August 13, 2012

We are here today to celebrate the life of Tom Cain, to mourn him, to remember him and to pray for him. We remember him as he was – vibrant, handsome, smart, caring, funny, and in every way, his own man.

Tom had a fulfilling professional career, attaining his life -long goal of a Vice Presidency for a top notch company in the medical devices field. Tom had a rich family life, close relationships with friends, and by his own definition, financial success. Tom was an enthusiastic world traveler who fully absorbed and appreciated every place he ever lived or visited. He loved recounting stories of his travels to family and friends and kept a detailed photos library of interesting, exotic and beautiful places.

Tom’s life was much shorter than any of us could have expected, but that does not mean it was not full, happy and complete. At his death, Tom had achieved what he wanted from life. He always intended to make every minute of his life count, and he succeeded.

Tom came into my life when I was 14 months old, my first sibling and my first and only brother. As babies, we shared cribs and playpens, as toddlers we competed for toys and attention, and as kids we conspired together to cause mischief. Our family grew to include Julie 2 years after Tom, Kristin 3 years after Julie and Miriam 4 years after Kris. When we hit the 5 year mark after Miriam, everyone held their breath, but the family was complete. Well almost complete – there was Tony our foster brother, Guillermo, our exchange student who lived with our family for a year and bonded with Tom as the brother he never had, and Wendy another exchange student who listened to Chinese opera and chattered incessantly in mandarin with her relatives over the phone, driving everyone in the house crazy.

Tom learned lessons that are only taught to members of a large, raucous, close, loving family –how to appreciate others, how success lead to recognition, and ultimately how to lead. Tom learned the value and satisfaction of hard work and he learned how to compete – lessons that served Tom well in his future career.

Tom had a somewhat rocky academic career which began at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne Florida where Tom decided to pursue a degree in marine biology. At the end of his freshman year, Tom came home and announced to our parents that he had decided to become a sponge diver. Sponge diving is one of the most dangerous and unpredictable careers and almost certainly did not require a college degree. This plan did not go over very well with his mom and dad. In order to sort out his future goals, Tom took time off from school, and worked at manual minimum wage jobs for a period of time. He referred to this period as his education in “what he did not want to do for a living. “

Tom graduated with honors from the University of Delaware with a degree in Biology. He began his career in sales with Miliken. He loved this privately held family company with its culture of hard work and its balanced respect for both profit and customer relationships. Tom learned the art of selling at Milliken. He learned how to listen, and how to talk to people. He moved on to Johnson and Johnson in the Ethicon division. Tom honed his craft in the medical field at J&J. He progressed quickly from sales representative to manager of sales training then became manager of International Marketing, a position that stationed him in Japan and allowed him to travel widely throughout the Far East, Europe, South America and Africa.

Tom left J&J because he was ready for a new challenge. I remember him weighing the pros and cons of his next career move – going back to school for his MBA, a move that would have guaranteed him success in the corporate world of a large multi-national, or starting his own business from the ground up in Australia. Tom as could be predicted opted for the riskier path. Tom never ceased being an entrepreneur. He thrived on the responsibility, accountability and the flexibility that running his own business offered him. While he enjoyed making a nice salary and he negotiated hard, money was never the most important thing to Tom. He liked money because it allowed him to live the kind of life he wanted to live.

Tom moved to Colorado Springs in 2009 to join Spectranetics. My fiancé Peter lobbied hard with his contact there to get Tom in the front door. Well, Tom not only got in the front door, he got the job. When Spectranetics offered Tom the Director of Marketing position, Tom wrote a letter to the Senior Vice President and chief counsel of Spectranetics accepting the position of Vice President of Marketing of surgical devices. This caused an uproar at Spectranetics, but at that point, Tom had made them want him badly. They called an emergency board meeting and created an additional vice presidency and Tom joined Spectranetics.

I was very upset when Tom left his job at Spectranetics. I enjoyed having Tom close and thought it was a bone headed move to quit a good job when he didn’t have another job lined up. The business climate was tough and jobs were scarce as the country struggled to come out of a terrible recession. Tom was implacable on the matter and he was very clear about why he made the decision. He did not have confidence in the leadership of the company, there was not strategy for growth, and his talent was being wasted. He told me that “Life is too short to spend any time doing something that I don’t want to do.” So Tom went back to consulting, moved east and started his job search again.

In January of this year, Tom landed his dream job with Zimmer Inc as vice president sales and marketing for Biologics. Tom was excited by the company, the product, and its potential. He admired and respected his boss, and for the first time in his career, Tom felt the team, the management, and the culture were the ideal professional fit he had been looking for the last 25 years.

So many of Tom’s colleagues at Zimmer have written and talked to me about Tom with great consistency. Tom was passionate about his business, he was a true leader who could motivate his team, he was a great guy with a tremendous sense of humor. He impacted the business energized his team and impacted the business in a positive way that will be remembered.

