A Fighting Chance

The commission’s most visible work was to hold public hearings. The staff and I worked hard to create a balanced list of witnesses—some banking industry advocates and some consumer advocates, some conservative economists and some liberal ones—but that doesn’t capture how these hearings actually worked. When we started, I thought the real point of the hearings would be to let people from different parts of the country participate in a public conversation about our bankruptcy laws. Gradually, I came to realize that even though the commission’s staff tried to be evenhanded, the playing field was sharply tilted.

Many of the same people showed up at the hearings, no matter where we held them. After a while, Brady clued me in: A bunch of bank lobbyists were being paid to follow us from town to town.

By contrast, relatively few bankrupt families attended those hearings. The commission’s chief counsel, Melissa Jacoby, worked hard to seek them out, but most people didn’t want to draw attention to their own financial failure. Even if they wanted to come, most bankrupt families couldn’t take a day off work or afford any travel expenses—and they had no lobbying group to put them up in a nice hotel and foot the bill.

To most of the people who attended those hearings, the families in bankruptcy were little more than abstract numbers. There was hardly anyone to talk firsthand about what it was like to lose a job or face overwhelming medical bills and how the bankruptcy system had given them a chance to get back on their feet. Commissioners might talk about debtors “gaming the system,” but they almost never had to look at a real person and make that accusation.

The whole process made me gag.

By law, the National Bankruptcy Review Commission’s report was due in October 1997. The final vote on our list of recommendations was a nail-biter. Judge Jones pushed hard for a series of recommendations that Congress should make it harder for families to file for bankruptcy, but in the end, she mustered only four votes. Five commissioners, led by Brady, recommended keeping the safety net intact and making just a few modest adjustments to the law. It wasn’t the three wishes that Mike Synar had once promised me, but the official commission report stood with the families in trouble.

The day arrived to deliver the report to Congress, and ceremonies were planned in Washington. All the commissioners and the staff showed up. I didn’t go. The good guys had won, by a one-vote margin, but I was sick of politics. I’d had enough of Washington.





Another Death

A few days after the final commission report was delivered, I flew to Oklahoma. My daddy’s slow cancer, it turned out, wasn’t so slow.

Daddy was eighty-six, and he wanted to die at home. In my whole life, I couldn’t remember that he had ever asked me for anything, but he asked for this: Let me die at home.

My brothers and I pulled in closer. We called a hospice. We split up what needed to be done. John and David were there every day, and I came whenever I could.

In a catalogue I came across a video series about the airplanes of World War II. I bought all the videotapes and took them to Daddy. I was sure he would love seeing the old planes, that he would point out this or that plane he remembered from the war. But he had no interest in those memories anymore. The only thing he wanted to talk about was Mother.

Daddy never spoke about it, but I could see that he was in a lot of pain. His breathing was often jagged. When someone moved him to change a sheet or adjust his pillow, he would often cry out involuntarily. Then he would quickly reassure us: “It’s fine. It’s fine.”

In December, Don Reed and I were both back for the weekend. With all four children nearby, Daddy seemed to let go. He was suddenly much worse. He held my hand and told me how much he loved me and that I was strong and I was going to be fine. The last thing he said to me was, “It’s time for me to be with your mother.” He closed his eyes and he never opened them again. Within the hour, he died.

After we buried Daddy, I grieved for a long time. For months—for years, actually—I would see or hear something and think, Oh, I’ll tell Daddy about that. And then I’d get a little jolt all over again.

I stopped watching sports as often. Without Daddy, the games weren’t the same.

Two years later, Aunt Bee died in her sleep. She was ninety-eight. A few days after that, I stood in the cemetery in Wetumka. Aunt Bee was way over on my left, in what had once been the northern edge of the cemetery, in the same family plot as my grandparents and various aunts and uncles. Far off to my right, near the southern edge of the cemetery, were my daddy’s parents and his side of the family. My mother and daddy were buried together, in a single plot right in between the two families. They had picked this spot many years earlier, and I wondered if all the angry words that had been traded back and forth about their defiant elopement mattered anymore.

Bruce and I seemed more alone. Bruce’s family—his mom and dad, his sister and her family, his brother—were all nearby, and every few weeks it seemed like someone had a birthday or we had a holiday to celebrate. But our house—which once hummed with slamming doors and buzzing voices—was quiet. Our kids were grown, and Mother, Daddy, and Aunt Bee were all gone. Bruce and I went hiking more often, and Faith stayed closer by my side. The hours I spent working—teaching, writing, researching—grew longer and longer.