A ghost will always haunt the Garber house in Anaheim Hills, Calif.
Julie’s bedroom is much as she left it: a stuffed bear on the bureau, a blue spread on the bed, a sorority picture on the wall.
“Look at my sweetheart. She’s the most beautiful one there,” said her father, Howard, gazing adoringly at his dark-haired daughter amid a sea of bottle blonds. “I always told her, blonds are a dime a dozen. Dark hair is spectacular.”
At the end, though, Julie’s hair was gone. As was the sight in those striking hazel eyes. And when leukemia killed her on Dec. 18, 1996, also gone was an unwieldy chunk of her father’s heart.
“A jewel. That’s exactly what she was,” Garber said. “I’ve got four kids, but she was, frankly, the closest to us.”
If that was hard for the Garbers’ three surviving children to bear, they swallowed hard and bore it nonetheless. Because, like everyone else who crosses Howard Garber’s path, they know their father is not one to sugarcoat the bitter pill that he calls “the truth.”
Howard Garber, 69, retired optometrist and ultraconservative activist, has devoted himself to making jaws drop for decades. But mouths were never more agape than they were one year ago, when in the wake of Julie’s death, the Garbers told the world they wanted a surrogate to carry their dead daughter’s baby.
Six months after announcing the unprecedented pregnancy’s untimely end on national television, life has finally slowed for the Garbers. The chaos of caring for their dying daughter melted into the chaos of trying to make her a mother–but finally it all stands still. In the quiet, the Garbers realize Julie is really, truly gone.
“We didn’t have time to grieve,” said Jean Garber, Julie’s mother. “Now, it’s finally hitting us.”
They attend bereavement therapy groups. They’ve traveled to Italy, Australia and Israel, telling Julie’s story to anyone and everyone who will listen.
While Jean Garber allows herself the luxury of memory, crying as she gazes into the past at a daughter who also was business partner and best buddy, her husband finds it difficult to be still.
So Howard Garber deals with his grief the only way he knows how: by trying to change the world to match his singular vision of it.
He does this by talking. And talking. And talking. Until people get interested–or angry–enough to listen.
“Dr. Howard D. Garber” says his business card. “Professional Troublemaker, adversary of corrupt politicians, ACLU, IRS, Israel-bashers, leftists, socialists, illegal aliens, pornographers, militant homosexuals, legalized drugs, welfare breeders, violent criminals, all nincompoops and most Democrats.”
Howard Garber deeply, honestly, genuinely believes he has cornered the market on truth. His friends call him brilliant, brave, dynamic. His detractors call him racist, troubled, frightening.
“He is a soldier, and this is a morality war,” said Evelyn Miller of Irvine, Calif., a friend who helps produce his cable-television show. “He is an American patriot with strongly held beliefs about right and wrong and the decline of America into a moral dung heap. He wants to stop the slide. He tells it like it is. He does not compromise. Takes no prisoners. What do they call it? Scorched-earth policy.”
The death of beloved daughter Julie was the greatest torture of the Garbers’ lives.
She survived a brain tumor in 1992, only to develop leukemia in 1994. She fully intended to survive and become a mother–so she put off treatment for a month so her eggs could be harvested, fertilized and frozen before the radiation left her sterile.
Her death, the Garbers felt, need not negate her plans. Even friends were aghast, fearing the Garbers were trying to re-create Julie. When the family was turned away by regular surrogacy agencies, they took their crusade directly to the American people on television talk shows.
Eighty women volunteered to carry Julie’s baby. The Garbers chose Tracy Veloff, a postal carrier from Riverside, Calif. The first two tries–using eight of the 12 embryos Julie left behind–failed.
The miracle then occurred: Veloff became pregnant. But three weeks later, on Dec. 17, after the Garbers and their surrogate had flown to New York to tell their story on NBC’s “Today” show, Howard Garber dropped a bombshell at the interview’s conclusion: There had been a miscarriage and Julie would not become the world’s first post-mortem mother after all. He had steadfastly refused to release the news until he had the ear of millions.
“I wanted to play up the importance of this new approach for women who are undergoing cancer treatment,” he said. But in his heart of hearts, Howard Garber simply wanted the largest audience possible to hear Julie’s story.
“I love the idea of everyone knowing about my sweetheart,” he said.
