During my mother’s final years, Dad had been frustrated by the primitive level of medical knowledge about dietary matters, and by the scarcity of low-salt foods for her. He had taken her to Mexico for laetrile, seeking what he thought was the latest, most effective cure for her. In his own eleventh hour, he had searched a computer network for the technology needed to save his life, and had gone across the country to participate in an experimental program.
If only my mother had been able to receive a heart transplant, a technology Dad wasn’t confident about at the time. And if only he had been able to secure a cancer cure for himself. In another, future time, both of them might have lived many years beyond the onset of their illnesses. So many things I wished for them.
My parents were fighters. Mom beat her cancer and ultimately succumbed to heart disease. Dad had his cancer in remission, only to be struck down by an embolism.
I wished I had done more for them, a feeling that haunted and paralyzed me. It’s been said that we all have 20/20 hindsight. It’s only natural to wish, to regret, to want to revisit old pathways, doing better the second time around. I wish I had been with my mother and father when they died, to offer comfort. But in this life you can’t totally prepare for anything. Events rarely occur the same way twice. I didn’t expect my mother to die. She was too much of a fighter, and Dad told me she was improving. I didn’t expect my father to die, either. He was too strong and vibrant, too optimistic to lose his life prematurely. He was like a mountain climber going up the tough side of a peak and then falling off the easy side. It wasn’t expected. We thought he would climb other mountains.
I didn’t cry when I first heard about Dad, though in my anger and disbelief I trembled and felt glassy-eyed. In a daze, I made a number of telephone calls, including one to Jack and Norma Vance. “I’ll raise an empty glass for him,” Jack said, his voice breaking as he referred to an Irish tradition, saluting the warrior who has not returned from battle.
Very few of Dad’s friends and business associates knew about the nature and severity of his illness, so for them, too, his passing came as a shock.
While running an errand later that afternoon I saw Jan in our other car, and motioned her over into a school parking lot. There we stood outside and I told her what had happened. Like me, she was in shock, but unlike me, she burst immediately into tears, to the point where she had trouble driving home.
Later that day I returned to the table in the dining room, where my manuscript pages were still spread. I don’t know why I sat there with the thought of going back to work, but I did. Maybe I thought my father would have wanted me to keep writing. It was the craft he had taught me. My thoughts were fuzzy. I lifted pen to paper, but all I could write was, “My father died today.”
I still had not cried for him.
The next day, Jan and I were in line at the post office. We reached the counter, and by that time a long line of people had gathered behind us. The clerk, a sweet woman named Agnes, had heard about the tragedy on the news and was telling me how sorry she was. Without warning, the terrible immensity of it overcame me, and I broke down in tears.
Outside in the car I asked Jan, “Why in the post office? Why?”
Then it dawned on me. The mails had been our lifeline, our instrument of survival when I lived with Dad. He mailed manuscripts to his agent and watched mail deliveries carefully, because checks, contracts and important letters arrived that way. For him, especially during the early years of creative struggle, the postal system represented hope more than anything else, his hope for the arrival of good news about a story.
Bruce’s homosexuality had never been fully accepted by my father, and they had never reached full rapprochement. Still, when my brother came to Seattle he broke into tears while riding in the backseat of my car. Penny and Jan consoled him. My brother told me later that he didn’t cry from love, because he didn’t feel he loved the man. He said he cried from what he had never experienced in the relationship with his father.
“I missed almost everything,” Bruce said. “I never saw the good side he showed to you. He wasn’t there for me.”
He went on to say that he couldn’t watch movies or television programs having to do with father-son relationships, because they upset him so much. I told him that Dad loved him, that he spoke of him often and fondly, and that he just didn’t know how to show it. I reminded Bruce of all the ways that he emulated our father, and of the many interests that they shared…electronics, computers, science fiction, photography, flamenco guitar…and I asked if that could possibly mean that he loved Dad after all. My brother fell silent.
I told him that love is a complicated equation, fraught with countless different motives and angles of interpretation. One person’s definition does not correspond with another’s. Everyone would agree, however, that it is a strong bond of affection.
I am convinced that Bruce felt this for his father.
My telephone rang off the hook—reporters from all over the country—but I refused all interview requests. I found myself unable to talk with any of them. I had images in my mind of grief-stricken family members on the 5:00 news, sitting on a couch under the hot glare of TV lights, fielding insensitive questions from intruders. Instead I suggested that anyone wishing to do so could send donations to the “Frank Herbert Cancer Research Fund” at the University of Wisconsin Medical Center.
Frank Herbert was brilliant, loving, honest, loyal, generous and thoughtful. His deficiencies were more interesting than significant. In the days and months after my father’s passing, I experienced more apparent grief for him than for my mother. I felt a terrible emptiness. In moments of privacy and silence or during conversation I would suddenly be overwhelmed with emotion, and it confounded me. Perhaps it was because we grieved for Mom over a long ten-year period, during her illness. We were conditioned to expect her death. But with Dad it had been so nightmarishly sudden and shocking. He was such a survivor, such a larger-than-life figure. I thought he could beat anything.
