TO MY DAUGHTER
Be encouraged, my daughter
The victory is mine,
My race, I have won.
I am home now with Jesus
He talks taily with me,
My journey has ended,
My soul has been set free
Let the life that I have lived
Be a testimony to you.
Hold steadfastly to Jesus
He brought me through.
Whenever you need me,
Remember this day.
I am resting in heaven
Not too far away.
Always look up,
Don’t tarry, you see;
Call faithfully on heaven,
That is where I will be.
When your time has come,
To do what you must do,
I will be at the River Jordan,
To see you cross, too.
I am happy now, Leigh,
Don’t fret over me;
All my troubles have ceased,
My soul has been set free.
*****
Aaron Debnam had spent his life fighting.
He crushed tailbacks as “Chickenhawk,” the fearsome South Carolina State linebacker. He stamped out infernos as “Big A,” the Greenville firefighter.
Aided by an imposing frame, a cool demeanor and an unending confidence, he welcomed these challenges, volunteered for them.
But the fiercest battle the 46-year-old husband and father would face would be far from a choice, and it would require a new identity A<3> an unfamiliar acceptance of physical vulnerability that only an immeasurable spiritual strength from within could undergird.
Cancer isn’t a disease of victims, it’s a disease of fighters. Living on borrowed time that doctors had predicted he wouldn’t have, Aaron staked out his ground to stand in defiance of death, to see his daughter, Leigh, graduate from Easley High School.
“That was the only thing he would talk about,” says Wanda Debnam, Aaron’s wife of 23 years. “He would say to me, ‘If I can just make it to my baby’s graduation.’”
On May 27, dying of brain cancer, struggling to stand and speak and at least 100 pounds lighter than he’d been since he was a child, Aaron would see his daughter, in her green gown, walk across the Littlejohn Coliseum stage.
He stood to congratulate her after the ceremony. Afterward, he fell to the ground.
A little more than a week later, on June 7, Leigh sat alone with her father in the downstairs of their Easley home. She helped hospice caretakers put him in an ambulance, knowing she would never see him again.
Over the course of the night, at his own request out of his beloved family’s sight, Aaron succumbed to the disease that had made him a shell of himself — but that so, too, helped define the life he led.
* * * * *
Aaron’s nickname was “Chickenhawk” at S.C. State — apt for a linebacker, whose job description entails methodically and precisely striking his prey.
But on the field, Wanda says, he was the one who led team prayers. He was the encourager, the teacher, the glue that formed togetherness.
Aaron and Wanda met their freshman year at S.C. State in 1977 and dated right through school, to graduation and up until their holy union in 1983.
Aaron had always been a helper. He majored in sociology, but while his wife would go on to become the social worker, Aaron ultimately found his calling in a different kind of rescue mission.
In 1985, he was laid off from his job at Duke Power. Not one to simply wait for a job, he got in his car one day and drove down to a Greenville fire station to apply. He worked for the department almost until he died.
His assertiveness and leadership earned him the rank of lieutenant and the respect of his comrades.
In 1988, his only child was born — Erin Leigh Debnam (named after her father, as her parents had always pledged to do, boy or girl).
“Big A” was what firefighters call “a door buster:” By the time a colleague would come back with a crowbar to pry open the door of a burning building, Aaron would have bulled through it with his body.
He carved out a humble, selfless figure of steadiness in the fire department.
“It was always, ‘I want to go work for ‘Big A,’” says Doug Henson, a firefighter who battled flames with Aaron for two decades.
Aaron led the charge, both with his brawn and a keen awareness of when and when not to go into a burning building, says Jack Gillespie, a firefighter who served under him.
“Big A” would never put a colleague in a situation he wouldn’t be willing to be in himself, Gillespie says.
“It was an honor to be behind him, backing him up,” Gillespie says. “If you wanted to have a firefighter at a fire, he’s the one you’d want to be with.”
At home, Aaron engrossed himself in the welfare of others. If he had a flaw, Wanda says, it was that he cared too much. He was a worrier.
He was also a doer, a studier: He water-skied when they bet him he couldn’t; he bowled 10 strikes without having tried the sport before. If you were on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” and needed a lifeline, Wanda says, he was your guy.
And he loved his baby girl.
“We both loved tennis shoes,” Leigh says. “He’d take me out and buy me a pair of Jordans. Mom would be like, ‘What are y’all buying $150 shoes for?’ And he would say, ‘This is my only child; this is my girl.”
* * * * *
It was a Tuesday at dawn in February 2005, and Aaron was on duty when he fell and began to convulse in a seizure.
The Saturday before, he had run eight miles (he had weighed in at 320 pounds months earlier, Wanda says, decided he was fat and dieted and exercised to get down to a healthy 248 pounds for his strapping 6-foot-3 frame).
The guys at the department — thinking of a stroke or heart attack — rushed him to the hospital. Shortly after his examination, Aaron was getting dressed, ready to go home. Then, Wanda says, the neurologist walked in:
“Aaron, where are you going?” the doctor asked.