Tom had great energy, a fine moral compass and great intelligence. He was also intensely curious and had a wonderful sense of fun. Tom had a lot of fun as a child, and he never let that innocent joy and delight wither with the onset of adulthood. He thoroughly enjoyed his role as uncle Tom and was a great playmate for nieces and nephews. Using his prolific imagination and superb story telling skills to entertain them, play with them and of course give them a good scare. Tom once placed a mechanical hand in Danielle and Ryan’s rooms and when they entered, he sat outside the door giggling at their squeals of terror. He also delighted in telling all of his sister’s kids about the Jersey Devil until he had them convinced the the Jersey Devil was in the backyard and coming to get them soon.
Uncle Tom loved to play games. They might be standard board games or something he made up. Of course, if he made it up, there were a million rules that were to precisely followed. The kids noticed that “When it came to playing games with Uncle Tom, it was funny how he always seemed to win. There was one legendary game of Risk where Tom was being thwarted by his mother, (Nana to the kids), who managed to roll perfectly while Tom wasted all of his armies in the attack. This infuriated Tom to no end and delighted the other gamers who got a kick out of Tom’s red faced frustration.
Tom invented games throughout his childhood and into his adulthood – There was “whoever touches dog is dumb” a keep away game played with kids and dachshunds, “blanket monster” where he chased his nieces covered in a blanket, grabbed their legs and dragged them under the blanket to be tickled.” When we were kids, Miriam the youngest was a constant target and outlet for Tom’s games. Tom would play soccer with her – Miriam was always the goalie, never the shooter. He wrestled with her on the floor of the family room and titled her the ex champion of the world, followed by the ex ex champion of the world after yet another defeat in front of the television set while the rest of us were desperately trying to watch our shows and ignore them banging into furniture at our feet.
When our family decided to put in a swimming pool, the holes and mounds of dirt set the perfect scene for Tom’s “Boy of the Green” game which consisted of Tom in his tee shirt and shorts with a towel draped around his neck as a cape chasing down his sisters while wielding a crochet stake. It was lots of fun until he fell and gashed his head with the sharp end of the stake. Tom recovered but this early lesson taught him little about caution. As an adult, Tom surfed the huge waves in Australia and nearly drowned. He hiked alone in the outback and sprained his ankle and nearly didn’t make it back alive. Tom in every endeavor – at work or at play – went full tilt and put his all his energy into the effort.
Tom was also a practical joker and continuously got his cousins and siblings in to trouble. He once talked our cousin John in eating 9 or 10 pears in one sitting. He snuck his cousin Gus home by having him hide on the floor of the back seat for the 30 minute ride from our Uncles house to ours. He convinced my sisters Miriam and Kristin to go hunting for mythical Albinos out in the woods in Haycock township returning them to our home at 2PM in the morning.
The fact that Tom grew up with four sisters was both a joy and a curse for Tom. We all shared a single bathroom upstairs, but Tom was forced to shower downstairs in a cold room, that had all of the warmth and charm of a privy on a submarine.. He shared that bathroom with Dad who was a submariner and didn’t mind the close quarters. We felt sorry for Tom, but we weren’t letting him into our bathroom.
The impact of his sisters on his taste in women was immense. He chose women who were physically different than his sisters, but intellectually just as gifted . Tom had a type: blond, beautiful, fit and smart. He loved intensely in his life and he suffered at the hand of love. Tom valued commitment, friendship, and strong relationships more than he ever valued romantic love. I believe that when Tom found Jan, he found his closest friend and the women he felt comfortable sharing the things he loved most intimately – opera, music, the joy of Christmas. Tom and Jan had a tradition of themed dinner and a movie nights where he rented a Japanese movie and they ate sushi, or watched an Italian Flick with pasta and a good Chianti.
Tom loved Christmas and Christmas lights. One year Tom and Jan took a tour through Bethlehem to look at the decorations. Tom wanted to find the “Star of Bethlehem” and eventually they located the tower and decided to climb it. Again, a tour of holiday lights turned into a challenge for Tom.
Tom gave advice on everything – about marriage, diet, exercise, finances, how to make a margarita. If you expressed a point of view with Tom, his answer was generally the opposite. If you invested in stocks, Tom would counsel that gold was the way to go. If you voted Democrat, the Republicans had a much better plan. If you voted Republican, that might be fine, but the Libertarians were really on the right track. If you were on Atkins, Tom was on a vegetarian diet. Tom never disagreed with you for the sake of being contrary, he genuinely believed that he was right, and that he was convinced he had to power to persuade you to his point of view.

Tom was cheap.  He never thought you needed to spend a lot of money to have fun. Tom loved Colorado and the west. He loved the climate, the mountains, and he told me one of the things he missed the most was living fairly close to Costco and the great Thrift stores. Colorado Springs has plenty of consignment shops, second hand stores and two “big box” thrift stores. “I used find Ralph Lauren in those thrift stores”, he boasted.

