Cancer cutting life but not Utahn's living

Paul Berg feels forced to remember death daily.

The Lehi resident has walked beneath its looming shadow for six weeks, since his doctor told him his 6-year-old, recurring mouth cancer is incurable.

"It makes you think, 'How much time do I really have here?' " he said.

It's a question he can answer with perhaps more accuracy than most, though, because surgeons give him three to 24 months to live.

The cancer appeared as a painful hole in his bottom lip, but it also showed up with a tremendous amount of irony.

When his cancer set in, Berg and his wife, Tiffany, had just co-created a charity foundation to build and remodel homes for people in dire need of better living conditions.

"Paul showed up at our first home project with 150 stitches in his face," Tiffany Berg remembered about his first surgery in 2003. "He didn't feel good, he was sick, but he was excited to be there and to be serving."

While Paul Berg quietly fought his tissue-ravaging disease through dozens of surgeries over the next several years, he helped his nonprofit foundation stir up more than $2.5 million from sponsors and become nationally recognized. The couple and their Heart 2 Home Foundation team remodeled older homes and built new ones for nine desperate Utah families.

During that same period, the Bergs lost two homes. They sold their first house and funneled its equity into medical bills, then lost a lease on their second after more medical bills piled up and strained their income.

This week a crew of mostly strangers gathered at a commercial garage in Sandy to help Paul finish a project he and his father started two years ago: the complete building of his classic 1965 muscle car, a fastback Shelby Cobra similar to the iconic pepper gray speedster revered as a leading cast member in the 2000 blockbuster "Gone in 60 Seconds."

The project, which is now on Paul Berg's "bucket list," started when he and his father took off to Detroit for a $1,200 three-day crash course on rebuilding the beauty at a small college. They came home and went to work, but 1,000 hours later, the father-son project screeched to a halt. The unforgiving cancer again broke down Paul Berg and took everything he had.

The 90 percent completed, two-seater hot rod collected dust in his father's garage while he had seven more surgeries and took time off to support his wife, who was crowned Mrs. Utah United States in 2007. He wrote her a song in which he laments, "All I want is more time with you."

He no longer hits those same notes after this past month's surgery in which nine tumors were removed from his mouth, neck and chin.

"But hey," he said, "I still got my hands to play (the piano). I can do that up to the end."

Then he was silent for a few moments.

"I had a lot of things planned, a lot of things I was going to do someday," he said. "I never saw this coming. I mean, I was so healthy before. I could count the sick days I've taken (off) on one hand."

But the Cobra crew of strangers in the Sandy snakes den were busy making sure at least this project gets done — and within three weeks.

No matter how long that yawning bridge from birth to death has been shortened by cancer, Tiffany Berg, a well known motivational speaker and author, said the sad experience has made the couple closer partners, better Christians and that much nearer to "eternal matters."

E-MAIL: jhancock@desnews.com