In health crisis, a son seeks answers to father’s death

Purposeful delusion

Was it a coincidence that my heart disease became acute at age fifty-three, roughly the same age my father died? And how strange as I watch the years go by, as events become private memories or public history open to interpretation—and Dad remains several weeks past his forty-ninth birthday, voting in his last presidential election to reelect Lyndon Johnson, never returning to Eastern Europe where he was born, not alive to see his three children and their children grow—bringing a halt to relationships with all their enduring complexities, surprises, and delight. Memories of Dad, once calcified, crumble: his laugh; his making fun of his overweight, increasingly shapeless body; his voice, gestures, and facial expressions; his jokes and bestowed nicknames; his odor and touch; his take on our world.

I see my reflection today, which shows a man decades older than Dad ever was. I see the absurdity of projecting him as a retiree, his transition to father-in-law and grandpa. I can’t rationally imagine him witnessing my graduations, marriage, careers, fatherhood, becoming a grandfather to five rowdy boys. And yet, daily, he remains an active element in my life. A self-serving conjecture that he lost more from dying than I lost, finding myself too young to draw complex and reasonable conclusions about life, especially his. We both lost and, in other ways, won. He freed himself from hopeless suffering. His death freed me to escape parental expectations and become a partly successful, if financially under-rewarded, creative.

January 2007. A week before my triple-bypass surgery, it was with such “emotional packing” that I sought a follow-up session with a therapist (let’s call her Dr. J.) who had helped me through one of my periodic (though far from paralyzing) depressions a few years earlier. My motivation at the time was coping with the truth that my career as a writer was functionally over once one of my novels for young adults was shredded by self-anointed censors proclaiming that teenage readers should not be exposed to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll because, as we all know (wink, wink) such things turned decent kids crazy.

Dr. J. was in her sixties and favored a Georgia O’Keefe, New Mexican style to her office and clothing. Her empathy never devolved into pity. She had tracked the details of my life and our sessions together (as I’m sure she did with other patients) as if secret recording equipment was hidden in one of her Santa Clara potteries on display. After a year, I stopped seeing her when she assured me that my professional identity remained a writer, regardless of commercial failures—one of those “half a loaf is better than no bread” concessions.

After bringing up my current situation regarding marriage, adolescent daughters, work, mood, and such, she asked me why I chose to see her again, which prompted my invocation of potentially catastrophic cardiovascular disease.

I drew distinctions between Dad’s suicide and my imminent dance with death. He was in the throes of a psychotic episode. I wasn’t. He was convinced he’d never return to a “normal” life. I had no plans not to. He decided his family was better off without him. I was determined not to render my wife Coleen a widow and our three daughters fatherless. He was likely convinced that he faced a long, debilitating death due to an inoperable brain tumor. Most mornings, I woke with a headache, but I hadn’t stretched fatalism to include a terminal brain disease.

Before leaving, I asked, “So, any parting words of wisdom?”

Always thoughtful, Dr. J. paused, parsing her words. Then, with perfect syntax, she said, “You have the opportunity to heal your heart. Something your father never had.”

“Blood Flow”

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February 2007. Once hatched, the sea squirt resembles a tadpole swimming along the ocean floor. It has a single eye and a brain that navigates and controls its tail until reaching a place on the ocean floor to settle. There, it implants itself in the sand and lives out its existence, waiting for food to drift by. It also eats its brain because there is no further need for it. Such is business travel.

Against doctors’ orders, I’m traveling a few weeks after open-heart surgery. Since making the bold (and in retrospect, idiotic) decision to start my own consulting business the prior October, unbeknown that I’d be looking for a thoracic surgeon come December, I’m traveling more than ever. Several clients expressed compassion immediately, followed by concern about my availability, and added, “If you’re unable to finish the project on schedule, we’ll need to hire someone else.” I cannot lift my carry-on luggage to a plane’s overhead storage without help from the cabin crew or a kind stranger. Sitting for hours in an economy seat, I might as well be shackled and hanging from my wrists in a dungeon torture room.

As departure time nears, I can barely stand without the support of a wall at Newark Liberty International Airport. I skip dinner for fear of missing my late flight home to Denver. My clothes stink from a day racing around Manhattan, taking subways, jogging to appointments when taxis were locked in traffic, like frozen cubes in an ice tray—being “on” hour after hour in meetings with people I’d never choose to socialize with (cataclysmically tiresome and draining for an introvert). I don’t dare think about what’s growing between my toes, locked in brogues for seventeen hours.

