Raising the Dad Read online

  “He didn’t tell you?!” There was a scolding in her voice. “How could you let him—?”

  “He said he’d explain everything, after … After…” he insisted defensively before trailing off. “Help me!”

  Her responding to his raw plea came automatically. In this precise moment, the best of what they brought to each other seemed to seep back in tentative rivulets. It ran sludgier, but there it was.

  She found the right tone.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Who the fuck knows? In the entire history of dead fathers, nobody’s ever had to deal with this!”

  “Well, maybe there’s been somebody,” she instinctively countered. John had never learned to love the way Robin brought an arbitrary contrariness to their marriage, often when she seemed to know it would rev him up.

  His terse glare told her this was one of those times.

  She sat silently and watched him pace. Over the years they had racked up hours of silence in this park, the two of them running out of words without ever getting to the nub of what was dying in their marriage. Those quiet stretches grew to be agonizing, neither willing to articulate the hard things that needed to be said.

  Now, as John continued to pace and chew his lower lip frenetically, Robin finally grabbed him gently at the wrist.

  “Hey,” she soothed. “Sit.”

  He parked himself beside her on a picnic table. John felt stillness for the first time since he had crossed into room 116. He appreciated her bringing him to it.

  But she knew there was work to be done.

  “You have to tell your mother,” Robin said.

  “How?” he agonized, jumping up to pace again. “Does Hallmark have a card for this? ‘Congratulations, turns out your husband’s not dead!’”

  “John…” she scolded. He shook his head regretfully; usually he knew when his humor went wrong.

  “This could kill her,” he sighed.

  “You don’t know that. When you were telling me, it sounded like as awful as this is, something has touched you in a way you need to share with her.”

  He exhaled deeply, rifling through the barrage of emotions he had been wrestling with the past several hours.

  “I don’t even think about him anymore,” John said sadly. “I haven’t for years. The whole time you’ve known me, I haven’t gone to the cemetery once. I couldn’t find his grave if you put a gun to my head.

  “Whatever he used to be to me, he had just become a bunch of bones at the bottom of a hole. And, you know, that’s what it was. That’s what I knew.”

  Robin recognized his harsh dispassion as a defense mechanism. She knew he needed to sort this out his way.

  “But all this time later, to just stand beside him…” He sighed, then the tears came. Robin held him. The silence of the park was broken for several hard minutes by John’s sobs.

  He finally pulled himself together and broke the hug with his wife.

  “I have to tell her,” he said resolutely. But with dread.

  “Yes, you do. But you shouldn’t have to do it alone. Tell Mike, make him help you with this. Make him do something decent for his family for once.”

  Robin had no affection for Mike. She spent years watching John try to forge some sort of relationship with his older brother, despite Mike’s disinterest in anyone but himself.

  Over the course of their entire marriage, she probably had no more than ten conversations with her brother-in-law that lasted over five minutes. Mike knew about eighties heavy metal, and dope, and how much better the world would be if everybody just smoked dope while listening to eighties heavy metal. Everything else—politics, culture, essential human connections—were of no use to Mike Husted.

  But Robin saw right away that Mike might be the answer here.

  “He won’t feel this the way you do,” she reasoned. “All you’ve ever told me was how he hated your father. He’ll be able to look at this dispassionately and maybe know what to do. He could surprise you.”

  John scrunched his mouth skeptically. “You think?”

  “Sure. He might have heard an Iron Maiden song that addresses this very thing.”

  She winked; he smiled. An echo of something good returned to them.

  “But you can’t tell either one of them until you know how the hell this happened,” she said, bucking him up for what he had to do next. “You need to sit this old doctor down—first thing tomorrow—and not let him up until this all makes sense. Do you want me to come with you?”

  John studied her intensity with fondness.

  “I think you’d scare him.”

  “He needs scaring.”

  “I’ll handle it,” he said, hugging her. “This is for me to take care of.”

  Eleven

  Walt invited him to his home when John called the next day just past dawn.

  John had not slept all night. There in the silent darkness, he picked up a kind of radio signal that he now knew his father had been sending from across town. He thought of the moments in his life for which his father had been absent and his mind convulsed to think that Larry had been nearby all along. Although he hadn’t; not really. Not in any way that could have engaged John and his family.

  Nothing—not one damned thing—would have been any different if Larry had played a mute, meaningless role in his son’s life over the past thirty years. Or so John reasoned in those first mad hours of acceptance.

  The ornate Bolger house smelled of coffee, eggs, and bacon as Walt led John back to the kitchen, still locked in a late 1970s fustiness.

  Pleasantries were not attempted. Breakfast clotted on their plates. Walt picked up where he left off the day before.

  “When I spoke to your mother that day so long ago about ending your father’s life, he should have died the next day. Or the next week,” he began. “We kept his feeding tube in; we would not starve him to death. But every day I came into the office, I knew with all my heart that it should be the day that he would finally let go. He had to let go.

  “We had crossed some very bad lines, John. We knew that.”

