by Bruce Feiler
The librarian carries out five volumes of loose-leaf eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch onionskin paper, hand-typed in red and black ink, bound in black paperboard binders. She places the first volume on a book stand. I slip on a pair of white cotton gloves and open the cover. Inside is a one-page bio of the author.
Dr. Benjamin S. Abeshouse was born February 7th, 1901, in New Haven, Connecticut. He graduated from New Haven High School; attended Yale University, graduated 1921, then entered Yale Medical School graduating 1924.
The bio goes on to outline my grandfather’s medical career, culminating in his rise to chief of urology at Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital in 1945. It mentions his three children, along with 120 academic articles he wrote. It ends with this statement: “He had various hobbies, i.e., collecting antiques, miniature ivories and statues; but his pride, gathered in these volumes, was the world’s largest collection of epitaphs, 9,000 in total, which he and Mrs. Abeshouse accumulated over a period of thirty years.”
I was shaking. These pages were the closest I had come to the man who died three years before I was born and for whom I was named.
I was nervous. There was something ghostly about learning during a year when my most pressing fear was death that the figure who had hovered over my childhood had spent his entire adulthood collecting tombstone farewells.
And I was surprised. From the minute I turned the first page of these writings, any distance creepiness slipped away, and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of recognition, even kinship.
A PHOTOGRAPH DEFINED HIM while I was growing up. It hung outside my room and depicts him in profile, wearing a starched white tie and morning coat around a timpani chest. He seems poised for debate at Oxford. His face is round, even cherubic, with Harry Potter spectacles and thin hair, cleanly parted, waxed to his head. He hs a boy’s innocence and a man’s seriousness. Give him the floor, he would outargue you. Puncture him, and a flood of vulnerabilities would rush out.
I never noticed that vulnerability when I was a child. Instead, Bucky Abeshouse was so exalted he could have been a Roman emperor. His chiseled face belonged on an ancient coin—august, heralded, untouchable. I remember asking my father once about him; his reply seemed to cut off any questions: “He was a great man.”
The truth, of course, was more complicated.
Bucky Abeshouse, too, grew up without a dad. He was the youngest of nine children from parents who emigrated from Vilna, Lithuania. His father, Abraham, died when he was two months old, leaving his mother to raise her kids while running a corner grocery. Bucky was the first in his family to attend college, and went to Yale at a time when Jews were not allowed to live on campus. After medical school, he relocated to Baltimore to train with a well-known urologist.
Urology in the 1920s was a young profession, and Bucky rose quickly. He penned academic articles on everything from urinary tract sarcomas to testicle surgery to “inflammation of the bladder due to the presence of a foreign object (a pencil).” He pioneered research into renal dyes and kidney dialysis.
And he was always writing. He wrote a book of popular history discussing the genital and urinary diseases of famous men, from Isaac Newton to Woodrow Wilson. Called Troubled Waters (a pun only a urologist could love), the book includes chapters on Ben Franklin’s bladder stones and Napoleon’s urinary tract infections.
My grandfather’s expertise in male reproduction led to his having a comfort with sexuality that seems, at a minimum, uncommon for his era. He collected replicas of the Manneken Pis, the famed Belgian bronze sculpture of a naked boy urinating into a fountain. Bucky even molded a similar sculpture himself and recruited my ten-year-old mother to pose with a garden hose between her legs. In one reproduction that a friend lugged home from Europe, the boy’s penis was fully erect. My grandmother, Carrie, placed it over the kitchen sink, using the boy’s engorged phallus to store her wedding ring while she washed the dishes.
And in a fascinating career move that my mother didn’t know about for more than seventy years, my white-tie-wearing grandfather wrote the introduction to a popular sex guide that was published in 1936. The Single, the Engaged, and the Married was so successful it was still in print twenty years later. The book says that sexual relations should be more openly discussed and enjoyed, and does so by advocating the notion that as one advances from single to engaged to married, a greater amount of sex will result. Maybe for you, Grandpa!
My mother was born the year the book was published, which raises the tantalizing possibility that Bucky was writing his essay at the time she was conceived. His piece may be the closest thing to a Back to the Future moment of witnessing my own origins I’ll ever have. It suggests that in the middle of the Great Depression, my otherwise formal grandparents were, as the rappers like to say, knockin’ da boots.
