Steve delivered the eulogy.
“A hero is one who faces with courage and strength the indignities of life,” he said. “Michael is, and was, a hero.”
He was buried on an Indiana hillside, next to his brother Jeff.
“We haven’t lost the fight yet,” Steve said. “We’re going to pull Dad through this.”
Ray came home by air ambulance in July—no jokes, no crowds. Steve had promised Ray that outsiders would never see him helpless.
A month later, as Jane held one hand and Steve the other, Ray lost his hard-fought battle with the cruel inheritance that has tormented his family for 141 years.
“He is in heaven with two of his boys,” Steve said. “He’ll be surprised; he didn’t know Michael was there.”
As he had hoped, Ray Southerland left a legacy: “The family has made a tremendous contribution to cancer research,” said Dr. William Blattner, chief of the study team at NCI. “They also taught me an awful lot about humanity and the courage of individuals.”
Steve was reluctant to return to the University of Florida for his senior year and leave his mother alone, but she insisted. His father wanted him to finish college and go to law school.
Back at the 32,000-student campus, he plunged into politics. The UF student-government organization is the largest in the nation. He founded a third party, the University Student Alliance (USA), and campaigned for student-body president. He scored a major upset, edging into a run-off with 33 percent of the vote.
Six feet three inches tall and handsome, Steve worked tirelessly, campaigning on crutches for eighteen-hour stretches. By the end of the campaign, he had worn down several pairs of crutch tips, and his armpits were bloodied. He wore dark shirts so no one could see.
He was the underdog. No candidate had ever won from ten points behind. No nonfraternity member had won in thirty years. No one in a decade had succeeded without the endorsement of the powerful school newspaper. Victory seemed unattainable.
Steve Southerland won.
“I never had any doubt,” Jane said proudly, when he called with the news.
Weeping, he said he had done it for Michael and his dad. She knew they were proud too.
The good news, so wonderful for a change, continued. Student president Steve Southerland had two secretaries, controlled a $3.7 million budget, spent fifty hours a week on the job and realized that politics was the love of his life.
He finished his last law-school semester at Oxford, then backpacked through sixteen countries on crutches. Hired by a fifty-five-member Miami law firm, he dated a lovely blond dental assistant. “From the beginning she saw me as a person, a whole person,” he said. “That’s rare.”
That good summer of 1986, Steve, age twenty-six, was prepared to take the bar exam, just two weeks away. But first came the law Arm’s annual baseball game, Lawyers vs. Summer Clerks, at a Miami park. The clerks were being trounced 9-0, in 91-degree heat. Steve popped out to deep left field his first time at bat.
He played catcher, competing without crutches, hopping around the bases. At the top of the fourth, he said, “All of a sudden I felt my right hand cringing up, then my whole right side. I knew it was a seizure. I never felt so helpless in my whole life.”
His collapse stopped the game. “I certainly made an impact,” he later said. Lawyers ran for telephones to dial 911. The wife of the senior law partner sped off in her car to find a policeman. His arrival at a local hospital, flanked by two high-powered lawyers, “definitely got their attention.” Steve regained consciousness in the emergency room.
Everybody hoped it was heat stroke.
Jane raced to the hospital. Steve had never suffered a seizure before, but he had seen them. “A horrible feeling,” he told her. “Poor Dad—now I know what he went through.”
Doctors conducted tests. They told Jane first. Nobody had to tell Steve. When he saw her face, he knew. He had seen the look before.
Diagnosis: brain tumor—deep but operable.
“To think that it would come back twelve years later, to haunt you, in a more dangerous place … it hit us like a real thunderbolt,” he said.
They decided on the hospital in Cincinnati. “Our old stomping grounds,” Jane said. “You’d think I’d get better at this, but I’m not.”
The question was how to treat him after surgery. Therapy that had once cured his father and brother had killed them later.
Doctors posed a devastating question: How much would Steve sacrifice to live? Was he willing to lose the use of his right leg, his right arm, his ability to speak? The tumor was growing in an area of the brain that controls those functions.
How far did he want them to go?
Steve’s options were clear: He needed his right leg. It was the only one he had. “Speech is important for my profession, if I’m going to be a corporate lawyer.” He said he could “make do, if necessary, with only one arm.” His life, he decided, was worth more than the use of an arm.
Fortunately surgeons found the moon-shaped tumor positioned in a way that made the grim choice unnecessary. Though weakened, his right hand would respond to physical therapy.
Dr. Beatrice Lampkin, an oncologist, has treated the family since 1967. “This indicates once again that there is a cancer gene that can be triggered by things—we don’t know what. We hope that studying the Southerlands will shed some light on all of us and our potential for developing cancer.”
A week after surgery Steve traded wisecracks with reporters at a hospital press conference. Wearing a fedora to mask his baldness, he said he and his mother had struck a deal. “We’re not going to do this again. It’s time for her to retire from all this and go on to other adventures.”
Five of his firm’s young lawyers visited for the weekend. Miamians filled his room with cards and flowers. He had missed the bar exam, but so what. “Before all this happened I thought it was the most important thing in my life. Now just being alive is the most important thing.”
