His optimism was contagious, and I hung on the slender thread of hope that he spun, without realizing how tenuous it was. Or how fragile he was himself. Of course I was spinning my own threads as well, my own illusions.
Shortly after Jan left, he wrote to me on Kawaloa stationery:
Dear Brian:
Here are the two…insurance checks we discussed on the phone. Let me know if I committed a goof. Bev always took care of these things for us and I’m sometimes not as careful with them as I should be. (Mind off somewhere in current book).
She’s very slightly improved today but, as the doctor says, she is walking a very fine line with her medication. We keep our spirits up, though, and Hana is good for both of us. Bill Dana said the other day that “This is a very spiritual place.” I think maybe he’s right.
The saws are buzzing outside as they complete the deck around the pool. Looking beautiful, and Bev is showing signs of impatience to get into warm water. Soon!
We enjoyed Jan’s visit and she was a great help to us both. By the way, tell her we received a letter from Kim to her and sent it back “Return to Sender.” It should arrive in a day or so.
Love from your papa—
Frank
Mom had my father’s fighting abilities and his sense of determination, and he had hers. They were, as each of them often said, “one”—different parts of the same organism. At times Dad tried to intellectualize her condition, and these were the worst times for him, when he had to face stark, cold medical facts. He was the most optimistic when he permitted his heart full rein, when he believed she would pull through and convinced himself she would.
He convinced her of this, I am sure.
Curiously, though he, like my mother, never accepted any formal religion, he was basically a man of faith, and this made him good and true and strong. It made him capable of writing books that inspired millions of readers. It enabled him to become, at long last, a father to me.
Over the decade that the precious human cargo known as Beverly Herbert had been fighting for her life—first against cancer and then against heart disease brought on by radiation treatment, all of us grieved for her. We expected the worst at any moment, but hoped for the best.
When Jan arrived home from Kawaloa, she couldn’t talk about all of the sadness. She didn’t show me what she had written at the beach or fill me in on all the details, such as the oxygen my mother had to take to get through each night. Jan looked numb, lower than I had ever seen her, and just said, “Your mother is dying.”
I couldn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t ask probing questions, things hindsight tells me I should have asked. But I had a terrible, ominous feeling. For weeks I had been battling a bad case of the flu; I was tired and really depressed.
For the first time in my life, I called the airport and made a reservation for a flight on an airliner—to Hawaii.
Then I reread Dad’s recent letter, in which he said Mom was slightly improved, and I deluded myself. The swimming pool was almost ready, and soon she would be in the water, resuming the exercise program that had worked so well for her in the past. My terrible fear of flying returned and overwhelmed me. I couldn’t go through with the flight after all and canceled it, without ever having told my parents I’d made it.
The poinsettias my mother planted on the hillside did not survive.
Chapter 38
A Woman of Grace
Love…always protects,
Always trusts,
Always hopes,
Always perseveres.
Love never fails.
—I Corinthians 13:7–8
RESUMING HER interior design classes early in 1984, Jan was given an opportunity to study at an extension class that summer at the University of Paris at the Sorbonne. We discussed it but were wavering because of the high cost of the trip, including lodging at a pension (boarding house) in Paris, near Luxembourg Palace. We had the problem of child care, too. Julie was going through a rebellious stage at fifteen, and was quite a handful. Margaux was quite young, only a toddler.
So Jan telephoned my mother and told her about the situation, expressing concern about leaving little Margaux and her sisters in my care for an entire summer.
“My God, Jan,” Mom exclaimed. “An opportunity like that doesn’t come along every day!” And making a reference to Jan’s ancestry she said, “You’re French, aren’t you? You have to go!”
Jan had a feeling she would disappoint my mother if she didn’t go, and beyond that, Mom was right. Opportunities like that weren’t likely to come along again soon. We talked about it more, decided in favor of it, and made the reservations. She would leave in late May.
On January 25, 1984, I wrote to Mom, enclosing my usual light fare, and among other things said to her, “I’m working hard on an outline of a science fiction story to present to Dad for possible collaboration. Working title: A Man of Two Worlds.”
I spoke with her a couple of days later, and she said Dad had given her the sweetest, most intriguing note. It said, “There is no ‘real’ or ‘unreal,’ only what we create together.”
I found a similar entry in Chapterhouse: Dune, just one of many passages indicating he was thinking of her when he wrote the book:
I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves to the sacred presence we share and create.*
One morning my mother awoke earlier than usual and sat up in bed. The long vertical blinds over the windows were open, and she gazed through them at a golden sunrise. The sun was rising on another perfect day in paradise, but she felt her life setting. She heard my father pass her door and called out to him.
“Good morning, darling,” he said in response, then nuzzled his bearded face against her cheek and kissed her. “Would you like breakfast now?”
“Maybe later. I just want to sit here for a while. Look at that glorious sunrise!”
Dad felt a surge of hope, because she was smiling and her voice sounded strong. Beverly Herbert gazed out on the water, as if hypnotized by it.
