Today, November 10, would have been McCanna “Mac” Sinise’s 36th birthday, and his father picked it on purpose. Gary Sinise’s new book, Graceful Warrior: The True Story of a Son, a Father, and a Family Who Carried Each Other Through, arrives from Nelson Books today, according to the Gary Sinise Foundation and the publisher’s announcement. People ran an exclusive excerpt ahead of release.
Most of us met Gary Sinise as Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, the role that earned him an Oscar nomination, and many more know him from Apollo 13 and nine seasons of CSI: NY. Born March 17, 1955, he is 71 now, and he has spent the last few years away from acting for a reason he could never have planned for. The lesson he says his son left him is a simple one, and it took a whole book to explain.
Who Was Mac Sinise?
Mac was born on November 10, 1990, the only son among Gary and Moira Sinise’s three children. Music was his life. He graduated from the USC Thornton School of Music and played drums, sometimes filling in with his father’s Lt. Dan Band, which entertains troops and veterans across the country, according to People and 14 News. Gary and Moira, married since 1981, also raised daughters Sophie and Ella.
In 2018, when Mac was 27, doctors diagnosed him with chordoma, a rare cancer of the spine. That same year, Moira was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, as Fox 5 New York and 14 News reported. She beat it and is cancer-free. Mac’s fight was far longer, and it changed the shape of the family’s life.
How Did Gary Sinise Lose His Son?
The cancer left Mac paralyzed from the chest down, according to the Williamson Herald, and when he could no longer play the drums, he kept making music anyway. In the final week of his life he finished an album, Resurrection & Revival. Mac died on January 5, 2024, at 33. The family kept the news private for weeks and shared it on February 27, 2024, as our story on his son’s death reported at the time.
“As parents, it is so difficult losing a child,” Gary wrote in his statement, as Fox 5 reported. “Like any family experiencing such a loss, we are heartbroken and have been managing as best we can.” He added, “I am so blessed, fortunate, and proud to be his dad.” In the months after, he stepped back from Hollywood to be with family, and he made it his mission to get Mac’s music heard. That mission eventually turned into a book.
What Is Gary Sinise’s Book ‘Graceful Warrior’ About?
Sinise is clear about one thing. “This is not a book about cancer; it’s a book about the blessings and hope you need throughout the battle,” he told Publishers Weekly in October. Writing it meant going back through everything his son left behind, and it surprised him. “I thought I knew everything, but I discovered new things about his music and things he had written,” he said.
He didn’t set out to write a book at all. At a talk in Redding, California, last month, he told KRCR that messages kept arriving from strangers going through their own losses. “Some of the messages that were coming in were from people who were hurting,” he said, and he thought, “maybe I should go deeper and write a whole book.” He has been honest that the writing was painful. “There are times when I had to take a moment and let myself express the pain, sadness, and fear inside me,” he told Publishers Weekly.
The Lesson Gary Sinise Says His Son Taught Him
The title comes from the way Mac faced the worst of it. “He never wanted to quit,” Sinise said at a book event in Franklin, Tennessee, in October, as the Williamson Herald reported. “He kept going, and he kept going all the way to the end.” The father, by his own account, was not always so strong. “There were times where I fell down. It got to be more than I could bear.”
What he wants readers to take from Mac’s story is that courage isn’t only for soldiers or for the sick. “We all battle in our lives, and we all have the ability to be a graceful warrior,” he told Publishers Weekly. This year he has been taking Mac’s music to concert halls, from Milwaukee to Bangor, Maine, playing it with the Lt. Dan Band. And when he talks about his son now, it is less about the illness than about the young man who filled a room. “He was just one of those kinds of people that just brings a lot of light when they’re in the room,” Sinise said in Franklin. And as he told Publishers Weekly, “I hope I’m as graceful as my son was. He inspires me.”
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