He came home to a mob scene, stepping off the plane into a blizzard of confetti. A huge yellow banner stretched across the terminal. More than fifty colleagues cheered, whistled, and sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The office had shut down for two hours so everyone could be at the airport. The young associates wore fedoras, like the one Steve wore at his press conference. A fashion step ahead, he was now wearing a blue-and-gold Top Gun cap, along with sunglasses, to complete his “Tom Cruise look.”
He described the stubble on his shaved-for-surgery scalp as “basic Parris Island Marine.” The scar, he said, “looks like a Budweiser Clydesdale stepped on my head.” Privately, he confided, “When I left two weeks ago, I thought I would never be back.”
Yellow ribbons and balloons decorated the Southerland front yard. He began to regret missing the bar exam and hated waiting until winter. “A brain tumor should be a valid excuse,” he said, applying a lawyer’s logic. “Why wait six months? I’d like to take it and get it over with—like all this was something that never happened.”
He came back strong, but recent brain surgery made it tough to pass the bar, and his flowering romance with the pretty dental assistant faded. The big law firm merged with a bigger one, growing to 680 lawyers. Because he failed the bar twice, the firm followed policy and did not keep Steve Southerland, certainly considered a liability to any group medical plan.
Steve kept plugging.
He finally passed the exam, and I attended the small ceremony when he was sworn in as a member of the bar. With his medical history, what law firm would risk hiring him? So he went solo, sharing space in a low-rent district with two other struggling young lawyers, one black, the other Hispanic.
Jane had married as a teenager and had been Ray’s wife for twenty-two years. She seemed content to remain Ray’s wife forever. “I believe that’s true of most people who have really good marriages,” she said. “You don’t change your way of thinking because you’re widowed.”
For almost seven years she focused on her career, general services sales manager at the department store where she once sold dresses, and on her quilting. Her prize quilt won first place at the Dade County Fair.
By fall 1987, I had not seen Jane for some time. When we did meet, she looked so radiant, so absolutely beautiful, that I knew: “You’re in love!”
“Well, there is somebody,” she said shyly. She and a friend found seats at a crowded Miami boat club Oktoberfest. One was next to Eastern Airlines pilot Bertram Dawson McMillen III. The man is not at all like Ray Southerland, the gregarious prankster who loved life and laughter. The two might not have liked each other. Ray hid his feelings behind grins and practical jokes. Bert is gentle, soft-spoken and sensitive.
A harpist played Persichetti, Handel and Pachelbel at the small June wedding at an elegant old Coral Gables hotel. “Love goes on forever,” the pastor said. The only tears were happy ones.
“Now I not only have my mother’s love,” Steve said, “but the friendship of someone who loves her just as much.”
Jane sounded flushed and happy when I called almost a year later. She and Bert were wallpapering the bathroom. Life had not been easy for the newlyweds. Bert was on strike against Eastern. Jane and other longtime employees lost their jobs after Canadian businessman Robert Campeau bought the department-store chain and sent it skidding downhill.
Places, companies and organizations change. So do some people, but not Jane. As buoyant as usual, she was full of good news: Steve was in love, engaged to a college girl, and planning a run for the Florida State Senate. She asked me not to let on that I knew. Steve wanted to tell me himself. When he didn’t I hoped it meant he was busy, with more work than he could handle.
The truth came with a call in the night, like the bad ones always do. The deep, familiar voice of Ron Sorensen, Ray Southerland’s old partner. “Not good news every time we talk,” he said. My heart sank. He was calling about Steve.
“Where?”
“His brain—the left side.”
A checkup in Cincinnati—everyone was calling it a spot until the biopsy, but no one had any doubt about what it was.
I grasped at straws. How could this happen again? “On a scale of one to ten,” I demanded, “what are the chances they are wrong?”
He hesitated. “With somebody else I would say, hey, maybe. But not with this family.”
“But why, what could have triggered it? Steve doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke.”
“Who knows … we never did find out. It’s a shock that here we go again. A shock, but not a surprise.”
We promised that someday when one of us had really good news we would break the chain.
I asked Jane. “Why?”
“Because he’s a Southerland,” she said softly.
Doctors opted for radiation and chemotherapy, despite the inherent long-term risks, hoping to shrink the tumor enough to be excised.
Six months later, in April 1990, I shared lunch with Jane and Steve at a South Dade seafood house. He looked wonderful, back living at home and struggling to keep his small law practice afloat. He wore a baseball cap to conceal the effects of his treatments. His fiancée had ended the engagement before Christmas. She said she might call during the holidays, but she did not.
When I called his office on May 18, to wish him a happy birthday, Steve was in fine spirits. The prognosis had improved, and the treatment had worked. Surgery was again an option. He was going to Cincinnati. “It looks good,” he said.
Other good news: Steve had become the youngest member of Miami’s Orange Bowl Committee, Jane and Bert were taking him out for a birthday dinner that night, and Bert was about to interview with TWA in St. Louis.
A friend had called earlier to ask if he was depressed at turning thirty.
