Peter Obetz (PO) and Jeff Jarrett (JJ)

PO: Food would get stuck down my throat, and it got worse and worse. So I met with my doctor, and I had a tumor on my esophagus wall. He said, ”Well, surgery has about a 10 percent death risk.” And I remember telling the doc, ”You mean to tell me like one guy on my softball team isn’t going to make it?” There’s 10 guys on the team. He said, ”Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” He said, ”We can either do the surgery tomorrow, or we can wait till Tuesday.”

JJ: Do you remember you called me?

PO: Yeah.

JJ: I said, ”You need to do it as soon as you can.” I spent the day with your parents. And the surgeon met with us just after the surgery was completed and drew a graph. He said, ”Well, this is the percentages of survival over time.” It started out at 90 percent on the day of the surgery and fell to 15 percent after five years. That was my scariest moment–that there was only 15 percent chance that I was going to have my best friend with me five years from now. The next day, you had caught your mother with that little graph that the doctor had drawn, and she wouldn’t show it to you. And so I’d come in, and you said, ”I want you to sit down and tell me everything.” So I did.

PO: I remember saying, ”I’m toast.”

JJ: Your mom had said that to the surgeon. Surgeon said, ”No, he’s lightly brown. He’s not toast.”

PO: You know, to have gotten cancer, it was a wake-up call maybe that I needed. I was in a job where I was miserable. It gave me the permission to leave. I went from making a lot of money to making very little and being happier. I sold my big house, moved to an apartment. And then a week later the unit downstairs opened up, and you moved in. And the only time usually that you live right next door to your best friend is when you’re a kid, because often your next door neighbor is by default your best friend.

JJ: Exactly, second graders aren’t that picky.

PO: And when I think of every aspect of my life, my marriage has changed, my job has changed, where I live has changed. Our friendship is really the only thing that’s constant. That’s probably the greatest gift that you could’ve given me.

JJ: You know, when you were sick, everybody wanted to say, ”Peter, I love you so much. I’m so grateful for our friendship.” But, I feel so lucky that if anything would have happened to you, there was never any ambiguity about how you feel about me or I feel about you. I love you very, very much.

PO: I love you too, man.