by Studs Terkel
“That’s bullshit. That’s why we really can’t handle death very well. We want sort of drive-by grieving. Nobody wants you to carry on about it. They want you to deposit it like you do in a bank.”*
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 sixties, 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. . . .
We’ve had one child, a son. Dan has become the good companion, the troubleshooter, the rock. There’s a lied Lotte Lehmann sang, of a mountainside against which you lean when weary or bereft. My son is that mountainside.
One last personal note: The sixty-three heroes of this book, in offering me their bone-deep, honest testimonies, have been a palliative beyond prescription.
There was something of a “poem” fraudulently attributed to Gabriel García Márquez. The novelist was understandably indignant. Nonetheless, the words of some ersatz philosopher, coffee-house pundit, or practical joker suit me fine at this moment:
I would teach the old that death does not come with old age, but with forgetting. . . . I would walk when others hold back, I would wake when others sleep, I would listen when others talk, and how I would enjoy good chocolate ice cream.
Hopefully, that’s what this book is about: death, of course, but only by living to the full its long prelude, life.
*Some thirty years later, when a television program with which I was involved, Studs Place, went off the air, I received a scrawled, handwritten letter from Cleveland. I remember a passage: “I am sorry. I enjoyed your program because it gave me a feeling of heimweh, an old Dutch word for homesickness. I was once a baseball player. They called me Wamby.” It was signed Bill Wambsganns. I replied, though I neglected to tell him how he had helped me through my insomnia.
*Quentin Young has been our family doctor for the last forty years. I’m certain that his ebullience, his spirit of bonhomie, and his skills have been key factors in my living far beyond my traditionally allotted span.
*WGN’s Hal Totten broadcast this one, too, earlier in the same year, 1925. It was a blow-by-blow account of Collins’s twelve-day ordeal as rescuers tried to reach him. They were within earshot, but failed as another cave-in occurred. Both events, the trial and the guide’s fate, were celebrated in songs by Vernon Dalhart, the most popular country singer of the twenties, in “The Death of Floyd Collins” and a plaintive encomium to the martyred Bryan.
*Myra MacPherson, She Came to Live Out Loud: An Intimate Family Journey Through Illness, Loss, and Grief (New York: Scribner, 1999).
Prologue
Brothers
Tom Gates
A Brooklyn firefighter (retired).* During his earlier work years, he was a policeman. His words pour forth, stream-of-consciously.
I’M SIXTY YEARS OLD! I just made a will out, and I feel much better. My son’s going to be a lawyer and my daughter works in a courthouse in Pennsylvania—she’s going to college. That’s what I’m looking forward to, the kids.
Life and death? I never felt so alive as when you’re a firefighter. To go into a fire with the heat and the fear and people’s lives on the line . . . I remember sometime in July or August, summer, you’d be coming out of the fire and the sweat would be pouring off you, and you’d taste cold water and it was the greatest taste in the world. Better than any drugs, which I don’t know anything about, but I know about cold beer and cold water and nothing beats it.
When you’re dead, you don’t know you’re dead, right? So what’s the big thing really, when you think about it? The ones that suffer are your family and your friends. They’re going to be suffering with your memory.
I remember in 1956, when I was sixteen years old, we saw this man crying on a park bench. Prospect Park. He was about forty-one. He had a beard. We went over to him. “What are you crying for?” He said, “I just lost my mom.” We asked, “How old’s your mom?” “Sixty-four.” We started laughing. “Sixty-four—that’s old! She lived a long time.” He looked up at us and said, “Listen, it doesn’t matter if your mother’s sixty-four or a hundred and four, when she passes away, you’re going to miss your mom. Don’t forget what I’m saying.”
In 1981, I was coming out of the firehouse and there were these teenagers hanging around the corner. I went over and told them to take a civil service test, become a firefighter or a policeman. You get security, you get a pension, and there’s no better job than serving the public. As I walked away, another kid came over and asked his friends on the stoop, “What’d the old man want?” Meaning me! It brought back the past, 1956, the forty-one-year-old man with the beard. . . . It was like a flashback. I turned around and said, “Listen, like they say: as I am now, so shall you be.”
To me, life is like a relay race. You’re tired, you hand the baton off to somebody stronger and fresher. That’s what life is, right? The oldest thing in a human being is sperm, right? Sperm goes back to the beginning of time. I got a son now and a daughter, and they’re going to carry on. Somebody said that the Earth is a spaceship and sometimes the ride, like yours, Studs, is lasting eighty-eight years. Me, I’m on a spaceship ride called Earth sixty years. Some people only ride it for one day. So we’re lucky.