My so-called “zipper” wound, stretching from collarbone to stomach, feels as inflamed as it did on my first night in the cardiac care unit when the nurse said, “Let’s see if you can hold on for another forty minutes before any more pain relief.” I watch dozens of people with healthy bodies, trendy hairstyles, and neatly tailored business suits rush by as if someone is handing out gold bullion at Panda Express.

My second hour of waiting begins with the announcement of a delayed departure time due to storms and high winds. Forty minutes later, another weather delay. An hour later, my cadre of road warriors is teased that boarding is about to start, causing fellow middle-aged men—listless wooden soldiers carrying laptop cases—to rush to a urinal.

Queued up, wishing I had elite flight status so I could board first among the privileged and affluent, the gate agent announces that mechanics are trying to fix something wrong with the engines (which always soothes the air traveler’s mind). The queue dissipates like petulant toddlers, only to regather after thirty-five minutes when the gate agent informs us that a new flight crew is on its way due to numerous delays. This time, no one surrenders their place in line.

There is applause when the replacement crew arrives and hurries onboard. Twenty minutes later, we are told that boarding is about to start, causing middle-aged men to rush again to empty their bladders.

We never board. Looking out, we see the spinning turbines of jet engines shut down.

The FAA is closing the airport until the following day due to another severe storm barreling our way. Passengers race to the customer service desk like Lord of the Flies with luggage, not caring who gets in their way, demanding refunds, accommodations, and meal tickets. But such desperation is fruitless.

As the gate agent closes the terminal gate and the jetway recedes, I’m paralyzed by a panic attack of Old Testament proportions. Painful electric charges kidnap my body. My brain is locked in fight or flee (obviously, no flight), although neither is possible. My lung capacity is diminished. My heart pounds like an Iron Butterfly drum solo.

Gathering the remnants of my wits, I speed-dial the airline and describe my recent surgery in too much detail to the customer service agent. No Newark, LaGuardia, JFK, Philly, Baltimore, Hartford, Boston, or Bangor seats are available until tomorrow morning. Trying to appease me—is there a worse job than toiling in a 24/7 call center handling complaints?—and thanking me for my loyalty, she tells me to return to the airport by six a.m. because she’s able to position me at number 137 on the waitlist for earlier departures.

With my emotions as raw as steak tartare, I call my wife Coleen and lament how the fates punish me—again! “This is so unfair,” she says, worried that (true to my nature) I had done too much too soon without forethought. “Can you at least make them find you a decent room for the night?”

“Then I’d better hang up and call the hotel rewards desk. I was saving points to take you to a spa or resort.”

“That’s sweet, but I don’t care about that. I care about you!”

How had I lucked into marrying this wonderful woman? Coleen is brilliant, loving, funny, tall, and beautiful, a gentle, thick-haired, brown-eyed daughter of the American prairie (her parents are Bud and De), reputedly one-eighth Cherokee on her father’s side, intensely creative, and, at the moment I met her in Denver in 1987, wounded by divorce.

On our first date, she disclosed she had a toddler daughter, Allie, to nurture alone after the girl’s geologist father lit out for Alaska in search of oil to drill. She’d already endured two bad blind dates (one with a dude named Skippy) and wasn’t interested in men, much less a new relationship. After a few drinks and excellent people-watching-and-rating in a bar after Chinese food, we discover we both are middle children with an older sister and younger brother. Coleen set down the writer’s path in grade school when I took up drawing and cartooning. We had lived in Manhattan at the same time. She’d gone there on a scholarship to study acting at NYU while I moved there to get my grad school thesis/novel published and absorb the city whole like a python.

It wasn’t a sprint through the tunnel of love—her life was complicated, and I wasn’t accustomed to dating mothers—but we had the great sex that lovers aspire to, fun and deepening affection and decided to live together. Allie and I took to each other from the start. I cooked scrambled eggs for her and drew animals and trees on paper placemats. With Coleen, we warmed under blankets in her otherwise cold and drafty Congress Park house, watching Fred and Ginger movies on VHS. Married the following July (1989), Coleen and I completed our family of three sensational daughters by Valentine’s Day 1991. And now, stranded in Newark, anxiety rising like a sunflower on steroids, I wonder when—if!—I will be among our (shared family nickname) pod again.

Placed on hold by the hotel chain 800 number and handy with my new cellphone, I group-text Allie (by then a college senior in Portland, Oregon) and her teen sisters, Natalie and Willa:

Delayed in NJ.

Home tomorrow, I hope. Business travel sucks! Miss you!!!

Love, Dad

Convinced I might remain in limbo forever, I disconnect and call the other hotel chains where I have loyalty points. The closest available hotel—damn its abominable guest ratings!—is south of Edison, New Jersey, more than thirty miles away. I claim it before some other shlepper can pounce.

