Following are excerpts from “Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith,” by Studs Terkel.
I’ve courted death ever since I was six. I was an asthmatic child. With each labored breath, each wheeze, came a toy whistle obbligato. At my bedside, my eldest brother, to comfort me, would whistle back “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” in cadence with my breathing. It was funny, and pleasing, but not much help.
That plus a couple of bouts with mastoiditis, head swathed in bandages, made my awakening the next morning a matter of touch and go. What troubled me was not that I wouldn’t make it, but that I would no longer enjoy the whimsical care of my father and my two brothers. My mother was another matter; her hypertense attention more often than not added to my discomfort.
My father and brothers died in their mid-fifties. Angina. Bad tickers. I had a touch of it, too. It was in our genes, I guess. They died in what should have been their prime. I, the favored, sickly child they loved (as did my mother in her own wild way), have had so much the better of it.
All in all it’s been a good run. Going on eighty-nine, I was born the year the Titanic went down. Who would want to live to be ninety? Churchill is reputed to have replied: “Everyone who is eighty-nine.”
—
On December 23, 1999, as I was beginning work on this book, my wife, Ida, died. She had been my companion for sixty years. She was eighty-seven. A few months later, a friend of mine, disturbed by my occasional despondency, burst out: “For chrissake, you’ve had sixty great years with her!” Myra MacPherson was on the button.
Ida was seventeen years beyond her traditionally allotted time of three score and ten. On occasion, I’d hear her murmur in surprise, “Why do I still feel like a girl?”
They were roller-coaster years we shared, since I first spotted her in a maroon smock. 1937. She had been a social worker during most of those tumultuous years: the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Joe McCarthy, the ’60s, the civil rights and peace movements. She had been, as they say, “involved.” Garry Wills remembers her greeting him, years after the Vietnam War had ended: “Oh, we were arrested together in Washington.”
A year or so before her death, Laura Watson, a neighbor, “looked out the window and saw this slim young girl in jeans, with a flower in her hair, plucking out weeds in her garden.” The girl looked up. “It was Ida, of course.” Gwendolyn Brooks’s bet: “She could dance on a moonbeam.”
Yeah, she did live to the ripe old age of eighty-seven, but it doesn’t cut the mustard, Charlie. I still see that girl in the maroon smock who liked yellow daisies.
Each week, there is a fresh bunch of yellow daisies near the windowsill. On the sill is the urn with her ashes. On occasion, either indignant about something or somewhat enthused, I mumble toward it (her): “Whaddya think of that, kid?” Her way of seeing things had always been so clear eyed. . . .
It is a sweet irony that my first book of the twenty-first century (possibly my last) is about death. Yet these testimonies are also about life and its pricelessness, offering visions, inchoate though they be, of a better one down here–and, possibly, up there.
– – –
Ed Reardon, paramedic
I’m a Chicago boy, born and raised on the North Side. I spent about fifteen years on the job as a paramedic in Chicago, working the streets all over the city. Ostensibly, you’re the eyes and the ears of a doctor. When a doctor can’t be on the scene, they’ll send guys like us. I like to call us gutter medics because we work in the gutter–we work wherever we find a patient. Sometimes it takes you to some pretty strange places, strange situations.
As paramedics, we would straddle the police and the fire departments–we had one foot in each one of their yards. We’d respond with the firemen to a fire in case somebody got hurt. We’d respond with the police department. In a domestic dispute, you’ve got a guy beating up his wife, you’d walk in on that. If you had a guy standing out on a ledge, they’d call us for that. They’d call us when they didn’t know what else to do. Sometimes it would be a social-service problem: abandoned children or someone who wasn’t able to take care of themselves. Sometimes, dealing with life and death . . . [Sighs] . . . trauma, medical emergencies, heart attacks, diabetic comas . . . [Sighs] . . . murders, stabbings, gunshots, car accidents. In a twenty-four-hour period you did it all.
