From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  SR: I always had a wonderful relationship with my father. Early in his professional life he had written and published children’s books, so he was a man of words. His younger brother, for whom our son, Lee, is named, had also been a writer, and after my uncle was killed in a plane crash, I felt strongly that I was carrying on a family tradition by becoming a journalist. Dad was always my best editor and biggest supporter, and the day my first professional article was published in The Nation magazine—I was eighteen at the time—he drove me into New York and we scoured every newsstand in lower Manhattan looking for a copy. When we finally found one, with my name on the cover, I think he was more excited than I was. In later years, when I started appearing on television, I would call home every time I was on, and I still do. Since Cokie had lost her father so young, I knew how blessed I was and tried not to take that blessing for granted. I would look around at my friends and realize that I was one of the very few people at my age to have both parents alive and healthy, and we made a big effort to see them every chance we could. When Dad turned eighty in December of 1996, we had a party for him at our house.

  CR: It was a great party. He loved it.

  SR: Some of the most touching speeches were made by his children-in-law, who talked about what a loving figure he had been in their lives. We tried to think of something special to mark his birthday, something more permanent than a set of golf clubs, and we decided to honor his lifelong interest in books and libraries. Right near my parents’ winter home in Palm City, Florida, was a branch of the county library that they would visit several times a week.

  CR: They were still in the library habit. They had been active supporters of public libraries.

  SR: We decided to raise some money within the family and name the children’s reading room at this local library in honor of my parents, but we were having trouble finding a date when everybody could come to a dedication ceremony. I didn’t have a premonition, but I did say to my sister, who was doing most of the planning, “Let’s not wait.” So we picked a date that worked for most of us, and about a hundred people came, including some of my parents’ oldest friends. Dad was deeply touched. My mother even joked that it was a pleasure to unveil a plaque honoring people who were still alive. A few weeks later they came to Passover on their way back to New Jersey for the summer and in early May I called my parents late one afternoon…

  CR: To say you were going to be on TV.

  SR: Actually, to say I wasn’t going to be on TV, as I had expected to be. I reached my mother, and before I could speak she said in a rush, “Steven, I have something to tell you, your father has had a stroke.” He had had a stroke the night before but she hadn’t called me.

  CR: Any of us. She hadn’t called any of us.

  SR: If you didn’t call, it wasn’t serious, it wasn’t real.

  CR: He was in intensive care but the doctors led us to believe that he wasn’t in a life-threatening situation.

  SR: I consulted with my siblings and we agreed that Mom would need help over a period of time.

  CR: Everyone would take turns visiting her.

  SR: It so happened Cokie and I were free the next day, so we took the first shift.

  CR: We walked in the hospital and I tried to prepare Steven for a terrible shock because I’d spent a good deal of time with people in intensive care units. I thought, we’re going to get in there and Steve’s going to be undone by this. His father’s not going to be communicating, there are going to be wires and monitors everywhere, he’s not going to look like himself, and it’s going to be so unsettling and disorienting and sad. But when we walked in the room, we found his father joking and talking, asking about the stock market and the ball scores. Totally 100 percent with it. His speech was slurred but that was about it.

  SR: Also, he was having trouble swallowing. Throughout the day he actually seemed to be recovering, and it was heartening for everybody. Late in the afternoon I went to a pay phone down the hall from his room and got my messages, and one was from the president of George Washington University, calling to follow up on conversations we had been having about my taking a full-time faculty chair. When I returned the call he said that everything was set, my appointment would be approved the next day. I went back to Dad’s room and relayed the news and he was very pleased and excited. It turned out to be the last thing I ever told him.

  CR: He had been talking nonstop and he needed some rest, so we took Steve’s mother out to dinner, leaving instructions for the nurse: “We’re only two minutes away, call us if there’s any reason at all.” At three o’clock in the morning the phone rang. Nobody heard it at first. Finally, I shook Steven awake: “The phone’s ringing.” I think his mother didn’t want to hear it, because it couldn’t be good.

  SR: I raced into the kitchen and picked up the phone and it was the intensive care nurse saying, “Your father has coded.” I didn’t know immediately what that meant…

  CR:…he had had another stroke…

  SR:…it meant that the code had gone out for emergency personnel. She wanted to know whether he had a living will and I said, “Is he still alive?” She said, “Yes, but it doesn’t look good.” And then her voice caught: “Oh dear, they’ve just come out of his room. He’s gone.”

  CR: It was very sudden, almost like a traffic accident. From Monday morning till Tuesday night…

  SR: He was still so vigorous that he was planning to captain his boat in a race on Wednesday.

  CR: In fact, his crew called on Wednesday morning to ask what time to pick him up.

  SR: I had to turn to my mother and tell her that my father was dead. I just thank God we were there. Cokie was holding Mom. I can’t imagine her getting that phone call all alone. Then I had to call my siblings. I felt very bad that by the luck of the draw, I had had that last day with Dad and they had not.