All say his day had ended…How bare
the pathway down this mountain.
Frank Herbert, in Dune Messiah
Epilogue
We say of Muad’Dib that he has gone on a journey into that land where we walk without footprints.
—Frank Herbert, in Dune Messiah
MY FATHER made a mere sixty five trips around the sun with this planet. Still, he crammed a thousand years of living into his life.
I was not there when he died, but I was there when he lived. And perhaps this is better, for I can remember him as he was, a remarkably alive person with such boundless energy and enthusiasm for life. Only one thing could stop this giant of a man prematurely, this creator of magnificent worlds—and that was losing my mother. Though none of us knew it, as she faded away, he was fading, too. His own suffering was obvious to us, particularly after she was gone, but still we hoped. There was always hope.
After Mom died, several people including myself tried to fill in the gaping holes left in his life by her departure, but it wasn’t enough to keep him whole. The sum total of all of us did not equal my mother. His heart had been shot away.
Following Beverly Herbert’s death, the only productive writing Dad did involved the fulfillment of promises made to her. He completed Chapterhouse: Dune and the collaboration with me, Man of Two Worlds. Additional projects either didn’t come to fruition (screenplays on The Santaroga Barrier and Soul Catcher) or were left for others to finish (The Ascension Factor and other books in the Dune series). He also left undone a new collection of science fiction stories, which was to include a 20,000-word novella set in the Dune universe.*
Without his companion of nearly four decades, my father could not go on. I did not discover one of the terrible pieces of the puzzle until months after my father’s death, when it was too late. For years there had been stories of surviving spouses dying shortly after the death of their loving companion. I always thought of it as a vague phenomenon, something nebul
ous…dying of a broken heart. But it was more than that, much more. It was tangible, with ugly teeth. Even the onset of a serious illness in a spouse could be dangerous to the mate, as in the case of Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was in good health, though elderly at eighty-seven. He suffered a fatal heart attack at the hospital bedside of his wife, Anne, while she was in a coma. She died two days afterward, reportedly without learning of his death. But I think she knew. After nearly sixty-six years of marriage, with the tremendously close bond the Fullers had, she knew.
According to a Harvard Medical School article published in October 1986, entitled “Depression and Immunity,” bereavement, depression, and loneliness in the surviving spouse can cause the immune system to break down, making the survivor more susceptible to illness.
In one of the obituaries on Dad, the writer said that Frank Herbert “was condemned to sequelizing himself…” I was furious upon reading it and shouted at the page that it wasn’t true, that the needs of my mother forced him to write the sequels. There were astronomical costs for the construction of Kawaloa and for medical expenses that were not covered by insurance.
After I calmed down, I realized the press could not be expected to understand my father’s motivations. Even if they read the touching dedication to my mother in Chapterhouse: Dune, they could not know the pain of this complex man, could not possibly know his innermost thoughts.
A week after my father’s death, we held a simple ceremony for him on the Olympic Peninsula, in a forest he loved, attended by family and friends. On a high spot of ground, in a small clearing with evergreen trees towering overhead, we dug a small hole and scattered his ashes in it. Pursuant to his wishes, we planted a young dwarf McIntosh apple tree there and suddenly realized no one had watered the hole. At that moment, to our amazement, rain began to fall, not unlike the rain at the end of the David Lynch film version of Dune that watered the parched planet.
It was just enough water for the tree.
In the mist, Bill Ransom read one of our favorite passages from Soul Catcher:
Our brothers will sing of this. I will cover your body with white feathers from the breasts of ducks. Our maidens will sing your beauty. This is what you have prayed for from one end of the world to the other every day of your life. I…give you your wish because I have become Soul Catcher.
And I remembered one of the Zen parables my father had told me shortly before his death: “Before I achieved satori a mountain was a mountain, a river was a river, and a tree was a tree. After I achieved satori, a mountain was still a mountain, a river was still a river, and a tree was still a tree.” Now it seemed to me that the satori he had been speaking of was the burst of enlightenment that he had been on this planet—a brief and brilliant flare of energy, a miniature sun with human frailties. Despite his achievements, he was tied inextricably to the human group, and its fate became his fate. As in American Indian thought, he had come full circle, and the end was like the beginning.
A quarter century before, Frank Herbert wrote this unpublished poem:
I am a Human of Earth!
My kind ebb and flow like the tide—
Whipped on by an unseen master:
Myself, a prisoner.
My other side calls out from its prison:
“Logic binds me in chains of flesh!”
And, with part of me chained,
There is fear!
I am a Human of Earth!
The sense comes out behind my words
Like a deer startled in the forest:
Fearing movement.
Only one avenue remains open to flotsam,
Driven before the wild currents of time
With part submerged:
To lift my eyes and look ahead.
But bound down and weighted by the chained side,
By the other side that I sought to deny,
I must flounder,
I must sink!
I am a Human of Earth!
In despair, I seek the farther shore,
And the dark
Drags me down into terror.
