Dave Wheeler, a lawyer who lives in Moreno Valley, sent me his obituary recently.
He had written it himself, right after he got married and just before he went in for brain surgery. He wanted to leave something behind in case he never woke up. So, he sat in his living room in September with a laptop computer and struggled to put 54 years of life into several paragraphs.
Where to begin?
I might have started with his time as a race car driver in the '90s. Or with his animal rights activism in the '80s. Or with his anti-apartheid and pro-farmworkers crusading in the '70s.
But here's the intro he came up with:
"Former Costa Mesa Councilman and Champaign, Ill., resident Dave Wheeler, 54, has died of lung and brain cancer. He was the son of William and Myrna Wheeler. . . . As a child, he had high scores on standardized tests and in 1966, a team of psychologists from the University of Illinois measured his IQ at 191."
I'm happy to report that two months after writing his obituary and having a brain tumor removed, Wheeler isn't dead yet.
He's sick, yes. Very sick. But alive and scratching.
I get the sense that as he's about to flat-line, whatever month or year that might be, he'll still be fighting an insurance company, knocking back a beer and bargaining for more time.
I drove out to visit Wheeler after we'd corresponded for several weeks by phone and e-mail. It all began when he saw a column about my sister's ovarian cancer spreading to her brain.
"I am getting married next Friday and the following week, I plan to have brain surgery at Hoag," he wrote.
I couldn't help but admire his spirit, and it's not as if a lot of people send me their own obituaries.
What kind of guy could this be?
Allan Roeder, city manager in Costa Mesa, fondly recalled Wheeler as "a bit of a wild man." Roeder said Wheeler was elected to the City Council in 1984 as a chain-smoking, 29-year-old bon vivant and political rebel. He said the councilman routinely knocked heads with local establishment figures, particularly over development issues, and always stood up for civil rights and neighborhood preservation.
"I know he would drive people absolutely nuts, but I really enjoyed him because you could have an intellectual discussion with him even though he would do some wild things," Roeder said.
