‘It’s going to be OK’
Mark Rine was good at saving people.
And then Heather Durbin saved him from himself.
The couple were high school sweethearts, reunited years later, who fell in love.
Back then, Rine treated most people in his life badly and used them for whatever he needed. He drank too much. He became so depressed at times that he would sit in his truck and consider ramming it into something so his pain would end for good.
He isn’t sure why he acted that way. Mark Rine reads at bedtime with 6-year-old daughter, Halle.
In 2012, hours after a surprise family engagement party, Durbin was awakened in the middle of the night by a noise not far from her bed. Rine had mistaken the dresser for a toilet.
Rum always had been Rine’s drink of choice. He guzzled it almost daily, usually alone. He successfully hid his problem from Durbin for a while, and she tolerated his behavior.
But this was her breaking point. “I can’t marry you if you are going to act like this,” Durbin shouted when he awoke the next morning, remembering nothing. “I can’t have someone drinking around our kids.”
Rine didn’t really remember the drunken night, but his fiancée’s message sobered him instantly. He walked downstairs, grabbed the remaining bottles of rum and poured the booze down the drain. He hasn’t had a drink since.
Shortly before they married, Durbin spotted a mole on the right side of Rine’s back.
She hounded him almost daily to have it checked. But he ignored her pleas until a mom from their daughter’s softball team noticed it and said her brother had one similar — and had recently died because of it.
So Rine made a doctor’s appointment.
Just two months after their summer 2012 wedding, a doctor told them that Rine had cancer and didn’t have long to live. He’s beating the odds, yes, but death is always in the room.
It’s going to be OK, Rine tells folks.
But he knows it really won’t be OK ever again.
Changing a ‘macho’ culture
When Columbus Fire Chief Greg Paxton retired in 2015, he planned to start a business and travel the world with his fiancée, Paula Friedrich, guided by a list of the best places for wine.
For nearly two years, they did just that. Then five months ago, he started urinating blood. Doctors discovered a cancerous tumor in his bladder.
Paxton had heard Rine’s warning lecture. But as chief, he had so many other things to worry about.
He also carried a level of arrogant invincibility. After all, this is a guy who once jumped into the frigid Scioto River in nothing but his long johns to save a drowning man.
It’s difficult for many people to