THE WORLD’S LARGEST COLLECTION of epitaphs is divided into five, carefully subdivided volumes. Book I contains the inscriptions of famous figures—pharaohs, poets, philosophers, kings. Book II gathers epitaphs based on cause of death—poisonings, railroad accidents, bee stings, burns, electrocutions, falling anchors, diarrhea, hangings. There’s an entire chapter on unusual deaths. “The manner of her death was thus / She was druv over by a bus.” There’s another on food. “This disease you ne’er heard tell on, / I died of eating too much melon.”
Subsequent volumes gather epitaphs of centenarians, movie stars, and drunks. His list by professions is prodigious: clockmaker, coal heaver, collier, stagecoach driver, cricketer, coroner, cremationist. And that’s just the c’s! He finds dozens of epitaphs for prostitutes. “Here lies the body of young Miss Charlote, / Born a virgin, dies a harlot. / For sixteen years she maintained her virginity / And that’s a record for this vicinity.” He even uncovers advertisements for widows.
Sacred to the Memory of Jared Bates
Who died August the 6th, 1800
His widow, aged 24, lives at 7 Elm Street,
Has every qualification for a good wife,
And yearns to be comforted.
His final epitaph purports to be the inscription of Jesus. “Therefore being satisfied with his life and faith, give him eternal happiness through grace.”
It took me six hours to turn every one of the collection’s 1,500 pages. I may be the only person other than Bucky (and Carrie, who typed them) who ever did.
My first impression was that the collection, while clearly a life’s passion, may also have been an obsession. Bucky Abeshouse had a great mind, an astonishing knowledge of history, and a wicked sense of humor that I wish I had heard. And boy did he have follow-through! Robert Ripley of Believe It or Not! fame accumulated 5,000 epitaphs by the time of his death; Bucky Abeshouse had 9,000. His work is meticulous, but also encyclopedic, in both the best and worst senses of the word. There’s very little perspective. No effort to explain his methodology. No attempt to make sense of what he gathered. There’s no forest. Only trees.
With no overview, the only clue to Bucky’s motivation is a one-and-a-half-page manifesto that appears at the start of Book 1. Labeled “Preface on Hobbies by Dr. Benjamin S. Abeshouse,” it says the public should find it inspiring and consoling that physicians seek creative outlets for their noteworthy talents beyond their profession. “These artistic manifestations should be considered as safety valves,” he writes, “offering an outlet to the nervous tension of those constantly walking in the footsteps of death. A romantic expression may be just the thing to remove the embitterment.”
His conclusion is that others should follow the same path. “Be a collector, make a garden, have a hobby.”
My mother used virtually the same words when we were kids. We might call it the Abeshouse Absolute.
AFTER LEAVING WASHINGTON, I drove to Arlington Cemetery in Baltimore to visit my grandfather’s grave site. A beautiful stretch of grass contains row after row of unadorned graves. In the middle, an arched gray headstone is chiseled with the name abeshouse. A small footstone bears his name, along with the boilerplate BELOVED HU
SBAND & FATHER. In the middle is the winged staff of Hermes, the symbol of medicine.
There is no epitaph.
After three decades of gathering every imaginable inspiration, Bucky Abeshouse chose none as his legacy. Maybe he couldn’t decide. Maybe he died so suddenly he didn’t have time. Or maybe, as my brother put it, he had writer’s block.
Either way, as I stood there, I began reflecting on the parallel lives of Bucky Abeshouse and my paternal grandfather, Edwin Feiler Sr. In many ways, they could not have been more different. One was from the urban North; the other the rural South. One was a scholar and collected epitaphs in Latin; the other played blackjack, trapped squirrels, and fished. One was a teetotaler; the other drank moonshine.
But in crucial ways, they had deep similarities. Both were the first in their families to attend college, and each went on to earn professional degrees, in effect isolating them from their closest relatives. Both initiated decades-long literary projects that few would ever see (or hear). Both abstained from joining the types of civic and community institutions that would later define their children—arts groups, political parties, volunteer organizations.
