As Sam was, Marta is a careful steward of life stories, of history, and of the ways we interact with all of it. She is a one-of-a-kind talent with a heart as big as Sam’s. I hope you’ll come back to read about her next Wednesday.
And thank you for reading and for making this work count in my life. I am every kind of grateful. ♣
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