A brief, timeless love story ends

Theirs was a love story to end all love stories. A love story maybe even “Love Story” couldn’t compete with — because Hank and Stacie Sisk’s story was true.

Not that they, or their marriage, were perfect. It was her second marriage, and his third.

And on the day they were married, Nov. 27, 2004, they knew they might not have much time together.

“We talked about it,” Stacie said Saturday after her husband’s memorial service at the Eugene Faith Center. “How can you deal with it if I only have three months to live?” Hank asked her in the weeks after proposing.

“We’ll deal with it moment by moment, day by day,” Stacie told him.

“And I’m so blessed that I had 51/2 years,” she said. She has no regrets. “We packed memory-making moments in. It’s like we were married for 20 years,” she said. And, yes, she means that in a good way. “Obviously, I wish we’d had the 20 years, but. …”

But how did Hank Sisk, a multimedia producer, even make it to age 43 after being diagnosed with a rare form of gastrointestinal cancer almost seven years ago? How did he make it to March 13 after Stacie drove him from their Cottage Grove home to the emergency room at Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend on Feb. 7?

“Every time I talked about Hank, my next phrase was: All bets are off with this guy,” Jim Jenkins, pastor at the Cottage Grove Faith Center, said during the two-hour service attended by about 200 friends and family members.

The Sisks’ story is all the more remarkable when you consider what happened 14 months after their wedding day. On Jan. 25, 2006, 36-year-old Stacie, a personal banker at the Wells Fargo branch in Cottage Grove and owner of her own talent agency, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Hank was by her side through four operations, still battling his own cancer that doctors said would take his life within a year.

They received their chemotherapy treatments in the same chair at the Willamette Valley Cancer Institute. They served as co-ambassadors of the American Cancer Society’s annual Relay for Life in 2006. They participated in the relay every year thereafter, raising about $3,000, Stacie said.

Today, her cancer is 20 months in remission. But she will be there in July when the 2010 Relay for Life kicks off. “I definitely plan on being a part of Relay for Life for life, or until we find a cure,” she said.

“Superdad”

John Henry Sisk was born on April 7, 1966, in Las Vegas to Gilford and Nora Sisk, the youngest of three children. His two sisters are both quite a bit older.

“We called him the ‘Geritol baby,’” his sister, Vickie Woodcook, said Saturday, after Stacie and her daughter, Alex Henderson, 16, and two stepdaughters, Marissa Sisk, 10, and Haley Sisk, 8, had let 50 yellow and green and blue balloons float toward the sky in memory of Hank.

He loved superheroes and comic books as a boy, and Superman was his favorite. To his daughters, and his stepson, Thomas Fotta, now a 23-year-old Army man stationed in Georgia, Hank became known as “Superdad” through his brave battle with cancer.

He was raised in Igo, Calif., an unincorporated community of about 600 west of Redding, where he wore cowboy hats and drove his black 1968 Dodge Charger in high school.

His best friend since fifth grade, Mike Jones, who spoke at the service Saturday, remembered that Hank “had my back” before he even really knew him. And, of course, Hank had his sense of humor. A mean kid challenged Jones, the new boy at school, to a fight one day. Hank showed up and jumped between them at the last second.

“Hold on!” Hank hollered, flashing a piece of paper. Jones thought it might be some sort of “peace treaty.” Nope, just an announcement.

“Welcome, everybody, to the big fight between Mike Jones and …” 10-year-old, freckle-nosed Hank said.

At a funeral, the sound of 200 people laughing is good.

Hank, who worked making TV commercials for Adlib Advertising in Eugene, was already an actor/director at age 12, Jones remembered. They used to roam the creeks around Igo making “war movies,” Jones said. Around the seventh or eighth grade, Hank “actually wrote a 15-minute screenplay based on ‘Star Wars,’” he said. Hank was Darth Vader and Jones was Obi-Wan Kenobi. But Hank’s handwriting wasn’t so good. Jones mistook an ‘H’ for a ‘W’ and belted out the line, “Weed my word, Darth Vader” as he swung his fake light saber.

The two played football together at Shasta High School, Hank wearing no. 44, his favorite number. He went on to play football as a defensive back at Shasta College and graduated from Chico State in 1988.

“Glimmer of hope”

Hank and Stacie met in 1993. They were on opposite softball teams in a Eugene recreation league. A few years later, their teams merged. Hank was the coach of the Emporium Plate Smashers and played second base. Stacie played first base.

During a game in September 2004, after both their marriages had ended, Hank proposed. Stacie was at bat at the Amazon North Field by South Eugene High School. The umpire called her out for wearing jewelry. What jewelry? Suddenly, Hank was on his knees with a ring. She said yes, then belted a home run over the fence.

Hank loved softball. “It could be the bottom of the last inning with two outs, and my father could pull everyone together and give a glimmer of hope,” said Fotta, his stepson from his first marriage, in a video recording sent from Georgia that was shown at the memorial service.

A glimmer of hope.

Hank was always giving that, and more, before his deadly diagnosis and after, his family and friends recalled Saturday. “To me, my father was the very definition of strength,” Fotta said. “Not because he could lift a million pounds. His strength came from within.”

Hank and his fellow Eugene Delta Rotary Club member Tony Metcalf had breakfast one day, and Hank had a question for Metcalf. “What is God’s reason for keeping me around?”

“He wants you to spend more time with your friends and family,” Metcalf told him. “I never heard Hank complain,” Metcalf said during the service. “He never allowed selfishness or bitterness to rule his life. Some would call it grace.”

“He died in my arms”

One of Hank’s dreams was to make a movie. In 2008, he did just that. It’s just a 20-minute film called “The Note,” about a family that loses a daughter to cancer. But it was Hank’s pride and joy. It’s a cancer awareness film starring Hank and Stacie and their three daughters and produced with cancer survivors.

In the movie, the daughter who has died of cancer, portrayed by Haley, writes comforting letters to her father from heaven. The words are invisible to everyone but him. The screenplay is based on the notes Haley wrote to her father in real life during his cancer battle.

After a few days in the hospital in February, Hank returned home to Cottage Grove; to a morphine drip and his own bed. Doctors said he would be lucky to make it through the month. But, as always, he lasted longer than anyone thought he would. “I had a gut feeling he was trying to make it to his 44th birthday,” Stacie said, referring to both his favorite number and April 7.

“He died in my arms. He was looking right in my eyes. It was pretty amazing.”

It was 5:44 p.m.