It doesn’t take a medical genius to spot someone who’s dead. But by law we’re obliged to at least make an effort [at resuscitation]. Sometimes you have to make calls that are really going to put you on the line. For instance, we were called into a home and the guy was dying of cancer. He was in his bed, he had his family around him, and you could see that the disease had completely ravaged him. He was unconscious but he was gasping for air, he was breathing his last breaths. I called the hospital and I said, “Listen, here’s what we got. The family doesn’t want him resuscitated. There’s no point. What should we do here?” They don’t know what to tell us. They don’t want to stick their necks out. They don’t want to say, “OK, do not resuscitate.”
This was before there was such a thing as living wills. I know that if we don’t make some kind of a decision, this guy, his last moments are going to be very undignified. We’re going to go through a whole resuscitation. That means doing CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, on him, putting a tube down his throat. In a situation like this it would be debasing him. He’s not quite a vegetable, but he’s not going to be viable. As we’re sitting there, he literally breathes his last breath.
He utters out a shout and he stops breathing. I look around and I mean, I see, it’s a Catholic family, we’re a block away from the church that I grew up in, St. Andrew’s Church. From my Catholic upbringing, I went to them and I said I’d already called a priest and he was on his way. I said, “Why don’t we gather around and say a prayer to St. Joseph?”–the patron saint of a happy death. St. Joseph is the patron saint of just about everything, actually, but a happy death is the one thrown in there. The family went with that, they thought it was a great idea. We kept them calmed down. We took the guy, we put him in the ambulance, and we took him to the hospital to be pronounced. Now, I’m wondering when I get there, am I going to run into some doctor or some nurse who’s going to call me on this? As it turned out, the doctor understood our position, the priest was there. It was fine with the family. He was dead and he was going to stay dead.
Every situation is different. Not far away from here over at St. Joseph’s Hospital, an old couple lived up in the high-rise just overlooking St. Joseph’s. This guy was a pretty vigorous-looking octogenarian. We got in just as he was breathing, literally on the floor, breathing his last breath. We got on him right away, defibrillated him, put the paddles on him, shocked him–it’s an electric shot to the heart. Woke him up! Literally woke him up. So now he’s talking to us and he’s not in the best of moods either. “What’s going on? What are you doing?” We said, “Relax, relax, we’re going to take you down to the hospital.” “Why? What happened?” So he’s giving orders, right?
We’re getting him on the stretcher and we’ve got him all bundled up and ready to go outside, get him in the ambulance. We’re going down in the elevator, and he looks at his wife, calls her by name, he says, “I want you to know, it’s really been great. Thanks an awful lot”–bam, dead. That was it: he breathed his last breath and no matter what we did to him, we couldn’t get him back. You wonder about it. He looked at his wife very purposefully, very adamant. Did he know? Did he see it? Five minutes before that, he was in charge, giving us orders, telling us, no, I’m not going to the hospital.
You try not to be affected by it. It’s a reality you’re facing, numerous times a day, it’s part of your job, it’s what you do. The body or the mind is a great layer of defensive mechanisms. You don’t do it consciously–I think that you develop a thick skin as time goes on. You don’t identify with that victim. He’s not from your lifestyle, he’s not from your class, he’s not from your race. You know what I’m talking about? There’s a denial, a way of putting distance between yourself and the victim. You use every trick in the book. Because if you don’t, you’re going to wind up carrying some burdens that you just can’t afford to carry. And I know a few guys, they couldn’t handle it anymore. But there’s a toll that you pay for building up that callus on your emotions. It doesn’t come cheap. I’ve been off the job for ten years and I think that I’m probably free of it–I think I’m finally free of that thick-skinnedness that I had before.
You hear the humor that goes on in the back of a rig, the gallows humor. It’s all very defensive. You’ll see the same thing in cops, you’ll see the same thing in firemen, you’ll see the same thing in emergency room nurses, physicians. One of the things that was in our favor as paramedics was that we were hit-and-run guys–we got in and we got out, we didn’t stay with a patient. Maybe the most intimate moments of his life we would be there for, but then we release him to other medics and we’re gone, we’re out of his life completely–that’s in our favor. Other healthcare workers don’t have that luxury. As paramedics we ride in on our horses, we’re heroes, we drag them out, we get them to the emergency room, we drop them off. We say we never drop off a dead patient, which isn’t true, but as long as we can try our magic on him, he’s still alive. It’s just a reality.
