About three years ago, several months after his seemingly effortless eight-year service as press secretary to then-Gov. Mike Beebe, Matt DeCample went to the doctor because he wasn't quite well.
His work for Beebe had seemed effortless because he always got along so calmly and non-contentiously with a frenetic media ever-angling for the governor's position on this or that. DeCample had a gift for providing a professional service in a naturally personal manner.
Over 40 years, I have delivered angry or frustrated words at one time or another to every gubernatorial press secretary except DeCample.
So the medical professionals ran their tests. Then they sat Matt down and told him he had a rare and aggressive cancer in his liver that was in Stage IV.
A former TV reporter who'd come to Little Rock from Seattle to work at KATV until Beebe latched onto him, DeCample received this news at the age of 41. He was only warming up his business as a communications consultant. He was only revving up his improvisational comedy routines at a local club.
Armed with the grave medical news, he went straightaway and created a blog to make fun of cancer and chronicle his battle. He titled it "Mattie D vs. The Evil C: Fighting cancer with writing and bad jokes. Also using modern medicine."
You may review the blog at decample.tumblr.com.
Matt had T-shirts printed with messages joking about his liver. He did comedy routines referencing his condition.
That humor--and the strength it reflected and provided--saved his life for a while, through more than 40 chemotherapy sessions.
He stayed funny nearly until the end, which came Sunday night.
Six Sundays before, when commentator Tony Romo performed with uncommon prescience as an analyst for the AFC championship football game between the New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs, DeCample knocked out a tweet that went viral and got him quoted in the national media.
It went like this: "Tony Romo--Calls plays before they happen. Points things out after plays before they can even cue up a replay. Troy Aikman--Gets most of the players' names right. Sometimes knows what down it is. Cris Collinsworth--creepy uncle."
Three weeks before, on Valentine's Day when local politicos try their hand at legislative humor with romantic puns and quips on Twitter, DeCample invoked the protracted bumbling in setting up the state's medical marijuana structure. He tweeted this Valentine's message: "I'll wait as long as it takes to legally cultivate my love for you."
Four days after Valentine's Day, he tweeted, "Malia Obama had a glass of wine at age 20? gasp clutches pearls If she had started three years earlier, she might have qualified for the U.S. Supreme Court someday."
So, yes, Matt was political until the near end.
I make that point as a counter to those who inevitably will say I'm politicizing DeCample's passing with the following anecdote, one in which I'm no more politicizing his death than he was politicizing his condition.
A few weeks out from the recent general election, local Democratic congressional candidate Clarke Tucker tried to frame his stretch run on the health-care issue with a news conference.
DeCample joined him. He was no prop. He was not exploited. He was there to tell a story only he could tell.
He dominated the news conference. If I'd written a full column on it, which it probably warranted, I'd have started: "The Clarke Tucker campaign held a news conference yesterday on health care at which the candidate also appeared."
DeCample explained the complex rigor of his treatments and said the great blessing was that he hadn't had to worry about finances. He went on to say that, midway through these treatments, he made a career change to pursue a lifelong dream and go into business for himself. He moved off group insurance to buy individual insurance on the Obamacare exchange. He said he got the switch done affordably without anyone ever asking about his pre-existing condition.
Obamacare did not allow for treating pre-existing conditions differently.
When I asked Tucker to respond to the inevitable response of Republican incumbent French Hill--which would be that he had voted for an Obamacare replacement that would have provided separate risk pools to provide state-by-state coverage of pre-existing conditions--DeCample said he'd like to answer.
He said the godsend for a cancer patient was not having to worry about insurance. Repealing the national system and setting up state-by-state systems would have subjected cancer patients to a crap shoot--to worry about what was actually covered and to what extent in the jurisdictions where they happened to live.
A blanket federal guarantee of coverage without regard for pre-existing conditions meant that a cancer patient could consider the options for his care without the compounding worry of how much cancer-fighting he could afford.
It was an issue that should have turned the election.
But things don't always turn out as they should.
Sometimes a brave young man of good nature, good humor and great grace gets a killer disease and fights it longer than most, but not forever.
Mattie D took The Evil C into a humorous triple overtime.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/06/2019