  “Who’s ‘we?’” John asked darkly.

  “It was me, and three others. Friends of your father’s. They’re dead now. Your business now is just with me.”

  John silently, sternly commanded the tale to continue.

  “We had put our careers in jeopardy; we had exposed ourselves and the hospital to enormous legal risk. And the only way what I am about to tell you makes any sense—the only way—is if you believe that at a time of so much grief and uncertainty, we were trying to do right by both your mother and your father.”

  The old man’s earnestness was compelling; John had to give him that. Walt, sensing John’s willingness to hear the whole tale before lashing out, cinched up and carried on.

  “They think that before long, computers might make it possible to repair the brain,” Walt began. “Computer chips now restore hearing and eyesight, control pacemakers. It’s just a matter of time before maybe they can be used to regenerate cognitive function.”

  John jolted at the news; Walt moved quickly to correct any misunderstanding.

  “It’s too late for your father, John. Years and years too late,” he said tersely. “But I am telling you this because I need you to understand the conversations your father and I had right up until the day he had his stroke. Look…”

  John had given serious notice to a meticulously stacked pile of thick manila folders on the kitchen table. Tabs were color coded, with piles of folders sorted accordingly. Walt opened the first one and slid a copy of the local newspaper toward John. The date in the headline was February 21, 1985. The day Larry had the stroke.

  “See,” Walt urged. “This is the story I told you about, the newspaper article your father and I were discussing.”

  John saw the short newspaper article about William Schroeder, one of the first artificial heart recipients who crashed an early barrier by spending a whopping fifteen min
utes outside his Louisville hospital.

  “Every day back then, it seemed there were stories like these,” Walt said eagerly. “They were miraculous times, and for young doctors like me and your father—so dedicated and so damned full of ourselves—we knew we were blessed to be there on the cutting edge. We wanted to lead the way on some of this.”

  John flipped through one of the folders. It was full of articles from newspapers and densely written medical journals, dating back to the fifties. Jagged handwriting filled the margins.

  “That was your father’s file. That’s his writing,” Walt marveled.

  John absorbed the soft throb tickling his heart as he saw his father’s unfamiliar scrawl.

  “Remember, this was the eighties. Computers hadn’t been available to us all that long. And they were nothing like what we have today.

  “The medical journals, they knew what was coming,” Walt continued, fanning another stack of medical stories. “Everything was going to get smaller, computer chips were going to get faster. With what they were promising, anything seemed possible. And so much of it came true!

  “In the mid-seventies, they refined a chemotherapy drug that took the cure rate in testicular cancer from ten percent to ninety-five percent. Saved tens of thousands of lives. But it came just a few years too late to save your grandfather. Larry’s dad. That haunted him.

  “Seeing how technology was moving things forward so much faster, he became obsessed with losing control of his own care. He needed to know that if he could no longer make decisions for himself, the rest of us—the doctors he trusted with his life—would fight to keep him viable if there was any chance of recovery.”

  Walt produced a lone manila envelope with just one document inside. He slid it to John. It was a legal agreement, with Larry’s signature at the bottom.

  “He wanted all of us to sign one,” Walt sighed. “But none of us took it as seriously as he did. Bob Schurmer, his lawyer, drew that up. It’s giving us permission—it’s ordering us—to not let him go.”

  John stared at the document, queasy at the degree to which his father had taken this. He wondered about the state of Larry’s mind. His faith in medicine and belief in his own powers bordered on the obsessive.

  John jabbed his finger at the signed agreement with incomprehension. “Why would anyone even think to—”

  Walt held up his finger to silence him, anticipating just this moment.

  Five separate stacks of folders were set apart from the rest, each bulging with material. Walt slid the first of them into play, the name Schiavo etched neatly on the tab.

  “You remember the Terri Schiavo case?” Walt began.

  Of course John did; it had only been a few years before. A woman in Florida fell into a coma and she hung on for years. Eventually her husband wanted to let her die, but her family didn’t. John remembered being thoroughly disgusted by the family’s intervention. He thought it was ghoulish and profane to keep a hollowed-out shell of a human being alive simply because technology made it possible, and God commanded it.

  “That case all came down to this,” Walt urged as he touched Larry’s signed order.

  “The Schiavo thing was a few years ago!” John cried impatiently. “He signed this in … 1976!”

  Per the script he had spent decades crafting for just this moment, Walt slid forward more stacks of evidence. It was almost as if he were constructing a barrier between himself and John.

  “Karen Ann Quinlan was twenty-one years old in 1975 when she mixed alcohol with prescription drugs and fell into a coma that transitioned into a persistent vegetative state,” the old doctor recalled from memory. “Irreparable brain damage, just like your father. After a few months, her parents—good Catholics—wanted to let her die. But her doctors—and the courts—said no.

  “Your father watched the Quinlan case closely. He was mad at this girl’s parents. After only four months they were giving up on her and trying to shut down her ventilator. Four months! Because Karen wasn’t able to tell them she wanted them to keep fighting for her.”

