Life-significant People: Jerry McNellis

JW: After struggling with the terms mentor, teacher, guides, I settled on life-significant people: people who influenced me and my path in some way. While there are many I missed, I listed 27 people and then started trying to find patterns, looking for what gifts they had brought to my life and what they had seen in me.

Here's one example:

Jerry McNellis at a compression planning session

Jerry McNellis, deceased. After the mindmapping book, I went looking for other thinking tools for a new book, Transformation Thinking, and found Jerry who had developed a visual-thinking process he called Compression Planning. He generously explained his process and became part of the book. I thought that was that.

However, a few years later when I was planning the first conference for "innovative thinkers," I called Jerry to ask if he would participate in an unknown conference produced by someone with no conference development experience for no fee, and by the way, paying his own expenses. When he said "yes," it was like God had spoken. I knew the conference was going to work.

It didn't work quite as I expected. The first planned date turned out to be overly ambitious and was postponed. It was probably a year after Jerry first said yes that the conference actually came together. When I called to confirm his participation, I learned that he had had a major health event and hadn't traveled for a year. However, he recommitted to coming.

I went to Jerry's extended session to learn more about Compression Planning and at the end, we sat and talked. I asked him why he had said yes in view of his health issue. What I had learned by then was that, physically, Jerry was significantly crippled by the effects of his childhood polio: at best travel was a challenge. While we talked, I learned that, in addition to a devastating health crisis on top of his already precarious physical situation, his wife and mother of their six children had divorced him. He was bereft, but for whatever reasons he might have had, he decided my conference was important. It was the first traveling he had done in over a year. It makes me teary recalling that bonding conversation.

I think Jerry and I were fated to be friends, but I did something out of the normal for me that probably clinched it. Years before, I had asked a manager I worked for about the symbols on his ring. He patiently told me the story that they were Hebrew and stood for "This, too, shall pass." He told me the story of King Solomon and spent time explaining the meaning that both good times and bad times will pass.

That thought became so important that I cross-stitched it onto a pillow ... in 1979. The conference was in 1995. I was so touched by Jerry's story that I packed up that almost-20 year-old (and definitely bedraggled) pillow and sent it across country to Jerry. He laughed as he told me about opening the package and pulling out a sorry, old pillow. Our friendship was sealed.

Over the years, Jerry participated in more conferences and every once in a while we would have long, rambling telephone calls. He was a gatherer and always had something new he wanted to share and new dreams and plans to talk about. Plus, he always wanted to hear about what I was doing and generally had valuable advice to share.

One of the funniest of his plans was to find a new bride. He threw himself into that just like he did everything else, with gusto and creativity. He loved to regale me with stories about how he set up outrageous dates ... I wish I could remember some of them, but they were so wild I told him he had to stop or he'd have every woman he dated falling in love with him. But, he finally found Phyllis and was happy.

When he called to tell me he had terminal brain cancer, his dream was to plan his going away party down to the last detail and to spend as much time as possible with the people he loved. For some reason, I was on what must have been a very long list. More frequently than I had hoped for, we had those last talks. Until they stopped. I still miss him and am grateful to have had him in my life.

All of this makes me realize that I have been somewhat bitter about not having that mentor who opens doors to a bigger, material world and safeguards my passage through it. Maybe I never reached remarkable success but Jerry gave me a greater gift of feeling appreciated and connected. As a role model of courage and creativity, he still gives me more confidence to follow my own path and look at life with humor and creativity.