“Call if you need me,” he said. And he went back to his book, the one she had named, Chapterhouse: Dune.
On January 30, Dad called and spoke with Jan while I was out. He was in tears, said Mom refused to eat. “She wants to die,” he said. “She’s slipping away.” Penny was there with him, helping. He was having a cardiac specialist fly in from Honolulu.
I wasn’t home when he called because I had lost my wallet, something I never did, and I was searching for it in the woods where I had been gathering kindling. I didn’t find it, and when I returned, Jan told me of the call.
Somehow I seemed to be feeling my mother’s anguish, as before, from far across the ocean. It was sending scattered signals through my brain, leaving me in dazed confusion.
I reached Dad by telephone, and he sounded dismal. He said Mom refused to go to a hospital, where they could hook her to life-support equipment. “She doesn’t want to die in a hospital,” he said. There were long periods of silence and broken sentences, when he couldn’t talk. I told him I loved him.
He canceled a scheduled book tour.
The following day I called him again. He said the specialist had given Mom medicine that was working well, and that she was starting to eat once more. Dad was planning to hire a private jet with medical equipment to bring her back to Seattle in March or April. That was two or three months off, so I thought the emergency had passed.
He said things were better, under control.
That evening I wrote a letter to my parents:
Dear Mom and Dad:
I know these have been hard times for both of you. Each of you have always drawn strength from the other over the years, and now we worry ab
out both of you. Dad, I know you’re tired and I know Mom is, too—so it may be hard for each of you to give and take the strength that is needed to go on. I wanted you to know that we are here to draw upon for whatever extra measure of support you need.
In the past years we have enjoyed many fine dinners and good conversations together. During the last five or six years in particular, I think, Jan and I began to think of both of you as friends as well as my parents. There is a bond there which goes beyond love, I suppose, if that’s possible. Maybe it’s a special kind of love, or a special kind of friendship.
Somehow, Mom, you have to reach for that intangible extra. You are a strong person, and I hope you know the depth of what we feel for you.
Margaux is showing some of the Herbert artistic talent. She loves to dance, and last night was spinning to the music to the point of dizziness—she just kept going around in circles, getting giddy as she did so. She also likes to rub Daddy’s shoulders to relax the tight muscles after a hard day at the office. She’s smart, having seen Jan do that for me only once. Margaux is trying to be good, too. If she spills something, she often tries to clean it up. And she’s carrying a lot of stuff around with her all the time—her new Christmas doll, a blanket, a bottle and a little pillow. It makes me think of Linus in the Peanuts cartoons. Her vocabulary is increasing by leaps and bounds, but she has trouble with the “L” sound. Pillow, for example, comes out “piddow.”
I am enclosing cards that Kim and Julie made up for you. They miss both of you, as we all do.
Love,
Brian
On February 3, I spoke with Dad, and he said Mom was doing a little better. We discussed A Man of Two Worlds, and it looked like we would definitely write the book together. He suggested the title Man of Two Worlds instead, which he thought would be stronger, and I agreed. The newspaper element in the story would concern a high-technology communications empire, with a strong lead character. Dad had spoken with his literary agent about it, who felt we might obtain a large advance for the book. We spoke of sending him a short outline of our proposed plot, perhaps two pages.
When Mom woke up the next morning she said to Dad, in a faraway voice, “You will fall in love with a younger woman.”
Oh no, he insisted, that would never happen. And besides, he told her, he didn’t want her talking that way, as if she weren’t going to be around.
On February 5, Dad called and said Mom had taken a sudden turn for the worse. The doctor only gave her three days to live. There was nothing to be done for her now, he said. His voice wavered, and he couldn’t talk for several moments.
“I’m sorry for breaking down,” he said, finally.
I felt numb. “You don’t need to apologize, Dad. I love you. Tell Mom I love her.”
He mentioned an unusual incident that occurred several days before, when Mom sat up suddenly in bed and said, “I just saw Federico [De Laurentiis, son of the Dune movie producer]. He was talking to me.” She had been especially fond of young Federico, who had died some years earlier in an Alaskan plane crash. This was a common experience, my father told me, in which dying people had visions of those already gone.
I also spoke with Penny, who was still with him. She was in tears.
For several hours after talking with my father and sister, I again struggled with my terror of flying. That evening I made my second reservation to fly to Hawaii, leaving the afternoon of the sixth. Again, I didn’t tell Dad I was coming. Events lay before me in a haze. I would go to the airport and get on the plane, entirely sober. Drunkenness would only make it worse, would intensify my fear, I thought. With any luck at all I would arrive in Hawaii, where I would telephone my parents and surprise them. It didn’t make a lot of sense, wasn’t thought out at all.
But Jan told Dad about my plans, and he said for me not to come, that there was nothing I could do, and besides Mom was adamant that she didn’t want a “big deathbed scene.” Dad said he had just read Mom a letter from a friend of hers, but she had trouble concentrating on the words, only picking up bits and pieces. Mom gave Dad a list of things she wanted him to do after she was gone, and made him promise to do them. It was a long list, he said, and involved us.