  CR: And they did, too.

  SR: It was very unfair. I have memories they don’t have. We were allowed to go to the hospital and see him for the last time that morning. I’m still haunted by the sight of him.

  CR: Well, it’s such a strong visual image. For a long time after Barbara died, I couldn’t remember her alive. I could only see her dead. My sister died at home and it took a while for the funeral home to arrive to collect her. I thought she looked lonely all by herself in the bed while everyone else was rushing around making preparations, so I got in bed and sang to her. It’s almost impossible to erase that image. Steve’s parents had been married fifty-seven years. His mother had to somehow find the strength to tell her husband good-bye. When she did, the nurse in the intensive care unit who must have seen this countless times broke down in tears herself. She was a kind, sensitive soul.

  SR: That was, without a doubt, the worst day of my life.

  CR: In cases like your dad, people always say, “Well, he lived a long and full life and he died without being disabled.” And all of that is true. But it doesn’t help. That’s the part that people never understand. It’s still very painful. Would you prefer for him not to be disabled? Of course. Or would you prefer for him to have lived to eighty instead of fifty-eight? Of course. Does it make it any easier? Of course not. It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s true. In your parents’ eyes, you become an adult when you have children. In your own eyes, I think you fully become an adult and fully aware of your own mortality when you lose a parent.

  SR: Even now I expect to hear from him when I’ve done some television show or written something that he would enjoy. It was so much a part of me to know that he was there and cheering me on.

  CR: This was May of 1997, and both kids were about to get married, Lee in June and Becca in August. He would have loved that so much, watching Becca walk down that aisle. That’s all I could think of the minute I heard the news. He missed seeing it. He didn’t miss much. He did see his children and grandchildren grow up and know they were well launched. But, boy, he would’ve loved those weddings.

  SR: When my father talked about my mother
he would say, “You know, separately we’re very flawed people, but together we make a good team.” Over fifty-seven years they were like two trees holding each other up, or vines that were so intertwined it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

  CR: Some women, even when they’ve had wonderful marriages, blossom somewhat when they’re given a sense of freedom. But it’s been very very tough for your mother.

  SR: There’s a hole in the center of her life that will never be filled. It is the price you pay for a long, happy marriage—when one partner dies, the survivor is very lonely. In my view, it’s a bargain worth making, but my father would openly muse about this in the last year or two of his life. He’d say to my mother, “Wouldn’t it be fitting if we could go together?” And my mother would reply, “Will, just give me enough notice so I’ll have time to pack.” But he gave her no time, no warning at all.

  As Cokie mentioned, my dad died just weeks before our summer of weddings. We only had two kids and they decided to get married eight weeks apart. Great planning.

  CR: Lee and Liza met when they were teenagers; they were both pages at the Capitol and they had a sweet puppy-love summer.

  SR: I remembered Liza vividly. One evening she and Lee and Cokie drove home together from the Capitol and found a note in the kitchen from Rosie, the kids’ old baby-sitter, who had been there to feed the dog. It read simply, “There’s a bat in the living room.” Lee and Cokie were ready to run right out of there; Liza grabbed a broom and drove the creature out—a take-charge woman even at sixteen.

  CR: Liza lived in California, so it was not easy to keep up a relationship once the school year started. They wrote each other for a while. But then they lost touch. They went to colleges in different parts of the country and didn’t get back together until they were grown.

  SR: After graduation she was working on Wall Street and he was in law school. She had a business meeting here in Washington and called him up out of the blue. Obviously, there was a spark between them that had never quite gone out, and when they saw each other again it heated up instantly.

  CR: Liza went on to journalism school at Columbia and then moved to Washington. Lee would bring her over for Sunday-night dinner and we became great friends. She even worked for me as a research assistant during the 1994 campaign. I kept hoping Lee would do the smart thing and ask her to marry him, then one day he invited to me to lunch, and I sensed something was up. In the middle of this stuffy dining room, he solemnly said, “I need your advice about diamonds.” I wanted to whoop and hug him and make a big hoopla, but he would have killed me. I didn’t know anything about diamonds, but told him where we could go to learn, and then we had to sit through this insufferable food service. Finally, lunch ended and I was able to grab him. Then we went jewelry shopping.

  SR: It was supposed to be this big secret. That night, when I asked Cokie what she talked to Lee about, she got this strange look and mumbled, “Nothing much.” So immediately I guessed what was up. No one in the family believes I can keep a secret, but I kept that one.

  The wedding was in Southern California, Lisa’s home. A priest was presiding, but Lee wanted to do what we had done, have part of the ceremony recognize his Jewish heritage, and he asked me to perform the role of tribal elder that Justice Goldberg had for us. As the wedding approached, and I was thinking of what to say, out of the blue one day we received a letter from Arthur Goldberg’s son Bobby. He had been going over his father’s papers, and found the original handwritten notes the justice had used at our wedding. In fact, they were written on little pieces of notepaper…

  CR:…it was a telephone pad…

  SR:…from the Waldorf-Astoria, where the UN ambassador has a residence. The symbolism was perfect. I was able to use Goldberg’s words as the text for my own remarks, almost thirty-one years later. And I made sure to repeat my favorite phrase, “Never cause a woman to weep, because God counts her tears.” The priest got so caught in the ecumenical spirit of things that he expressed the hope, off the cuff, that Lee would read the same words at the marriages of his children.

