A father loses his best friend, only son
By Michael Futch
Last week, Jean Bowden gave her nephew, Bobby, an autographed picture of country singer Carrie Underwood.
Bobby Sherman loved music. Loved to dance. And he regarded Underwood, the former “American Idol,” as one of his favorites.
With the gift, Bowden was banking on bringing a smile to that sweet, chubby face. Those trademark Bobby Sherman grins had become less and less frequent.
“He held that picture and said, ‘She’s beautiful.’ I thought, ‘What a brave guy.’ It’s tough. He has been able to bully through everything, and this time he can’t.”
Blind since infancy, Bobby had beaten the odds throughout life. But this time, doctors doubted that the video-game marvel with the freckles and crackly voice could overcome a rare and aggressive form of cancer that had wormed its way into his organs.
The doctors proved right.
Bobby died at 5:05 a.m. Tuesday, two days after his 20th birthday.
Phillip Sherman, his father, lost his only child and best friend. “He took it better than any man ever could,” he said.
Over the years, The Fayetteville Observer has chronicled Bobby’s life: When he lost his mother in 2002; when he was a freshman at Douglas Byrd High School; when he participated in an Independent Living program for visually impaired young people; and when he needed a paying job.
Bobby had an innate sense when someone was trying to pull one over on him or sugarcoat the situation. “Ah, c’mon,” he would say.
Bobby wanted the truth.
When a classmate in Douglas Byrd’s educable mentally disabled program hunkered over his desk to read a magazine up close, complaining all the while that life wasn’t fair, Bobby volunteered:
“That’s the way life is sometimes.”
For Bobby, life had been that way much of the time. Still, his blindness and other medical conditions never diminished his passion.
Bobby — remarkably resilient, bright, tender-hearted — saw the world in a different way.
“His body’s shutting down, day-by-day,” Phillip Sherman said Friday while sitting at his kitchen table in the next room from his dying son.
He hoped his boy could make it through the weekend. Bobby’s health had declined dramatically since he first told his father that he felt bad during a fishing trip to Shearon Harris Lake eight weeks ago.
Like his dad, Bobby loved to fish, but he didn’t like to hold his catch. The fish felt too slimy. So when Bobby snagged one, his father would take it off the hook.
“I’m going to be lost,” Phillip Sherman said. “Losing his Mama wasn’t nothing. She left me someone.”
A couple of weeks ago, one of Bobby’s doctors at Duke Children’s Hospital and Health Center in Durham told Phillip Sherman to take some time off work so he could be there for Bobby. He didn’t hesitate.
“That was my friend. I never call him my son,” he said. “That was my friend.”
Last week, Phillip Sherman’s eyes started to moisten as he stood on the front porch of his weathered double-wide mobile home. Inside, Bobby lay on a sofa, an arm draped over his head and a blanket spread over his thinning body.
He had been on oxygen for a couple of weeks, and he was taking morphine for the pain.
“How’s my breathing?” Bobby asked his father before Phillip Sherman stepped outside the door.
Bobby lay stiffly on the sofa, the television flickering in front of him. A glimpse of Bobby’s face indicated he was afraid.
“He ain’t scared to die,” his father said. “He’s scared to leave me.”
Bobby’s struggle to survive came in darkness.
When Bobby was 2, surgeons at Duke University removed the second of his baby-blue eyes, the same color as his mother’s.
Bobby had tumors — medically known as trilateral retinoblastoma — in both eyes, in his brain stem and in his right arm.
He underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment at Duke, a grueling regimen for anyone. An almost unspeakable ordeal for a child.
He would remain a cancer patient the rest of his life.
In all, Phillip Sherman estimates that Bobby underwent 36 surgeries. For the first 12 years of his life, he needed blood transfusions. So much radiation was used to kill the brain tumors, his father once said, that it stunted his growth.
Later in life, Bobby discovered that he was diabetic.
“Medically fragile,” Phillip Sherman called his son.
Bobby was never expected to live long. When doctors first found the tumors, they told his mother, Sissy Bowden, to take him home and enjoy the time she had left with him. He probably had less than a year to live, she was told.
“He’s inspiring,” said Jean Bowden, his aunt. “He’s been through so much. His whole life has been touches of sadness, and Bobby knows that. I guess that’s how he has faced everything.”
The boy never cried when his mother died at 37 of ovarian cancer. He was 14.
And no tears were shed after his doctor, Philip Rosoff at Duke’s Children’s Hospital, told Bobby he had something he needed to talk to him about.
“And Bobby said, ‘Before you talk to me, Dr. Rosoff, can I ask you a question?’ And Dr. Rosoff said, ‘Yes, Bobby, you can ask me any question,’” Phillip Sherman said.
“Am I going to die?”
“And Dr. Rosoff said, ‘Bobby, I’ll never give up on you, but, yes. You’re going to die.’ You know, he ain’t shed no tear yet.”
In the last year, after earning his high school degree, Bobby mostly stayed home while his father went to work at Competition Automotive Service in Spring Lake. Bobby cooked for himself. Showered. Dressed himself. When he felt like it, he rode his bicycle around the neighborhood or played video games. Bobby loved the fighting games, and he was good at them.
Blindness never stopped Bobby from independence.
It was the only way he ever knew in a life that ended too soon.
“All I did,” Phillip Sherman said, “was drive him around to the store or to Fun Fun Fun or get him something to eat and be his friend.”
Bobby is being cremated. A memorial service is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday at Friendship Baptist Church in Hope Mills.
On Aug. 13, Jean Bowden had one of her last opportunities to spend some “Aunt Jean and Bobby time.”
That was when she presented him the picture of Carrie Underwood. Bobby smiled after he told her it was beautiful.
“That was all I needed,” she said. “My job was to make him smile.”
He set the framed picture of the singer beside the television. Though it might not make sense to some, Bobby kept it there so he could see it.
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that is so sad. 
thanks to Ver for the set! iloveit.