With my chest muscles mere months from re-meshing, I drag my laptop case and carry-on toward the airport exit. Outside, in the cold air, dejected, dehydrated, hungry, constipated from weeks of painkillers, I wave down a cab and grab the door handle before it slows to a stop. Inside the taxi, I give the driver the address of the faraway inn and jot down his name and medallion number before he can refuse the fare.

Taking little pleasure in besting my fellow desperate wayfaring strangers, I settle in the taxi’s rear seat, sticky with substances whose origin I’m too resigned to ponder. I cross my arms over my chest, ready in vain to catch my explosive heart.

After a trial-run family road trip in 1962 to Yellowstone National Park—the geysers! The bears knocking over and rummaging trash cans! The hour-long lines for a toilet!—in 1963, we packed up our Ford Country Squire station wagon and headed east to see the famous sites and meet Dad’s Newark family, who never left New Jersey.

By packing, I mean Dad putting down the backseats and laying out three, unzipped Montgomery Ward sleeping bags decorated inside with quilted fishing and hunting illustrations, and Mom loading a camp cooler with fruit, cold cuts, sliced cheese, orange juice, milk, cottage cheese, peanut butter and strawberry jam, sandwich bread, matzah, Tupperware containers of chopped chicken liver, potato salad, coleslaw, macaroni salad, Mandarin oranges suspended in Jell-O, and cough syrup: everything floating like bobbing apples once the ice melted somewhere in eastern Kansas.

Prepared for every unrealistic situation, she also threw in three kid-sized sombreros and serapes she and Dad had brought back from a Mexican vacation. Oh, and five large suitcases containing clothing, footwear, a portable pharmacy, inflatable beach toys, and toiletries for any conceivable clime. Somehow, there was still a space for my siblings, Michele, fourteen months older than I, and Harvey, eighteen months younger, and me, scrambling for primacy over the rolled-down windows.

Michele spent the journey days mostly reading until carsickness forced Dad to pull over so she could puke off the interstate highway. Harvey and I whiled away the hours noting non-Colorado license plates, playing travel tic-tac-toe, and counting sixty-seven cows! Nineteen horses! Twenty barns! One motorcycle with a sidecar! Three men beyond a prison’s razor-wire fence trying to flag down our car!

When Mom wasn’t handing us snacks like we were trained seals or telling us to “cut out that roughhousing,” she was content to enjoy the scenery and knit enough sweaters to warm a Finnish village.

He enjoyed being on the road, radio playing, pointing out things of interest, showing us a self rarely viewed when working hour after hour as a general practitioner. I don’t remember him once removing his floppy fishing hat with a sweat-stained brim as the miles sped by, his left arm resting on the open window until his skin reached second-degree burns, entertaining Mom by crooning offkey, “There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow. The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye . . .” and other Broadway show tunes. Occasionally, I’d consult our auto club TripTik to monitor our progress along the designated route, turning pages over like a traffic cop writing speeding tickets. (I didn’t understand why the travel agent had to highlight what road to take, given that we left Denver on Interstate 70 and didn’t exit it until reaching Baltimore).

Decades later, I carry no memories of the Kansas State Capitol, Hannibal, Missouri, or Terre Haute, Indiana. What has stuck is arriving in Washington, D.C. After seeing The Spirit of St. Louis hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building and taking the White House and Capitol tours, our day was highjacked by a large gathering of American Nazis in full regalia marching down Constitution Avenue. Mom began steering us toward our hotel when Dad stopped her.

“Babe, this is history in the making. Something the kids should witness.”

She replied, “I’m going to the hotel. Is anyone coming with me?” I assumed I’d be corralled with my sister and brother until Dad invited me to stay. He perched me on his shoulders and approached the commotion. Holding my ankles with one hand so I would not fall, he got out his Bell & Howell camera housing 8MM Kodachrome II Movie Film to record the action.

Goose-stepping white men with shaved heads and sneers, waving placards—Kill King!

N—–s Must Die! USA For White Men! Murder the Jews!—and a few marchers dressed in gorilla suits, signs tied behind their necks reading “Martin L King Kong!”

When the Nazis passed, Dad lowered me to my feet, bent down to my height, and looked me in the eye. I wasn’t frightened. I was with the best dad in the whole wide world. “Larry, this is how evil started in Germany.”

“But it can’t happen here,” I told him.

Dad paused. “I’d like to think so, but don’t be so sure.”

Larry Bograd is an award-winning, widely translated author whose works have been published by Farrar/Straus, Harper, and Macmillan. Bograd eventually turned to playwriting, screenwriting and documentary filmmaking. He grew up and currently lives in Denver, Colorado.