Antioch family of dying dad wrapped in life-affirming Comfort Quilt
Fans of the Alyce Is Curious blog are accustomed to the former radio personality's high-spirited, funny, irreverent, adult, brassy, sometimes profane insights on everything from her political leanings and the hottest campaign topics to her sex life, diet and plastic surgery enhancements.
"My blog used to be funny," Alyce says. "I can't really make cancer funny. Once you get married, it gets less funny. Once you have kids, cancer is really not funny. If you can picture someone having the rug pulled out from under them - but not Laurel and Hardy - that's us."
Her husband's incurable cancer turned life upside-down for Eric and Alyce Riedesel and their three kids. Instead of obsessing on the worst, Alyce and the kids are focusing on a life-affirming project that encourages the kindness of strangers and should result in a beautiful secret surprise for their sick dad on his 48th birthday.
Alyce and Eric met in 2000. She had gotten a tattoo on New Year's Eve that read "Be Good To Yourself."
"Because this was going to be the good decade," Alyce says.
It was.
She lived in Unit 901 in a Chicago condo building. Eric lived in 907. Two days after he missed her big party in June with a live band, Eric came by for leftovers. They got engaged in November, married the following March, and she gave birth to twins Adelaide and Harrison a little more than a year later. The couple, who now live in Antioch, welcomed their baby daughter, Lorelei, in 2010.
So much for the good decade.
In November 2010, Eric developed a cough. A couple of days after Valentine's Day 2011, Eric was feeling so crummy he went to a suburban hospital. On Feb. 18, the technology manager with a Fortune 500 company in Chicago was diagnosed with an extremely rare, incurable type of kidney cancer.
By June, the cancer had spread to his lungs, a lymph node and a rib. There was more bad news in October, when his back pain was so intense that Alyce insisted he go to the emergency room. Chemo and radiation aims to bring him pain relief. Four hospitals have confirmed the grim prognosis.
"We plan for the worst and hope for the best," Alyce says.
"Only 100 people get his kind of cancer every year. I told him that makes him special," 9-year-old Adelaide writes in a letter asking people to help her with a project for her dad. "Mom told me people who have dad's cancer die. … The doctors don't know when he's going to die and I don't, either. My mom and my dad cry sometimes. I cry a lot."
Her brother "cries and cries and cries and wishes his dad wasn't sick," Alyce says.
Harrison talks of feeling as if he is in a building with a happy wing and a sad wing. Whenever he sneaks into the happy wing, "they always catch you and bring you back to the sad side," he told his mother.
"He says he wants to find a cure," Alyce says, "but he's 9."
In a situation where no one in the family can do anything to change the expected outcome, a therapist suggested a project to keep the kids busy and give them a way to help their dad. The "Comfort Quilt" project, in which they collect autographs of loved ones and celebrities on a square to be sewn into a quilt, lets the twins cling to something positive in a world where much of their news is negative.
The want to surprise their dad with a finished quilt for his birthday on Jan. 17. Eric, who is in constant pain and busy managing his treatment, isn't reading newspapers or watching Alyce's videos, where she asks anyone with links to a possible celebrity autograph to email her at alyceiscurious@gmail.com.
"We got Charlie Sheen," Alyce gushes to the kids after that autographed patch arrives in the mail, adding that "Platoon" is their dad's favorite movie. All the Chicago Bears have signed a patch. Former President George H.W. Bush sent in an autograph. Boxer Joe Frazier agreed to send an autograph but died of liver cancer before he could send it. The family really wants to get Eric's favorite country music stars, such as Shania Twain.
The quilt mission is an oasis from the "heartbreak," Alyce says, recounting sad stories about how their daughter asked who would take her to the Daddy-Daughter dances when she's older, and how their son wondered "who's going to teach me?" about the sports he hasn't played yet. The kindness of strangers who have responded to her video or self-addressed stamped envelopes she mails to any celebrity contact she can find makes an impact on the family, she says.
They focus on quality time right now, living in the moment. Alyce says she thinks about kids whose parents "go to Afghanistan and don't come back." Instead of focusing on the bad luck and what awful things are expected to happen, Alyce says the family doesn't "forward think."
"It goes from 'how sad' to 'how fortunate you are,'" Alyce tells the children. "How lucky we are to get this time with Dad and tell him how much we love him."