Ben McNeal, 21-years old and a devout Georgia Bulldogs fan, died December 9th, 2009, of congenital amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS: Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Ben was our son’s best friend and, in that rare strange way that happens from time to time, became a sort of extra family member, accompanying us on countless long and short trips and whose likes and dislikes and whereabouts simply and naturally became a part of the tapestry of thinking ahead. It has seemed odd — thoughtless, somehow — in these past few months of that vicious and unforgiving sickness to not ask, “Is Ben coming?”
He was probably the politest kid I ever met, mild and always ready with two extra hands when there was something to be done. Indeed, Ben’s unfailing niceness became the object of a long-running gag, that it was the cover for a mysterious alter ego deeply engaged in all manner of the untoward. At the peak of the Duke lacrosse scandal I handed him a piece of paper, ostensibly a phone message, telling him that Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong had called, looking for him, and wanted to speak to him. Ben rolled his eyes: “AGAIN!?” Maybe it’s one of those you-had-to-be-there things, or to know him, but it was funny … and oh-so-perfectly-sly Ben.
The ALS struck mid-summer, a nerve disease which kills the motor neurons that serve the muscles susceptible of voluntary control. Unused, those muscles begin to waste. First the neck, in his case, then the left arm, then the right, then to work on the legs and, at about the same time, the muscles that control breathing. It is implacable, and there is no cure. Though sometimes the progress of the disease can be slowed with medication and patients live for years, Ben went from healthy and busy to very nearly incapacitated in the space of about 6-months.
I begrudge nobody the consolations of faith, and Ben faced the certainty of death with rare equanimity. The video below was recorded just one month before his death. Bear in mind as you watch it that this is a 21-year old man who knows with certainty that he is going to die soon, that the fix was in while yet a blastocyst, that every daydream he’d ever had about his future was a vicious tease.
We will all of us miss him terribly. Rest in peace.
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