When you’re sixteen, you don’t know about death. Your friends are young, your aunts and uncles are only in their late thirties, forties. As I get older, half my friends are gone. My aunts and uncles are passing away. My father passed away, colon cancer, 1988. He was eighty-one years old. Before he died, he lived with me for two months. I got one of those wind-up beds. I’d wind him up and I’d lay down on the couch right across from him. A couple of nights before he died, every fifteen minutes he woke up, swung off the bed, and lit a Camel cigarette. He took two puffs, put it out. Five minutes later, Camel cigarette. All night. I said, “What the fuck is this?” I don’t want to curse, but I was going crazy. I said, “Stop smoking.” He looked at me and said, “You see the clock up there?” I said, “What clock?” It was dark—four in the morning. He said, “I was born at twelve o’clock. The hands are coming around and my time is coming to an end, and it’s going to end at twelve o’clock.” It was unbelievable.
He was five-foot-six, a powerful man, a truck driver, longshoreman, a father—he was everything. He went from a hundred and fifty pounds down to seventy-eight. I remember changing his bag, cleaning it, and he was so embarrassed. I said, “Dad, it’s good in a way because it saves on toilet paper.” He ran out of the bathroom laughing. He said, “Catch me if you can!” He was running around the kitchen and I was running aft
er him. It was the first time I saw my father’s legs in eighty-one years. They were skinny, the same size as mine.
I was up all night for days and days and I was starting to get mad because he was taking the life from me. I’m telling you honest, I loved my father—he was a great man.* He was just wasting away, wasn’t eating . . . One night he was breathing hard and then he stopped. He was panting, then nothing for five or ten minutes. I said, “Oh, my God, he’s dead.” I relaxed. I says, “I’m not telling anybody. I’ll notify the family in the morning.” I wanted to close my eyes and get a few hours’ sleep because I was exhausted. Just then, he started breathing again, I said, “Son of a bitch!” That was my human feeling—I got pissed. He lasted two more days. I felt guilty, but I know he would have said the same thing. If it was me, I’d just want to let go, pull the plug—’cause I don’t want my family, friends, to suffer. My mother was in her seventies at the time. She’s still alive at eighty-eight. I saw her starting to go. We’re all going into the hole. A friend of mine committed suicide by Blockbuster. His wife and his son died. He kept renting videos all day and all night and just drinking liquor, scotch. They found him with the VCR running. He was only in his fifties.
When you’re above ground and you’re healthy it’s great. My father used to have an old picture with all his friends on a Model-T Ford, sitting in the back on the rumble seat and on the step of the car. He was telling me, “This fellow’s gone, this fellow’s in the hospital, this fellow’s dead.” I said, “Dad, you’re sad.” He said, “It’s gonna happen to you. But it’s great to live long because you’re gonna outlive your enemies!”
I’ll always have memories of my father. I was in a place in Pennsylvania and I saw a man that looked like my father. He was smoking a Camel cigarette and my father loved to blow the smoke in the air. It was like a dance. This guy had his back to me and he had a hat like my father, same size. I said, “That’s my dad!” I sat there and I looked at him, knowing my father’s dead and the memories come back—old smells, old songs. Then he got up and he wasn’t my father.
Like you, Studs—you look like my father. You know what I mean? I want to interview you. When are you gonna give it up? You’re eighty-eight years old! Unbelievable . . . The great medicine now, you can go for ninety or a hundred. But you gotta have your faculties. You gotta be able to walk and talk and chew, enjoy food. That’s the great joy of life, food and companionship and laughter. Laughter shoots chemicals into your blood . . .
Funny thing, memories. Looking back now, my mother was really the strength in the family. Five kids, and my mother kept us together. My father, he took off a number of times, but your mother’s always there.
Let’s talk about firefighters. January, 1976. I was on vacation when Charlie Sanchez and nine guys from my firehouse went into the basement of an A&P. Charlie Sanchez got killed, and they thought the other eight were dead. They heard the firemen crying for their mothers on the walkie-talkies and the guys outside were crying, too. The fire commissioner come down and said to give up, they were dead, turn off the walkie-talkies. They told the fire commissioner to get the fuck out of there. They’re doing their job. They breached the wall with a battering ram, sixteen inches of brick. In the 1800s it had been a prison room for slaves. They grabbed the eight firemen and dragged them through the hole.
I went to the hospital and I remember Paul Matula, a big Polish guy—senior man, Ladder 131. Tremendous hands. I said to him, “Paul, did you talk to God?” I don’t believe really in churches. To me, churches is business—but there could be somebody out there. Paul said, “Listen, I thought I was dying, so I gave God a couple of shouts.” You couldn’t do better than that.
Gordon Sepper, the carbon monoxide was getting to him, and the smoke, he was falling asleep, his head down, knowing he was going. Just then, he says, a twenty-four-foot portable ladder appeared and he knew he could be saved. So he started reaching up, climbing up the rungs, and when he got to the top rung, his brain told his hand to grab the floor of the A&P there, because he was all carbon-monoxide-to-the-brain disorientated, right? Just then two firemen grabbed him by the coat and pulled him out. Another guy was Joe Pennington. When the A&P was collapsing into the basement, Joe counted eighteen steps to the street—he knew enough to count the steps. They went down eighteen steps in the basement next door and breached the wall. I look up to those men. It was the greatest job you can ever have, a fireman . . .