Both were self-made men. And both, in a crucial sense, were alone.
I felt an allegiance with the loneliness of Bucky Abeshouse, a lion whose mane was always draped around my shoulders. As a writer, I felt the kinship of the solitary pursuit. With an output of four academic articles a year, a book of popular history, and his collection of epitaphs, Bucky Abeshouse sacrificed himself to the calling of words. My mother remembers him sitting in the den every night, surrounded by three radios and a television set, all tuned to different sporting events. “You could walk in at any time,” she said, “and he could tell you the score for every game.”
I must say, it sounds familiar. He would have felt right at home in my office, with three news sites open on my computer, stacks of books on my desk, and ESPN on the flat-screen TV.
Even deeper, Bucky was clearly drawn to epitaphs because his profession exposed him to mortality. He described this feeling in his opening essay as “walking in the footsteps of death.” But he also must have felt the lure because of the loss of his own father. Perhaps spending so much time in the company of ghosts drew him closer to his dad.
His searching certainly drew him closer to me, especially when I also felt the pull of death—and the loneliness that comes with it. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of getting sick as a young person is the profound isolation that comes from thinking about dying when so few people around you are doing so.
Standing at his grave, in my own year of epitaphs, I felt for the first time that Bucky Abeshouse wasn’t just an untouchable portrait on the wall. He was real. In our shared passion for language and our joint interest in mortality, I had finally found in myself the part of him that was there all along.
And I was reminded of the common message that both my grandfathers seemed to be sending: Don’t disappear, don’t withdraw. Turn away from the briefs, the records, and the pages and turn toward the people who are just out of view.
.16.
CHRONICLES OF THE LOST YEAR
volume V
February 3
Dear Friends and Family,
Relentless torments of snow and ice have battered Brooklyn in recent weeks, leaving the streets and sidewalks a chalky, salty mess, and our creative ways of keeping kids occupied while indoors tapped out long ago. But even as winter slogs toward its halfway mark, if you look outside in the late afternoons, you can begin to detect that the light lasts a little longer, hinting that relief is on the way.
There are very few days in one’s life that you know, in advance, are going to be momentous. December 23 was one of those days for me. I awoke before dawn and arrived at the hospital at 5:45 A.M. for the beginning of what would be a fifteen-hour surgery to salvage my left leg. An orthopedic fellow arrived to sign my thigh, and at 7:30 A.M. I was wheeled down the longest hallway I had ever seen. (I later determined that the world’s longest hallways are probably all outside surgery rooms, and I learned that this hallway, long even by hospital standards, has been nicknamed “The Green Mile.”)
Inside, the OR was a mix of high-tech television screens; a swarm of nurses and attendants; a man with a large, astronautlike glass bubble around his head; and a twelve-foot-long table overflowing with knives, scalpels, and prongs. There was enough equipment to cook a state dinner, though in this case the only thing being carved was me. In the last minutes before the anesthesia kicked in, my surgeon, Dr. John Healey, appeared over my table to tell me that the latest scans of my leg suggested that the tumor had been wiped out by the chemotherapy. “It’s dead,” he said. As he later told my family, “I wanted Bruce to go to sleep with a smile.”
As I drifted into sleep Dr. Healey went to work, while Linda, my mom, and my brother waited anxiously outside. At 12:15 P.M. a nurse let them know that Dr. Healey was still resecting the cancerous material from my femur and thigh. At 2:50 P.M. they got a similar report, and at 4:50 P.M. another. At 6:10 P.M., Linda, Andrew, and my mother were escorted into a room where Dr. Healey joined them five minutes later. “He’s doing fine,” Dr. Healey said. “I’m fine. That says it all.”
In his patient, arresting manner, Dr. Healey spent the next forty-five minutes outlining what he had done. First he removed twenty-two centimeters of my left femur (just shy of nine inches), as well as about a third of my quadricep. The amount of muscle resected was less than he had anticipated, and he was especially pleased that he was able to save a key artery he had expected to have to remove. “Bruce is going to love this,” Dr. Healey said. “The artery is called the profunda.”
