What Is Your Integrity Worth to You?

Imagine your wife is diagnosed with ovarian cancer and then one day the doctor describes how it has spread: “Like somebody dipped a paintbrush in cancer and flicked it around her abdomen.”

This is exactly what happened to Matthew Teague, as described in his quietly devastating essay “The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word,” which was published in the May 2015 issue of Esquire magazine.

The essay is real and honest in its examination of illness and death, and it inspired a major motion picture titled “Our Friend” (watch the trailer here).

Matthew’s wife, Nicole, was in her thirties when the cancer diagnosis came. Initially, there was an outpouring of support from friends and neighbors. But as Nicole’s condition deteriorated, the friends slowly stopped coming by.

Except for Dane Faucheux.

Dane is a close college friend of both Matthew and Nicole. He came to visit them and their young daughters. He saw how overwhelmed they were, and suggested moving in to help out. Matthew was glad for the assistance and agreed.

Dane took vacation time from his management job back home and explained to his girlfriend that this was something he had to do. Maybe for a few weeks, he thought.

But the weeks became almost two years.

Do what is right, not what is easy nor what is popular

Matthew’s poignant essay pulls no punches in describing Nicole’s medical decline, and the many indignities she suffered.

In the essay, Matthew notes:

We don’t tell each other the truth about dying, as a people. Not real dying. Real dying, regular and mundane dying, is so hard and so ugly that it becomes the worst thing of all: It’s grotesque. It’s undignified. No one ever told me the truth about it, not once.

But the story isn’t just about dying, it’s about the power of true friendship.

Dane Faucheux ends up losing his job and his girlfriend in order to be there for Matthew, Nicole, and their young daughters. Dane lives with them, helping with meals, errands, laundry, getting the girls to school, and being a sounding board for everyone. He’s like a guardian angel.

Do what is right, not what is easy nor what is popular. — Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

Dane remained with Matthew, Nicole, and the girls until Nicole finally lost her battle. And he stayed on for a while after, although he battled some depression, no doubt exhausted from serving as a steady rock in everyone’s lives.

And then one day he decided it was time to move back to his home in New Orleans, and get on with his life.

Dane sacrificed a great deal, losing his job and girlfriend because he is a man of deep integrity. A man who places others above himself. A loyal friend who can be counted on.

How many of us would have done the same?

Blunt refusal to be compromised

Calvin & Hobbes is a beloved American comic strip about a boy and his stuffed tiger.

The delightful strip ran from 1985 until 1995, when its creator, Bill Watterson, decided to retire. Watterson felt he had done all he could with the comic strip, and he was also exhausted after years of deadlines and a difficult battle with his syndicate over licensing and merchandising of his cartoon characters.

During the heyday of newspapers, before the Internet, some comic strip cartoonists became wealthy as their features were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers and their characters were licensed and merchandised as dolls, lunch boxes, bed covers, posters, toys, animations, and more. Charles Schulz’s “Snoopy” and “Charlie Brown” from his comic strip Peanuts are good examples.

Bill Watterson refused to license his cartoon characters, despite the huge popularity of Calvin & Hobbes. He felt that turning his characters into merchandise would cheapen them.

The decision meant that his syndicate could not create any merchandise, thus losing out on over $100+ million in revenue. Watterson only allowed for cartoon book collections to be made of his comic strip.

In the exhibition catalogue “Exploring Calvin & Hobbes,” Watterson explains his reasoning:

My argument was really about artists’ rights. I was saying the issue should be decided by the artist who created the work, and not the syndicate or anyone else. The artist gets to decide what his own creation is about and stands for. If licensing fits your vision of your creation, wonderful, go nuts. But I reserve the option of saying no for my own work. If I don’t like licensing, I should be allowed to refuse it. That’s all it was.

But Watterson once said in a speech that licensing and merchandising was “the cheapening of comics.” He felt that the integrity of the art should not be sold out. How many aspiring cartoonists today would say no to hundreds of millions of dollars just to protect the integrity of their art?

One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised. — Chinua Achebe

It’s not only famous cartoonists who face difficult decisions about doing the right thing. Every day we are confronted with choices.

And every day we should ponder the question: What is your integrity worth to you?

Doing the right thing

Dane Faucheux has shown us what being a loyal and true friend is all about. He dropped everything in his life to help his friends and their daughters in their time of need.

Bill Watterson chose to put the authenticity of his art above millions of dollars in profit from licensing and merchandising his characters. I own the box set book collection of Calvin & Hobbes, and I’m glad Watterson stuck to his guns.

It’s gratifying to see Calvin & Hobbes live on in the world Watterson created for them, instead of assembly line dolls, toys, and countless other merchandise that somehow cheapen the simple beauty of the characters (note: the illegal, bootleg sticker of Calvin urinating, often affixed to cars, is precisely the kind of crudeness Watterson wanted to avoid).

What do Dane Faucheux and Bill Watterson share that we can all do well to emulate?

Integrity.

Integrity is about acting with honor, whether in public or not. It’s about having strong moral principles, uprightness, honesty, sincerity, and maybe a bit of love, too.

In the end, integrity is about doing the right thing.

You can be the wealthiest, prettiest, or most popular person around, but if you lack integrity, then you must live with a kind of ugliness. You must live with the knowledge that behind the facade, you are not the person you pretend to be.

We are all works in progress. Everyone stumbles, and sometimes our integrity falls short. But there is always tomorrow.

Strive to be a friend like Dane Faucheux. Do the right thing, like Bill Watterson. Place integrity at the top of your values, and you will be like a shining light in this broken world.

And now more than ever, we need shining lights.

Before you go

I’m John P. Weiss. I write elegant essays about life. Every weekend I send out my free Saturday Letter, which pairs nicely with a cup of coffee and quiet reflection. Check it out here.

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This post was previously published on Medium.com.

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Photo credit: John P. Weiss