  The old man laid his palm across Larry’s signed decree as a silence descended upon the kitchen. John recognized the need to meticulously read this document with the same care that his father had drafted it.

  He read aloud his father’s command: “‘I order that all actions be taken to sustain my life, until it is the consensus of the doctors to whom I am entrusting my care that there is no current or pending medical measures that could provide a reasonable expectation of restoring me to a cognitive state of being as defined by me to be a state of mental and physical ability, notwithstanding grave and perhaps permanent diminishment of function that could result from my impairment.’”

  John’s eyes bore a hole through the mournful old man. “He’s saying, ‘Once there’s no hope, you have to let me go.’”

  Walt stared at his coffee cup. John angrily balled up Larry’s agreement and brandished it at the old man.

  “He trusted you to let him go!” John shouted.

  Twelve

  Walt stood slowly from the kitchen table and wandered away when John’s anger hit its peak. He thought the old man had walked to another part of the house merely to let the tension subside, but when he didn’t return John followed. He found Walt standing alone in a dusty bedroom, empty aside from a hospital bed and walls adorned with images of the Bolgers’ Catholic faith.

  “Within days of your father’s stroke and continuing all the way to your reunion with him yesterday, I have known that to most eyes he appears dead in all ways other than the air in his lungs and the blood in his veins,” Walt said solemnly. “To be a life not worth saving.”

  John stood among the portentous religious imagery and immediately sensed where this was leading.

  “‘Sanctity of life’ is a phrase that has become such a charged expression over the years,” Walt continued. “I know for people like you, who don’t hold to the word of God, it’s within your capacity to decide which lives don’t measure up. Don’t quite deserve a chance, especially if they’re just going to be in the way.”

  John’s temples began to throb. The air in the room turned icy as it grew thin.

  “My wife and I, we didn’t live that way. We truly had no expectation that your father would hang on more than a few weeks, maybe a few months. But the path for your father was never ours to choose.

  “If it was God’s will to keep Larry alive, then it was our duty to minister to him. No matter the sacrifice,” he said stoically, gesturing to the empty bed. “This was his home. For twenty years.”

  John’s mind roiled as he stared at the bed.

  “Terri Schiavo lived for fifteen years in your father’s condition,” Walt said. “If her family had had their way, she could still be alive, knowing the care they would have provided her. If the patient is fed and hydrated, if disease and infection are treated effectively, if their environment is kept as sterile as possible, a human life is a very resilient thing.

  “But their care is unrelenting, often without insurance. Few loved ones can be expected to take on such a burden. Marie and I accepted the task as a blessing, and as a test of our faith.”

  John went to a window and stared out, his thoughts overwhelmed. Terri Schiavo had hung on for years, that was one of the surreal elements of the story. That happened.

  “I still had my practice,” the old man continued, “so it was on Marie to set Larry up here and tend to him. Changing his feeding supply, repositioning him to avoid bedsores, keeping him clean and sanitary—it’s all simpler than you’d think, but it’s constant. And she committed herself to him, a hundred percent.

  “She loved that man, John. If nothing else, I hope you’ll believe that. She gave him such tender care, I really think you would have been touched by that.”

  John turned away from the window. Brutal truths continued to pummel his comprehension of all this.

  “Your wife and my mother had been best friends,” John whispered bitterly. “My
mother was across town, and the two of you said nothing.

  “She thinks her husband is dead!” John hissed.

  Walt joined John at the window. “Son,” he began softly, “the moment I committed to this, the moment I lied to your family about your father, I put myself at terrible risk—legally, professionally. Morally. And the longer it dragged on, the more I had to lose.

  “I don’t expect you to give a damn about any of this, but that’s where I found myself,” Walt said plainly. “Marie and I pulled back from your mother—we pulled back from pretty much the whole town—so that there wouldn’t be a risk of being found out. That’s how much we believed in what we were doing.”

  The old man sighed.

  “Then Marie died. May 2004,” he said quietly. “That left just me and Larry. For maybe a year I tried to take it all on myself, but it damned near killed me.

  “So for a good while I brought in hospice nurses. They were young, fresh out of nursing school; I told them Larry was my brother. They weren’t going to question old doc Bolger.

  “But as it dragged on, the agency started asking questions. I was surprised they let it go as long as they did.

  “But the time finally came when Larry couldn’t live here anymore.”

  The old man heaved a weary sigh.

  “That was the closest I came to letting him die. God had given me this test, and it looked like I was finally going to fail,” he said. “But then came this.”

  He had the Schiavo file again.

  He reminded John that 2005 brought the closing chapter in the Schiavo firestorm. The Bolgers, virtually trapped in their home to hide Larry’s presence, had spent the previous six years monitoring the endless fight over Terri Schiavo’s life. They drew strength and validation from the faithful who filled their TV screen all day and night, forcefully sharing their belief that even the most stilled life was a gift from God. Marie Bolger died praying that that poor girl down in Florida would be spared by being delivered to her family’s care.