Dr. Healey then installed the specially crafted titanium prosthesis into the gap in my femur, attached the device to the remaining bone, and screwed the entire contraption into place. Though we had expected this prosthesis to mimic the shape of the femur, it’s actually a series of tubes, cubes, rods, and rings that appears more akin to a shock absorber, though without the ability to expand and contract. (My brother thinks it looks more like the handle of a light saber from Star Wars.) Dr. Healey was encouraged that the prosthesis fit snugly into the good parts of my femur and likened the gap to that between a boat and a dock: the closer one is to the other, the easier it is for the healthy bone to make the leap and grow into the prosthesis. Overall, Dr. Healey said he felt emboldened by the positive developments and pushed himself to take even more chances and be even more courageous. Asked if there were any surprises, Dr. Healey said, “Bruce has a very big leg!”
Though Dr. Healey’s work was mostly done, mine was not. While Dr. Healey was briefing my family, the plastic surgeon, Dr. Mehrara, went to work on my lower leg. Dr. Mehrara removed a little more than nine inches of my left fibula, grafted it to my remaining femur, then screwed the fibula into the prosthesis. In order to keep the fibula alive, Dr. Mehrara removed four blood vessels from my calf and relocated them to my thigh. When he told my family about all this at 11:30 P.M., he, too, was upbeat. “Good bone; good vessels; no problem,” Dr. Mehrara said. Dr. Healey returned near midnight to provide an exclamation point to this magnum day. “Believe it or not, I’m ecstatic,” he said. As promised, Dr. Healey was the last man standing; as foretold, he was the hero of this war.
And then: the recovery. I woke up the next morning in a fog of narcotics, tubes, drains, and incoherence. I had thirty-one inches of stitches up the side of my left leg and no clue what had happened. Even more confusing, during the time I was on the operating table the doctors had forcibly shut my eyes with what must have been duct tape, and I woke up with a scratched cornea. No one could explain why such a high-tech operation had been marred by this low-tech methodology. An eye doctor arrived that evening—Christmas Eve—to test my sight; he stuck a miniature eye chart about six inches in front of my face. In my state, the whole thing appeared to bounce up and down like a trampoline. “I think you need glasses,” the doctor said and thrust a monocle in front of my eyes. �
�I don’t need glasses,” I said desperately, “I don’t need this test.” Then I promptly threw up on him. Unflustered, he declared my scratched cornea the worst he had ever seen and ordered me not to open my right eye for three days!
Within days my sight had improved, I weaned myself off the morphine drip, and began to take stock of my body. In effect, I had two different wounds. The first was the thigh, which was grossly swollen, had two drains to reduce the swelling, and seventy-five stitches that stretched more than a foot and a half from my hip to my knee. The second was the calf, which had its own drain, was wrapped in a splint to prevent movement, and had thirteen inches of dissolvable stitches. The ortho team was responsible for the upper wound; the plastics team for the lower; and each side strenuously avoided commenting, inspecting, or even looking at the other wound. But they did continuously blame the other team for keeping me in bed. For a time it seemed as if my leg had become the United States before the Civil War—with my thigh the North; my calf the Confederacy; and my knee was the Mason-Dixon Line. The frustrating standoff needed Lincoln to restore the Union.
On the seventh day, Dr. Healey (after protesting that he was not as tall as Lincoln) finally broke the stalemate and provided a surprising diagnosis. I had eased past the possible complications of surgery more hastily than they expected, and my leg was simply not ready yet to begin rehabilitation. “I’m afraid you recovered too quickly,” he joked.
Finally, on Day Eleven, I was allowed to sit up for the first time. “Your leg will swell; it will fill with blood; and it will turn purple,” Dr. Healey warned. “Your head will throb; you’ll get dizzy; and you’ll faint.” He was right! Over the next twenty-four hours I slowly made it out of bed, into a wheelchair, and into my new life. On Saturday, January 3, twelve days after I arrived, I was finally sent home. It took an ambulance, a fire truck, two crews, a stretcher, and a near overdose of painkillers to get me out of Manhattan, into Brooklyn, up a flight of stairs, and into my bed. The girls came upstairs and swarmed around me. We had reached the end of phase two of our yearlong war.