One brick at a time

If you had walked into our living room at Christmastime in 2010... you might have recognized we had a problem.

It was a challenging year.

There was illness. A lengthy hospitalization. Worry.

But that wasn’t what would catch your attention.

No indeed. It was the Legos.

There were boxes everywhere.

Not the small kits either—I’m talking about the kind that come in cartons the size of small furniture.

Starships. Pirate ships. Train sets with enough track to create a regional transportation system.

There were instruction manuals as thick as textbooks... little plastic bags everywhere.

The living room looked like a toy store had exploded.

That’s a life lesson.

To us... every single box meant something very different.

It meant hope.

My son, Troy, was going through cancer treatment that year.

If you’ve ever watched someone go through that—especially your child—you learn very quickly that the hardest parts aren’t always the big moments.

It’s the everyday ones.

Getting out of bed.

Fighting with tubes and cords.

Eating when nothing tastes good.

Moving when your body just doesn’t want to cooperate.

Just... being a kid during five rounds of chemo and two stem cell transplants.

And as parents, we felt this constant tension—we wanted to help, but so much of it was out of our hands.

We needed something—anything—that would give him a reason to get up, to stay engaged, to look forward to something.

Something that would let him persevere instead of just tolerate.

So we made a deal.

If he stayed active... if he kept pushing... we’d keep him supplied with Lego sets.

Not just any sets.

We’re talking about the big ones.

The kind where you pick up the box, look at the price tag... and quietly put it back until you’ve reviewed your 401K portfolio.

Thankfully, we had an inside connection.

My daughter, Hannah, worked at the Lego store in Bellevue Square.

And she had that magical thing known as an employee discount.

Fifty percent.

Which, in Lego terms, means “still expensive... but now we can pretend this is a reasonable life choice.”

She became his pusher. Legos instead of morphine.

Boxes would appear like clockwork.

Sometimes planned. Sometimes “just because.”

Troy didn’t just build these sets.

He threw himself into them.

In the hospital, there was hardly room for the nurses to move around.

At home, we barely had room for the sofa.

He went through a pirate phase—and when I say “phase,” I mean full engagement.

He wasn’t just snapping pieces together.

He was learning the names of ships, understanding how sails worked, asking questions about rigging and navigation that I absolutely did not know the answers to.

There was something beautiful about watching that curiosity come back to life.

But my favorite memory... the one that stays with me more than anything else... happened that Christmas in 2010.

To my delight, one of the gifts under the tree was the Lego Yellow Submarine.

Now, I’ll admit—it wasn’t the biggest set we had.

It didn’t have the most pieces.

It didn’t even take the longest to build.

But it had something else.

It had meaning.

Troy and I sat at the dining room table—just the two of us.

No rush. No schedule. No engagements waiting in the background.

Just... time. Together. By ourselves.

If you’ve ever built a Lego set with someone, you know there’s a rhythm to it.

You search for the right piece.

You double-check the instructions.

You snap it into place.

And then you realize you used the wrong piece... and go back three pages... and try to pretend that was part of the plan.

That morning, time slowed down in a way it hadn’t for a long while.

We weren’t thinking about chemo therapy.

We weren’t thinking about side effects.

We weren’t thinking about what came next.

We were just... building.

And for a little while...

Everything felt normal.

That might not sound like much.

But when you’ve been living in a world where nothing feels normal anymore...

That’s everything.

By the time we finished, we had this bright, colorful Yellow Submarine sitting in front of us.

I’m fairly sure we had at least one extra piece... and at least one piece in the wrong place.

But it didn’t matter.

Because it was ours.

We had built it together.

That day taught me something I didn’t expect.

We tend to believe that when life becomes overwhelming, the answer must be a plan. A system. A way to regain control of the whole picture.

But that’s not how we got through it.

We got through it piece by piece.

Not in advance. Not all at once. Just... the next small thing that could be done.

A hand turning the page for the next instruction.

A brick clicking into place.

A moment of attention held long enough for something to take shape.

When I think back on it now, I don’t remember a strategy.

I remember a table.

A box opened between us.

And a morning where nothing needed to be fixed except what was right in front of us.

The finished submarine is still with me. It sits in my office.

And every time I look at it, I don’t just see plastic bricks.

I don't hear the Beatles singing.

I don’t think about productivity or progress or plans.

I see that morning.

I see a moment when my son wasn’t a patient.

He was a kid.

And I wasn’t thinking about what came next.

Because life, at its hardest, is rarely solved in big gestures.

It’s lived in smaller ones.

One brick at a time.

Fifteen years have passed since then. Troy is in remission, and we are grateful—more than words can hold.