A Fighting Chance

Two days later, I called Mike and said yes.

The job with the commission was part-time, so I kept teaching at Harvard and started flying down to Washington for a day or two at a time. I was the commission’s senior advisor, and it was my responsibility to make proposals, manage the research, and write first drafts of the recommendations for the commissioners to approve.

Over the next few months, I began digging in. I met with the other commissioners. I went about gathering research and hiring good people, setting up a schedule, and organizing our agenda. Mike started pulling in people to talk about our plans. It was exciting—like drawing up blueprints and beginning to build something new. But the best part was lying in bed at night thinking about the three good changes. It felt better than Christmas. Three changes that could make a difference for working families. Three wishes.





Two Funerals

And then it all broke apart. Before the commission could really get under way, before we had even agreed on those three good ideas, Mike was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He stopped working and hunkered down for radiation therapy. The last time I saw him, Mike was bony and bald and his hands shook. Just talking seemed to exhaust him.

On January 9, 1996, Mike died. He was forty-five.

The day of his memorial service was cold and rainy. We gathered at historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, on Lafayette Square, across from the White House. President Clinton spoke, along with then-congressman Dick Durbin. It was a huge affair, packed with the politically powerful. There were lots of handshakes and hugs, but I kept pretty much to myself. I’d never met these people.

I left the church believing that I was leaving Washington for the last time. Mike and I had a deal. Now Mike was gone, and I wasn’t coming back.

Mike’s funeral was the second in six months. The first was a much harder good-bye, smaller and more personal.

Daddy had called in the summer of 1995 to say that Mother needed to have an operation—a cancerous polyp, but nothing serious. The doctors had promised a noninvasive surgery. She’d need to be in the hospital for a few days.

Nothing serious, Daddy insisted, but he seemed rattled. Bruce and I decided to go back to Oklahoma City for a little family gathering. We wanted to be there when Mother went into the hospital.

I’d been home only a few hours when my brother David took me aside to say that not long ago he had found Mother wandering near their house, apparently lost. I tried to ask Daddy about it, but he said she was just tired or a little confused by the odd layout of the nearby streets.

Daddy held Mother’s hand whenever there were people around. He talked more now, and he would start nearly every sentence with “Polly, you remember…” and then fill in the story or the name of whoever was in the room.

After the operation, the doctors told us it had gone well, and Mother seemed to be recovering just fine. The day after her surgery, we gathered in her room, telling stories and laughing. Mercy Hospital was pretty relaxed, and they let some of my teenage and twenty-something nieces and nephews take Mother on wheelchair races up and down the hallways. Everyone laughed, and we ate cookies and drank juice from the nurses’ station.

Mother was due to go home the next morning, and Daddy thought we were tiring her out. So on her last night in the hospital, Daddy sent us all home and sat quietly holding her hand.

Late that evening, she sat up in bed and said, “Don, there’s that gas pain again.” Then she fell back dead.

The doctors arrived in less than a minute and tried to revive her, but she’d had a massive heart attack. The autopsy showed that she had advanced coronary disease—never diagnosed, never treated. And now she was gone.

John’s wife, Barbara, called. “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry.” I didn’t cry—I just didn’t believe her. I couldn’t believe her. My mother was eighty-three, maybe old by some standards, but Aunt Bee was ninety-three and spry as ever. And my grandmother had been energetic and active until she died at ninety-four. I knew Mother was fading a little, but I thought she was strong and healthy.

That was the hardest part for me: my mother was always strong—and in the blink of an eye she was gone.

Family poured in from everywhere for her funeral. I felt dazed.

A few days later, I was back in the spare bedroom at my parents’ house. I was lying on the twin bed on my back, crying. My daddy came in, and I got up and held out my arms. I thought he would hold me and tell me that we were very sad but we still had each other.

But he just stood there and said, “I want to die.”

I held him while he cried. I rubbed his shoulders, but he kept on crying. I told him what I’d hoped he would say to me: that our hearts were broken but we still had each other and everything would be all right. But I wasn’t sure it was true.