I think anybody who says they’re not afraid of death is kidding themselves. I don’t know whether we fear death itself, I don’t know whether we have any understanding about death itself. That’s what we fear about it: it’s something that we can’t possibly understand. What it’s like to go beyond that door. No matter how many times we’ve seen it happen, no matter how many of our loved ones we’ve buried, people that we’re tremendously close to: our parents, our wives . . . Not one of us has any understanding of what it means to go beyond it.
While we’re alive, it’s hope that keeps us going. That last laugh, that piece of cherry pie for today.
– – –
Dr. Joseph Messer, chief of cardiology at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago
During the first 18 years or so of my life, I looked at death as an objective event that occurs–I didn’t get very emotionally involved. Now, at the other end of my life, I react very personally to the deaths of my patients . . . I always seek out the families and talk with them and console them and give them my condolences. I’m very much helped by the memory of my father dealing with families in the funeral business. I don’t deal with my patients’ families as though I were an undertaker, but that ability to be empathetic, to share their feelings–I think it’s because I watched my father do it.
I noticed as a child, from experiences with my dad, how much of a role religion plays in dealing with this issue–the belief in the life hereafter, salvation and redemption, that sort of thing . . . The sermons given at funerals, the masses, the expectation of something beyond–these things sustained the grieving family through this terrible period.
My science background makes it difficult for me to accept some of the assumptions of organized religion. I doubt that there’s a hereafter . . . but it would be nice if there were. I guess I don’t really care. I think the important issue is the way we conduct our lives while we’re here, and the impact we have on other people while we’re here. And if it helps some people to think there’s a reward in the hereafter for being good, Calvinism or the Judeo-Christian ethic, so be it. The motivation isn’t as important to me as the solace it gives survivors.
– – –
Lori Cannon, head of the Open Hand Society, a food bank whose clients are mainly people with AIDS
We live with rage. Fortunately, we at Open Hand are able to channel that rage and grief into doing something positive–knowing that we’re relieving one burden from the day-to-day life of someone who is struggling. When we started Open Hand twelve years ago, people were in the final stages of HIV. We delivered to the Gold Coast, to Cabrini Green, anywhere there was a need.
I’ve been involved primarily with the gay community by way of theater, by way of getting my hair done, by way of having the apartment decorated. The gays have been discriminated against forever, and yet they did the humane thing by offering agencies to perform services for all people, not just gay people. To their dying breath, these wonderful activists who were my friends made sure that these agencies did the right thing. They blazed a trail. In Chicago, the legacy is: people with AIDS have services now.
I’m here seven days a week, fourteen to sixteen hours a day. This is my life right now. Open Hand. Death is my constant companion. People aren’t dying as often and as frequently as they did in the early years; 1980, ’81–that’s when it started. For those long-term survivors who are fortunate enough to still be here, they remember how it was back then. You know what our social life was? We would meet at the memorials. When you go to seven, eight a week, that is your social life. You worked your job, you went to the homes of your friends because they had to have clean linens, the kitchen had to be cleaned up and spotless because you can’t have bacteria. When someone is too weak to stand up and make a meal, you have to help.
So you multiply that by the hundreds and thousands of people that we’ve been able to serve, and I guess I thought about all of them last week at the Gay Pride Parade. For me, it was just the memory of the ghosts, not so much the people who were there but everyone who wasn’t. That was the corner where Bob Adams used to stand and wave to me . . . and then I’d look at another corner, and that’s where my friend Christopher Richardson would dance shirtless in his camouflage pants. I’d look at another corner and all I could remember were all the people who weren’t there. I often have these visitations. So for me, it’s a day of pride, but it certainly is bittersweet.