I spoke to Bruce, who said he had been told by Dad (pursuant to Mom’s wishes) not to rush to Hawaii for a big ending scene. Mom didn’t want drama. She just wanted peace.
I tried to sleep that night, but couldn’t. I got up and tried to write, then tried to read, then tried to watch a late movie on television. I couldn’t remain in bed either. Finally I dozed off on the family room couch, holding a letter she had written to me.
On the morning of the seventh, I called Dad early, afraid of what I might hear. Mom had slipped into a coma and was not expected to survive the night. He said it was her last wish to be cremated, with her ashes scattered on the land she loved, Kawaloa. He said he would come back to Seattle after it was all over. And he spoke of one of the items on her long list.
“She made me promise to finish Chapterhouse and get it off to New York, but I can’t do it here.” He said it was a little over half completed, and that he had read many of the passages to Mom, receiving her comments and suggestions on them.
In a failing voice I asked if she might possibly pull through, but he said no. It was beyond that. I broke down and couldn’t talk any more. Since she was in a coma, she wasn’t going to fight back again, as she had so many times before. This was finality. I went in the family room and hugged Margaux while I cried. I asked Julie and Kim to pray for their Nanna.
I hadn’t given them any details yet, feeling my daughters were too young to sense the immensity of what was going on.
Early that evening, Dad called. My mother, Beverly Ann Herbert, passed away at 5:05 P.M. at the age of fifty-seven, while he was holding her hand. Dr. Milton Howell was in attendance, and he said, when she was gone, “She had grace.”
My father told me that after my call that morning he held Mom’s hand and told her I said I loved her. She was in a coma, but he told her, “If you understand, darling, nod your head.”
She nodded her head.
I was only a little heartened when Dad assured me she was not in pain at the end.
They weren’t going to spread her ashes yet, as it was Mom’s wish that the ceremony, a simple one, be held at a future date at Kawaloa when the entire family could be there.
After the call, I told the girls, and we all cried.
I learned later that in her last days my mother had remarked, “I wish Brian were here.” It is a tragedy that I was not there, and I think I shall always suffer for it. What an astounding woman my mother was. What a terrible loss to me, and to everyone who knew and loved her. She had a valiant, strong heart.
And I recalled some two decades earlier, when we were living in San Francisco before the phenomenal success of Dune, when Mom predicted that she would die in a distant land.
A story on Mom’s passing ran in Retail Ad Week, describing her career in retail advertising, and featuring Dr. Howell’s description of her as a woman with grace.
Dad wrote a poignant poem about their life together, which he entitled, with the simple elegance that represented my mother, “Bev.” It spoke of their honeymoon on a mountaintop and little details about their life together, spanning nearly thirty-eight years. In reference to the cause of her lung cancer, he wrote, “Smoke buys your life.”
In the closing lines of the poem my father described their final moments together, when he held her hand.
Bev
My God! There’s a bear!
Black nose in fireweed,
Silver forest in your eyes,
Cold ground beneath our bed.
Making love on a mountain top,
A good place to begin.
You fear the hum of bees,
A packrat’s beady eyes.
Saliva smell on your cheek,
Stain of huckleberry there,
Black as a lover’s night,
The color o
f your hair.
White witch knows her man,
“You will fall in love
With a younger woman.”
Soft and hard and eager.
Our bed smells of aloe vera,
Sweetness in the spines.
Your shape in the pillow
Moans of the summer dark.
One puff kills a bird,
Smoke buys your life.
It rushes over the brink,
Waterfall of blinding light.
Eyelids flicker twice,
Your hand in mine
Trembles when you die.
Nothing is ever lost.
Chapter 39
Her Plan, Revealed
ON SATURDAY, February 11, 1984, I jogged in the morning, running from my house up a hill to the top of Mercer Island. It was windy and rainy, but the cover of woods at the top of the hill offered some shelter.
That afternoon, Jan, Kim, and I met Dad and Penny at Boeing Field in Seattle. They came in on a long, sleek Israeli Westwind private jet that Dad said cost almost $20,000 to charter.* He couldn’t bear to ride a commercial jet back from Hawaii with all the cheerful, talkative vacationers. (Another option he considered but rejected would have been to reserve the entire first-class section of a commercial airliner.) Jan thought he looked thinner than he had been only a few weeks before, and Dad said he had lost nearly twenty pounds in a short period of time.
His face appeared flushed, especially the top of his forehead—a shade of red that looked like high blood pressure but actually was from over-exposure to the intense Hawaiian sun. His eyes were deeply set in their sockets and filled with pain. He looked devastated, as if he had been shot through the heart. Nothing in his life had ever hit him that hard.
We had two cars, as Dad had five hundred pounds of luggage, files, and other items to go to Port Townsend. I had made arrangements to accompany Dad and Penny to the house, having taken two weeks off work to help them. Jan couldn’t take the time off from school. We filled the cars, then headed for Port Townsend.
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