In The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck wrote, “Men when old awake to a brief youth.” So like my father, those words. He married a young woman, ordered a new Porsche, grew fond of popular music, took skin diving lessons, and made plans to climb magnificent peaks in the Himalayas. Late in life, Dad wanted to spend a year in Paris, wanted to direct a movie. There were unfinished story ideas, including more books with me and with Bill Ransom. He left loose ends, dreams uncompleted. Like the painter Jean Géricault at the end of his life, Frank Herbert spoke of all the things he would do when he was well again. And like Géricault, he never got well.
In many ways my father never grew up, and this was part of the charm of the man. Like a small boy, he always looked forward to his birthday, and to my mother bringing him back little gifts on the few occasions when she took Plan Ahead business trips without him. In his youth, he had gone on a daring adventure all the way to Alaska in a small sailing canoe. Later, just before meeting my mother, he and his best friend, Howie Hansen, spoke of vagabonding around the world. He was an explorer at heart, an adventurer. He was forever curious.
As fate would have it, the very last novel my father wrote was with me, the book my mother wanted us to do together, Man of Two Worlds.* He never saw the completed first edition, though he did see the cover proof and typeset galleys. It was an emotional moment when I received copies of our book from the publisher shortly after Dad’s death, especially when I saw the photograph of us together on the back. Theresa took the picture on his sixty-fifth birthday, his last.
A lifelong workaholic, he wrote with me on that day. More than half a century earlier, on his eighth birthday, he had written as well, after announcing to his family at breakfast that he wanted to be “a author.” In the final scene of Man of Two Worlds, written by Dad, the characters are planning a vacation in the Himalayas. Each time I read this I think of my adventurous father and of his uncompleted trip to those mountains, the highest on earth. He wanted to become the oldest man to climb Mt. Everest.
In June, a single green McIntosh apple appeared on the tree. I know my father, who always wanted to beat the odds and do better than the next guy, had something to do with this. The young tree, you see, was not supposed to bear fruit until the following year!
On the cold February day that we scattered Dad’s ashes, we held a wake for him in the Port Townsend house, at which we played Irish music and celebrated the remarkable life he had led. His friends and family were there from points near and far, and we drank the wines in his wine cellar—grand crus, premiere crus, and even ordinary vintages. We drank all of the bottles of Château Prieuré-Lichire Margaux.
The following month, I was asked on very short notice to speak at two events in my father’s behalf, both at the Norwescon science fiction convention in Seattle. One was an awards ceremony for the Writers of the Future contest, where Dad had judged stories written by aspiring writers. The contest organizers wanted me to address four hundred people at a banquet. I had always been petrified at the thought of public speaking, but I got up and managed it. I felt my father’s spirit there with me. He told me that the people in the audience were our friends.
The other occasion was a showing of film clips on Frank Herbert and the making of the Dune movie. At first I told them I didn’t think I could talk to all of the people who were gathered. Then I reconsidered, feeling strongly it was something I needed to do. I spoke about the film clips and about my father, and fielded questions from the audience. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of love and sorrow from his fans, and this gave me strength.
Later in the year, a most remarkable event occurred. For many years my mother had tried to reestablish contact with her childhood playmate and first cousin, Marie Landis. During all those years, Marie was also trying to reach my mother. But each was married, and in the process their maiden names had been lost. They could not find one another. Then, after Dad died, Marie read in a scienc
e fiction magazine that Frank Herbert had been married to Beverly Stuart.
Marie wondered if this could possibly be the same Beverly Stuart she had last seen in the 1930s when they were children in Seattle, before an unfortunate argument created a rift between Marie’s father and his sister, Beverly’s mother.* Marie began bird-dogging, and finally made contact with me several months after Dad’s death. It turned out that she lived on my street on Mercer Island. It was a rather long street, more than five miles, and we were only three miles apart. Every weekday for seven years, I had driven by her house commuting to my job at the insurance agency. My parents passed her house many times as well, while coming to visit me or looking for real estate on the island.
Marie was an accomplished painter, as my maternal grandmother Marguerite had been. Marie was also a potter and interior designer, like Jan. And, of great interest to me, she was an excellent writer, having won several awards for her short stories. We began collaborating, and sold a science fiction novel, Memorymakers (1991). Numerous short story collaborations followed, and another novel, Blood on the Sun (1996).
Through Marie I met many cousins I had been totally unaware of, including her siblings and children. Following such tremendous losses, when I was grieving terribly, a whole new loving family opened up for me….
Then, eleven years after the death of my father I began to consider the possibility of writing new Dune novels, in collaboration with the noted science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson.* We were trying to figure out what Dad had in mind for “Dune 7,” the book he was just beginning to think about when he passed away. That novel would have been a direct sequel to Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune.** In Chapterhouse: Dune, the Honored Matres—the dark side of the Bene Gesserit—were laying waste to much of the galaxy, destroying planets, killing our Bene Gesserit heroines, driving them back. But something else was out there in the galaxy as well, something terrible that was chasing the Honored Matres…and Frank Herbert did not reveal what it was.
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