Most firemen die after they retire, eight to ten years earlier than the general population. Cancer, emphysema, stuff like that. Smoke inhalation—it’s cumulative. The chemicals, the plastics burn. My brother Billy was thirty-five years a firefighter—he’s got a disability. He can’t breathe. He’s got asthma, emphysema—he never smoked. He was a marathon runner, twenty-six miles.
It’s even worse than with the miners, who get everything, black lung, cave-ins, everything. I’m going with a woman whose father was a coal miner in Scranton, Pennsylvania. When she was a little girl, she remembers her father coming home with one finger chopped off from a mine accident. He took the finger, still in his glove, and threw it into the fireplace. A few days later, he went back to work . . . We’ve come a long way since then, but they’re still my heroes, working-class people. My father instilled that in me.
I remember August 2nd, 1978. Six firemen got killed in Brooklyn. Louise O’Connor, with three kids, went to see her husband at the firehouse near Sheepshead Bay. They were going for a weekend down to the Jersey Shore . . . Just a routine fire. Her husband was on the roof of the Ward Bond grocery—he waved to her as the roof caved in.
I was on vacation walking on a country road. My father came running down. “Six firemen just got killed.” It’s like being at war and you’re home. I said, “I gotta go in. I gotta go in.” My wife says, “Why do you gotta go in?” Because, I told her, this is my family, my second family. She said, “You gotta stay here.” I said, “No, I gotta go in.” I went in the shower. I didn’t want her to see me cry. I put the water on and started screaming, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I went in and was missing for three days. I went to as many funerals as I could—’cause it was two, three different churches. That was twenty-two years ago.
I ran into Louise O’Connor again in 1988 at the American Legion Post where another guy killed in a fire was being honored. She introduces me to her son, who’s now a New York City cop. I said, “That kid was a couple of years old when your husband got killed.” So the beat goes on. It never ends.
I hate guns. I wasn’t a good cop because I used to walk around with no bullets in the chamber. I used to have them in my pocket and kid around saying if somebody starts in, I’ll just throw the bullets real hard. [Laughs]
A few times I pulled my gun on guys. One time I went on the roof of this project and there’s this big black guy, about six-seven, on top of the stairs. He had his back to me. I said, “Hey, fella, turn around.” He said, “Yeah, wait a minute, man.” I said, “Turn around and put your hands against the wall.” He said, “Yeah, yeah, wait a minute.” It dawned on me he had a gun caught in his belt and was tryin’ to take it out. I said, “Holy shit . . .” So I took my gun out and said, “You fucker, I’m gonna shoot.” He threw his hands up against the wall. He had his dick out and was tryin’ to zip up his fly, and there was a girl standing in the corner, which I couldn’t see. So here was a guy gettin’ a hand job and maybe a lot of guys would have killed him. I said, “Holy shit, I coulda killed ya.” He started shaking and the gun in my hand was shaking like a bastard. I said—I musta been cryin’—I said, “Just get the hell outa here . . .” That’s when I decided to quit the force and become a fireman.
My brother Billy was a fireman five years before me. He said, “It’s a different quality of life—it’s great.” He was in a fire in a high-rise, knocking out windows in the bathroom. The bathtub gave way and he fell through the floor. They teach you when you fall to put your elbows out to your side. He caught on to the floor and the firemen come in and grabbe
d him. He said, “No, let me go, I’ll fall to the next floor and I don’t want to take you with me.” The two firemen said, “If you go, we all go”—that’s the job.
I retired from the fire department in ’88 and as a fire safety director in ’95. Now it’s just a memory. I just sit back and watch the world go by. Talk about dying—it affects everything I do. I feel life is like the twenty-four-second clock in a basketball game. I got the ball now and I gotta score. By scoring, I mean I want to travel, see the world more. I got twenty-four seconds left and I want to stretch it out. But if they hook up tubes to you and you’re on a monitor and unconscious for months, they gotta be kidding. I’m outa here. Twenty-four seconds ran out.
We had a great fire captain, Bill Huber. When he passed away, I went to his wake, his funeral. He had a simple pine box, closed, with a picture on top of him in a fire uniform. That’s what I want. In red pajamas, fire red. Then I want to be cremated. I want my ashes to be thrown into a beautiful pond in Jersey. I want somebody to sing “I’ll Be Seeing You.” [Sings]
In all the old familiar places
that this heart of mine embraces
all night through
I’ll see you . . .
Isn’t that wonderful? All the old girlfriends, the old neighborhood . . .
I remember years ago, a Laurel and Hardy movie, they’re in the First World War. Hardy says, “If we get killed, what do you want to come back as?” Laurel says, “I want to come back as myself.” Hardy gets mad: “You stupid, you can’t come back as yourself, you have to come back as something else. You’re gonna come back as a donkey.” They both get killed and Hardy comes back as a donkey.