  CR: Meanwhile, Becca was living in Philadelphia and dating Dan Hartman, a young man who grew up in Tennessee and was working for a financial consulting firm.

  SR: I hold only one thing against Dan—I root avidly for the Duke basketball team and he went to the University of North Carolina, their arch rivals. But I knew Dan would make a good son-in-law one day when he left me a phone message: “Dan Hartman here. Just in case you missed it on the news, North Carolina beat Duke last night by one point in the last six seconds. I knew you’d want to know.” Click. The guy had guts, and a sense of humor, a pretty good combination. But it took at least another year after that call before he phoned to set up an appointment.

  CR: Oh, that was funny because Steve didn’t catch on.

  SR: Yes, I did.

  CR: No, you didn’t, but I didn’t either at first. I told you one night when you came home, “Dan’s looking for you. He’s left a message.” Then suddenly I realized, why did he have to talk to you and not me? “Oh, my goodness, he’s probably calling to ask for your blessing to marry Rebecca.” Then you wouldn’t call him back.

  SR: I did the next day, but I needed time to collect my thoughts. On my way down to the office, I was rehearsing my lines in my head. I only had one daughter, and this was only going to happen once in my life. When I reached him, and he said that he wanted to come talk to me, I replied, “Dan, I think I know what this is about. It’s very honorable of you to want to come see me, but if you’re busy, we can do this on the phone.” And he said, “No, no, no, there’s only one proper way to do this and that’s in person.” A well-brought-up young man. So we agreed that he would come down on the train from Philadelphia and I would meet him in a restaurant at the train station for a drink, and then Cokie would join us for dinner. Now, Dan’s consulting firm does a lot of work with the D.C. government, and when we walked into the restaurant, sitting at the next table was half of his office, having dinner with several city officials. Poor Dan; his face turned white! When he told me what was going on, I asked if he wanted to go somewhere else, but when he said no, I suggested, “Well, before we start talking, why don’t you go over there and say hello and then you won’t feel uncomfortable.” Which he did.

  CR: Of course all his office buddies knew what was going on, or figured it out pretty quickly.

  SR: He was so dear, he didn’t have the ring with him…

  CR:…it was being made…

  SR:…but he had a photograph that he brought to show us.

  CR: Becca didn’t know he was coming, she was still in the dark, but we knew what day he was going to propose, so we stayed by the phone waiting for a call.

  SR: When she did call, her voice just sparkled with excitement. “I’m getting married,” she said, and I don’t think there are three happier words in the language. People kept asking me whether I felt sad about “losing” my daughter, but that question never made any sense to me. First of all, I wasn’t “losing” her, I was gaining a football-watching buddy. More importantly, if you’ve been lucky enough to have a good marriage, isn’t that what you want for your own children? How could you possibly have any regrets? After the wedding one friend said to me, “I’ve seen beaming brides before, but I never saw a father of the bride beam so much.”

  CR: From the time she was born, Becca knew she wanted to get married at home. In fact, she often joked that she could only pick out two things for her wedding, the groom and the dress. But actually there were many choices to make, and she was determined that everybody be seated at a table for dinner, a logistical nightmare with seven hundred guests. I didn’t know what we were going to do if the weather turned bad. I had tents ordered to cover the entire yard if I needed them, but they only protect against drizzle, not a blowing, whipping wind. I kept fretting, “What am I going to do if a hurricane comes?” I finally decided that there was only one thing I could do—move the entire event to the
gym of my old high school, Stone Ridge. It’s not far away, people could get there, we could still use the caterer. I called the headmistress, a nun who is a good friend of mine, and informed her, “If there’s a hurricane, I need the gym.” I love the school and I’ve been quite involved with it, but the headmistress had a problem with my plan: the annual book fair was going on in the gym the same day. I was so panic-stricken that I shamelessly pressured her: “Well, then, that’s a good reason to pray really hard that there’s no hurricane.”

  Even with all that heavenly intervention, with about two weeks to go, my degree of terror hit fever pitch. At some point I was going to have to make decisions, not keep everything on hold. So I became best friends with the long-term weather forecaster for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. His name was Ed Olenic, and after a while he didn’t bother to wait for my call. He was so sweet about it. He would call me first thing in the morning and tell me the forecast. But he could never voice the only words I wanted to hear, which were, “There’s absolutely no chance of rain.” Of course he couldn’t say that. He had to hedge his bets, telling me there was a statistical chance of precipitation. But it didn’t rain. It was a beautiful night, a little warm, but nice.