Not at all. “Turning thirty in this family,” Steve Southerland said, “is a major accomplishment.”
We talked briefly about survival and the importance of moving forward despite the odds. “I would not trade any of the experiences we’ve had,” he said. “If there is a purpose to all this, it’s probably to make other people who deal with crisis know that, despite whatever happens, it’s the quality of life you lead, not the quantity.”
The surgery went exceptionally well.
Steve Southerland entered the race for Florida State Senate that same summer. Jane looked radiant, her husband beside her, as Steve announced from a wheelchair. His dad’s old partner, Ron Sorensen, was there in uniform, our happy occasion at last.
Steve looked vigorous, acknowledging that he was still undergoing physical therapy, but said the tumor had been removed. He playfully vowed to “be back on my foot again soon.”
He felt strong, he said, and had no doubt he could serve effectively.
“This is for me a very special moment,” he said. “I always felt I should give something back to the community.” A tough campaign lay ahead. When someone in the crowd pointed that out, the last of the Southerlands smiled. The uphill race, he said, “will be like any other battle worth fighting.”
He fought it well. He raised nine thousand dollars in campaign funds and took 44 percent of the vote from his veteran opponent, who had raised fifty thousand dollars. Forty-four percent was not enough, of course.
Steve’s spirit was not dampened. “The best part of the battle is that it taught me a lot about life and taught a lot of people how I feel about life—and making the most of it. Even if you don’t succeed, making the effort is a success in itself.
“You should always fight for your dreams.”
Steve Southerland is no quitter, nor does he feel sorry for himself. Neither does Jane. “I’ve had a great life,” she said. “Look at people who have five or six kids who’ve been into drugs and robbery—and even murder. Facing that kind of problem would be really hard for me to handle. Can you imagine having kids on drugs and watching them kill themselves a little at a time? Mine all fought hard to survive. I had unbelievably good kids. With all they had to go through, I don’t remember them ever being bitter. I once apologized to Mike and Steve for bringing them into this world to suffer so. They both said that life was worth it.”
As Steve Southerland said, “Just being alive is the most important thing.”
20
A New Chapter
Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.
—CONFUCIUS
The world is full of real-life heroes, and I love to tell their stories and chronicle their feats, their adventures and their noble deeds.
I am still hooked on stories, and this singular city, with its rednecks and Rastafarians, Contras and cocaine cowboys, Yahwehs and yahoos, villains and victims. My love affair with Miami, the longest-lasting in my life, endures, as the city and I both grow and change.
Miami is still hot. Sleepy South Beach, once famous for its senior citizens, now throbs through the soft nights with a healthy and youthful energy, more lusty and alive than it has ever been. Hot bodies and the city’s sizzling beauty dazzle the world in movies, commercials, fashion photography and stunning photos that capture Miami’s true colors, breathtaking blues and shades of gold. Across the Bay, the city seethes with tension, battered by trauma and transition. Sometimes the city heat seems too hot not to burn. Not again. I hold my breath. The world is watching. Miami has been discovered.
To a far lesser degree, I too have been discovered and burn with ideas and stories to tell.
Life is a series of trade-offs; everything exacts a price. The cost of the city’s new fame is traffic snarls and parking problems, haze, pollution and destruction of our precious environment and wildlife. The carpetbaggers and profiteers will always be with us.
The struggle never ends—progress at a price. On leave from the Herald, I yearn for the fray, the daily battles, the exhilaration of stalking the wild story, the stimulation of the streets, the interaction with sources, strangers and tale
nted newsroom colleagues. I miss the intensity of deadline, focusing in tight on a story and tuning out all the meaningless and mundane irritants of life that make you crazy if you surrender to them.
Working at home, alone, is solitary confinement, but childhood dreams grew out of this self-imposed isolation into reality. Before I could even read, I said that when I grew up I would write books. Fiction was what I had planned before I was swept into that whirlwind called journalism.
In 1990 my first novel was published. I am blessed. How many of us get to do what we dreamed of as children?
I had never written fiction before—though I had been accused of it a few times in the past—and found it to be a source of unexpected satisfaction. We all yearn to be tidy, to wrap up the loose ends and resolve all the perplexing mysteries, but in real life, in journalism, that does not happen. Murders go unsolved; corpses remain unidentified; missing people stay lost forever. They dwell in your dreams.
Write fiction, and you can tell the whole story, solve all the mysteries, tie up the loose ends and see to it that the good guys win.
So unlike real life and so much more satisfying.
Nothing is easy, of course, especially writing fiction in a city where truth is stranger. But once begun, it was a joy to let imagination soar, to see characters spring to life, step forward and clamor to tell their stories.
Afterward, I returned to real people and real life with this book, intending, when finished, to plunge back into journalism and the police beat. But something happened: Certain faces and voices began to haunt my consciousness, imaginary characters with stories to be told. The time came to report once more for work in that big Herald newsroom in the sky overlooking Biscayne Bay. I hesitated and picked up my mail only on weekends to avoid the editors and their questions about when I was coming back to the beat. Like someone addicted to secret pleasures, I thought, Not yet, just one more, just one more book first, another novel.
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