But the underlying commonality is the heroism. Your diagnosis meant you had to come out again. Would people want to talk to you? Would landlords rent to you? Would your job keep you? Who else but the gay community could tolerate it? It’s almost like the Jews at the camps. It requires a culture and a group that grasps that the whole thing is about survival. And if at a certain point you understand you’re not going to survive, then hopefully you’re surrounded with friends. What would motivate somebody who’s dying of AIDS to still get up, write a symphony, design a ball gown, be an architect for a great building? There is a gene, I think, within the gay community, that allows them to survive challenges in a way that still offers whimsy, still offers humor, and still offers love. And I’ve seen it.
I accept death, but the dying part worries me. Will it be agonizing? Or will it be just going to sleep one day and not waking up? That’s not a bad way to go. Something quick, because we’ve seen the horrors of a lingering death. That’s not joyful for anybody, and it’s not poetic. But I look forward to joining all of my friends, and my dad, and all of my heroes.
– – –
Kurt Vonnegut, writer
I have experienced what happens when I die, and so have you. We call it sleep. We had a fire in our apartment in New York last February. I was unconscious for three days, in a coma, and I had a near-death experience. I had already written “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian” at that time, and I was talking about the blue tunnel into the afterlife. People who are interviewed on TV every so often tell about their near-death experiences. Some talked about the blue tunnel and it seemed like a good, funny idea to me. It’s not a blue tunnel, it’s a railroad train–probably because railroad trains used to play such a big part in our lives. When I left Indianapolis to go to the University of Chicago, I got on a train to Chicago. When I came home from the army, from the war, it was on a railroad train–so they’re very important symbols. It was parked near the hospital. I could see it. There was a railroad siding. It was just a regular passenger train with a diner and all that. There didn’t seem to be any people in it, but it was all lit up inside. I knew that if I died, I’d be put on a gurney, I wouldn’t have to walk to the train. Off I’d go. It wasn’t a terrifying image at all.
In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” every time somebody dies, and when a bottle of champagne loses its bubbles and is dead, I always say, “So it goes”–that’s all. Whenever anybody has died–and this would be my sister, my brother, my father, my mother, and I was nearby for those events–that’s how I felt . . . That was that . . . I had nobody to appeal to, to get mad at. [Laughs] When somebody dies, it’s wholly unsurprising and so it goes. What could be more ordinary?
– – –
Helen Sclair, former teacher
I spend my time visiting and tracking cemeteries. It is my full-time occupation.
I was born into death. My mother died a few days after my birth. I grew up in a foster home out in Lake County, Illinois. The first thing my foster family did was take me to visit my mother’s grave down in southern Missouri. It was a Sunday afternoon.
I lived for Saturdays because my mother’s sister-in-law would pick me up and we’d go to the cemetery. With scissors, on my little knees, I would trim around every one of the grave markers of the family. It wasn’t even my family–it was my foster family. It didn’t make any difference. This was my job and I loved doing it, because you could see what you had done. All those little weeds or leaves or whatever were cleaned away. I was probably about four when I first did that. When I got a little bit older, I’d go down to the spring and bring up buckets of water to water the flowers.
See these medallions? Ribbons–red, white, and blue on one side, black and silver on the other side. It was of the Grange Society, a rural group. The red, white, and blue side was worn at the regular meetings, the black and silver at the funerals. There were various fraternal orders.
All would have worn something like this or variations when someone’s comrade or relative died. It was communicating, “I feel lousy, I feel terrible, I’ve lost somebody.” The community knew how to respond to you. They knew you lost somebody of importance to you. Here’s a black-bordered hankie and all these envelopes, edged in black.
These are what I call the accoutrements of death. Wearing one of these ribbons or medallions, people understood that you were grieving. Today we have grief counselors because people don’t know how to express themselves. They have to go to somebody to tell them that, yes, it’s OK to feel terrible . . .
In the nineteenth century, everybody knew about death. In the twentieth century, nobody knows about death. People die in hospitals now. In the nineteenth century, nobody knew about sex. In the twentieth century, everybody knows about sex. Death has become the new pornography. We don’t talk about it.
