Timmy, you will be missed
Posted: December 21, 2008
Here, on this cold, first day of winter, a few stories about summer fishing trips might help take the chill out of the air.
They're all stories about Tim Trusnik, an incredibly courageous man from Avon who loved to pitch a tent in July or August, fish and sit around a campfire sipping a brew.
Trusnik died this month of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease.
He was 44, or 26 years younger than me, but I didn't stop calling him "Timmy." For that's what he was to me, from the time he was in his early teens until I said goodbye at Calvary Cemetery.
The disease that took his life is horrible. Yet, in the nine years that he had it, I never heard him complain. Not once.
In fact, it was the opposite. He laughed and joked and talked about the good times that he and his pals had on fishing trips; about his love for the outdoors.
The disease affects the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. The first time I noticed that something was wrong with Tim was a year after he had been diagnosed with ALS.
He, several of our pals and I were on a camping-fishing trip near the Minnesota-Ontario boundary.
During the week we were together, he didn't mention the disease he knew would take his life.
So one evening, Timmy and I were walking up an embankment from the lake to the campsite when he stumbled on a rock and almost fell. He did it a second time and I said, "Enjoy your trips, Timmy?"
He laughed and replied, "I'm getting old like you. Think what I'm gonna be like when I get to be your age." He could have told me he was ill but didn't want to spoil our trip.
As I think back to that day, I understand why Timmy lived longer than the four or five years he was expected to live. He had two young sons, Ben and Jake, and he wanted to be with them as long as possible; he wanted them to remember their dad.
Timmy's dad is Mac Trusnik, Speedway. He has been my friend and fishing pal for 39 years. It was Mac who for years took Timmy to a lake in northern Minnesota until Timmy got old enough to make the trip with his pals.
His mom, Shirley, asked me to give a short eulogy on the day of his funeral. "He wants it to be a celebration of life," she said.
So we celebrated at St. Christopher Catholic Church in Speedway.
We shared stories about the time that Timmy, barely in his teens, said goodnight to five of us in a huge, leaky Ted Williams tent. When he got to his father, he said goodnight and Mac replied, "Good night, Timmy. I love you."
And Timmy replied, "I love you, too, pop."
There was the time that Timmy made sport of his dad who, several years older than the rest of us, was slacking on camp chores one evening.
As he scrubbed pots and pans and washed dishes, Timmy glanced up at Mac living the easy life and said, "Old Mac's playing this senior citizen crap to the hilt, ain't he?"
Then there was the time that he, Larry Fortner and I capsized in a boat in the middle of a cold lake on a 38-degree day. Timmy was in his teens and we had only one life jacket.
During our 40-minute struggle to get to shore, Larry and I, fearing that we would not make it to shore, pleaded with Timmy to put on the life preserver.
But Timmy, whom we had to talk out of swimming a mile for help minutes earlier, refused, saying if Larry and I drowned, he would drown with us.
Lou Gehrig, who died of ALS at 37, said goodbye to 62,000 fans at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939. He told them he considered himself "the luckiest man on the face of this earth."
Timmy secretly made arrangements for his family and friends to be told the same thing at his funeral. But all of us knew we were the lucky ones.
Skip Hess writes an outdoor column every other Sunday for The Star. He can be reached at
skiphess.outdoor@sbcglobal.net.
http://www.indystar.com/article/2008...47/1287/SPORTS