“Well, I figure I’m fine now. I feel great. I’d like to go home.”
“Well, Aaron, I don’t think we’re going to be able to do that.”
The coming days would reveal an awful truth: Aaron — despite the outward perception of being a healthy, fit person — was suffering the most-advanced stage of cancer. It had begun in his lungs (he wasn’t a smoker) and spread to his brain and spleen and liver and lymph nodes.
The doctors told him he had a year to live.
“He was devastated,” Wanda says. “We were devastated.”
Aaron underwent chemotherapy. The tumors shrank. There was hope that, because of his physical strength, he might be able to fight off his cancer and extend his life.
He went on maintenance drugs for remission. But by December 2005, the tumors grew again. Back to chemotherapy in January. This time, the chemotherapy couldn’t stop the advance.
By April, his body began to shut down.
One day at the doctor’s office, Wanda noticed a nurse’s pained glance toward the doctor. Outside the room, Wanda asked the doctor the question she never wanted to ask.
“He’s dying, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
* * * * *
In his last weeks, Aaron would take his wife outside to wash the cars the couples owned (including his beloved vintage 1967 Ford Mustang). She needed to learn how to do it herself — the right way.
“He said, ‘You see what I’m doing, Boo?’” Wanda says. “This is how you do it. You’ve got to section off and do a little at a time. You try to do the whole thing all at once.”
When he wasn’t washing cars, he was reporting for work at the fire station — nearly up until Leigh’s graduation.
Through most of his chemotherapy Aaron worked at the station, says his battalion chief, Clark Farmer, who describes Aaron as “one of those quiet kind of guys who made things happen.”
He could no longer enter buildings because of the smoke, so instead, he worked as an “incident safety officer.”
He drove himself to work.
Aaron had accumulated “gobs” of sick time, Farmer says, because he rarely called in ill. The chief had tried throughout his battle with cancer to get him to use some of his days.
“Even when he was doing chemo, we had to make him go home,” Farmer says.
But on his last day at work, it wasn’t quite such a struggle. He had come in on May 23 — a Tuesday — on his day off because of a misunderstanding about when he was supposed to work.
“I said, ‘Big A, what are you doin’ here?’ You’re supposed to be taking a labor day,’” Farmer says. “He told me, ‘Yeah, I was talking to one of the guys, and he said, ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday,’ and I didn’t want to hold out on you, so I came on in.’”
Farmer told Aaron he didn’t look like he was feeling well. Aaron agreed. The chief told him not to worry about work and to go home and get strong for the graduation on Saturday.
His firefighting career was over.
* * * * *
Family pictures cover the walls in the Debnam household. Downstairs, Aaron’s treadmill sits still next to a memorial picture of him, displayed on an easel.
Aaron stayed here until his last hours.
Two days after Leigh’s graduation ceremony, he was admitted to the hospital, where he stayed for five days. The staff encouraged Wanda to let them handle the burden.
They told her he had five days to live. She took Aaron home.
Five days later, his body failing, Aaron asked his wife to call the hospice.
“Boo, I told you I wasn’t going to take you anywhere.”
“Listen, listen, don’t be so hard-headed. Wanda, just take me to the hospital. Take care of Leigh. I don’t want you to be burdened with anything.”
Leigh came downstairs and asked her mother if she was going to work.
“No, baby.”
Wanda told Leigh to go downstairs and spend some time alone with her father, and then she walked upstairs.
“I looked at him,” Leigh says, “and I knew he wasn’t going to come back home. I told him that I wanted him to be really sweet. He told me that he loved me, and that’s the last time I ever saw my Dad.”
Wanda planned on spending the night by her husband’s side.
Aaron could barely move. He spoke in long, breathy whispers. He didn’t want his wife to have to see him die.
“Go home.”
Wanda told him she was staying. He showed as much agitation as he could muster.
“You go home.”
“You’re going to heaven, Aaron. I love you.”
He couldn’t talk, so he winked.
“Aaron, God, I wish you could talk.”
Then, he emerged from his stupor. He took his eyes off his wife and looked to her right and spoke clearly.
“Wanda, I love you. Take care of Leigh.”
Before leaving, she took his hand and pressed her cheek against his: “God, if it’s your will.”
He passed in his sleep.
* * * * *
Aaron’s loved ones see his life as a testimony. He left an impression: at least 900 people attended his funeral, and his co-workers continue to give Wanda and Leigh help.
“I’m wondering,” Wanda says, “Now what’s going to happen me? As I look back over our lives, God had a plan for us.”
Leigh’s plan is to begin nursing school in August at Greenville Tech (to help people, she says, just like her mother and father).
“It makes me happy,” Leigh says, “that he was there to see me complete a chapter of my life as I go on to do something else now … but there’s so many things he won’t see.
“People think they’re going to live forever. You don’t know what time you have.”