While Tom was living with Kristin and her family in Medford, he deliberately ordered a pizza with extra sauce and little cheese, figuring the kids wouldn’t want it. He really just didn’t want to share the pizza that he paid for, but he couldn’t resist the “loving faces” as Dani and Ryan said it  “smelled delicious” . Dani to this day still prefers her pizza that way.
Tom was never ashamed that he was cheap, he readily admitted it.   As we were driving back home after our dinner out on Friday. He said to me “I am pretty cheap. I think I got that from Dad, but it was a good lesson. It allowed me to live the life I wanted to live.”

Tom loved to negotiate.  Tom was a highly effective sales person, but if you were selling something to Tom, look out! We all pitied the poor sales people. I remember that Tom’s first major furniture purchase, a queen sized mattress. It was exchanged at the store where he bought it three times, because it wasn’t right.
Tom had planned to buy a pair of special glasses in a shop in Denver before he flew to San Jose. As we were working our the timetable for the trip to Denver, Tom said, Oh I could spend two hours picking out those glasses. Really? Keep in mind, Tom had already researched the glasses on line and sent two inquiries about them by email. Tom’s true intention I am convinced was to wear the shop keeper down for the next two hours.

Tom was a people person. He didn’t like having a conversation on email. He didn’t have a facebook account, or a linked in account, and I counted a total of 3 tweets on his Twitter account. Tom believed that real communication took place face to face . It was an exchange between people who worked together to solve problems, communicate ideas, with the ultimate goal of making something better. It frustrated some of his colleagues that he refused to read an email string that was 15 pages long and fire back a response as was expected. Instead, he would just wait until the hapless person asked, “did you read the email I sent you?” To that, Tom would respond, “No I didn’t. I don’t read emails. I am right here, talk to me. If I am not right here, you can call me or text me, but don’t make me read through these long involved emails.”

Tom loved to compete. He loved to win and he really really hated to lose. I can remember intense battles on the tether ball in the back yard. This was a contraption which was a long pole with a ball tethered to the top with a long cord that allowed the ball to swing 360 degrees around the pole. The idea was to get the ball past your opponent by getting it high over his head. But mostly we just smacked it back and forth. A round of tetherball was gladiatorial with Tom. We generally left the game with bloody knuckles, covered with sweat, and swearing that each of us had triumphed.

There were all kinds of games and competitions with Tom – foot races in the field behind the house, swimming races, and badminton, until Tom tore down the net in a fit of adolescent rage when he lost an important point.

Tom eventually developed a strategy that insured he would always win. He just wore you down. If you won, he would want to play best of 3. If you won that, it would be best of 7. Tom once dropped $100 at a go cart track, trying to beat his friends time on the track. He bought ticket after ticket until he finally had a 2 second advantage over his opponent.
Toms’ love of competition and achievement grew out of his love of sports. As kids growing up I cannot tell you how many times we had to delay dinner in our house because there was only 15 minutes left to play. Well we all know that 15 minutes on a football clock is not 15 minutes. Tom loved the football and was eventually able to persuade my mother, that we could all eat dinner in front of the TV for Superbowl.

Kristin is fond of saying,  “Men walked on the moon. Dad made me watch that…because it was history. I watched THE FIRST SUPER BOWL because of my brother Tom.”
Tom loved basketball, football and the Olympics. He was really keen to get back from dinner on Friday evening so that we could watch the opening ceremonies. We did. . .
On the following day, Tom died.

Tom died doing something that he wanted to do. At 11:30 he climbed on a bike and started down a trail at the foot of the Rockies just east of the Air Force Academy. The day was bright, clear and hot. He had a bottle of water, a mountain bike, and the urge to explore a new trail and enjoy the scenery. On his way back to my home, his body failed him. He collapsed by the side of the road. His breathing and his heart stopped.Tom left on that trip, without his wallet, his watch, or a phone. He went out of this world as he came into it – with only his sense of adventure, confidence in his ability, courage, and optimism for the future.

In the days since his death, I came across little reminders of what had happened. On my refrigerator, I have a little calendar to remind me about things that are coming up. there are the usual things on it – Peter is in San Francisco, give the dog’s their heart worm medicine. on July 27th, it says “Tom here for the weekend”.  The quotation on that calendar for month of July, the month that Tom was here for the weekend read, “Walk with the Dreamers, the Believers, the Courageous, the Cheerful, the Planners, the Doers, The successful People with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground.”
We walked with Tom, for the time he was on earth. He challenged us, engaged us, cheered us on, made us brave, inspired us, and reminded us always that life is precious. If the way Tom lived his life holds a message for us here, I believe it is this: Life is here for us to enjoy, to exploit and to experience sometimes in small ways, sometimes large ways, but always in a way that makes us truly happy.