. . . And His Lovely Wife

by Connie Schultz

  It was an awful feeling to realize the campaign had shifted into gear at my book signing; it felt even worse to realize how much it bothered me. I didn’t write a book to promote my husband’s candidacy. Worse, I could immediately imagine the newspaper headline on the six-inch snipe of a blurb:

  Brown Profits in More Ways Than One from Wife’s Book Debut in Ohio

  I wanted to get up from the table, march the staff into a corner, and say, “Look, I don’t hand out my books at Sherrod’s events, and I don’t want you handing out his bumper stickers at mine.” Talk about a bad headline. Instead, I asked them to stop immediately, even after one of the staff members insisted he only brought them into the store after several people asked for them, including a bookstore employee who requested fifty.

  I lost count of how many people told me, as I wrote in their books, that they hoped Sherrod won. That was nice. The ones who told me I needed to start stumping on the campaign trail as soon as possible? Not so nice. Clearly, in the eyes of many Ohioans, I had already morphed from a newspaper columnist into a political wife.

  During the Q-and-A after my talk, someone had asked me what it was like to be on the campaign trail. I responded the way I would countless times in the months ahead: This is such an important race, to Ohio and to the country, and I believe in Sherrod. We share so many of the same values. It’s time for change.

  What I wanted to say was “You don’t know the half of it.” Just as I didn’t want to be reduced to the stand-by-her-man spouse, I didn’t want Sherrod downgraded to just a candidate. There was so much more to the man, and to the marriage we had forged in such a short period of time. I wanted to tell them my stomach starts somersaulting every time I know he’s on his way home, and how his face lights up whenever he first sees me walk in. I wanted to talk about how the energy swirls around a room as soon as he crosses the threshold, and how his default button is set to joy. I wanted them to know that every so often he leaves on my pillow love notes he writes on recycled stationery from his secretary of state days, and that sometimes he wakes me up in the middle of the night just to whisper, “I love my wife.”

  That’s what I wanted to say, but I could imagine that headline, too:

  Brown’s Wife Loses It at Book Event; “She’s in Our Prayers,” Says DeWine

  I kept my mouth shut. Surely, I told myself, an entire book tour couldn’t be about Sherrod’s race.

  Just as surely, I was wrong.

  LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, ON A MONDAY EVENING, MY FRIEND Jackie and I were on the road to Dayton. This would be the only time during the book tour that I didn’t have a professional driver provided by the publisher. Instead, I had jumped at Jackie’s offer to spend some rare time together before I headed to New York and California. I was scheduled the following morning for an interview with a local TV station, followed by lunch with the Dayton Daily News columnist Mary McCarty and then a book signing that evening.

  Jackie drove, and during the four-hour trip I called my dad. He was on the mend at home after a second surgery to clear out his other carotid artery, and I promised when I said good-bye to him in postop at the hospital that I would read a fourteen-page letter he sent me that had been written by his mother, my grandmother, in 1946. I kept my word, and then called to talk to him about the letter.

  Dad’s mother, Regie, had sent the letter to Dad’s oldest sister, my aunt Lillian, shortly after she had buried both her father-in-law, whom everyone called Pa, and her seventeen-year-old son, Dad’s brother Harry. To enlist in the army, Harry had lied about his age. Recently, Lillian had sent a copy of the letter to my father. It outlined a series of events so tragic that my father choked up reading it sixty years later. For some reason, he wanted me to read it, too.

  “I just can’t write much of a letter now,” my grandmother wrote in small, tidy script. “I am so crushed with grief I can’t think clearly at all. Never, never did I ever think that such a terrible shock would ever come to me.”

  She began the letter on April 19, 1946, but was unable to finish it until May 8. Her father-in-law, Pa, had died just after dinner one night.

  “He died in his chair,” my father stressed when we talked. “Had a heart attack.”

  My grandmother immediately sent word via the Red Cross to her teenage son, Harry Junior, who was in the Navy and due to ship out soon, that his beloved grandfather, Pa, had died. “I only wish to God that I had never sent for him to come home,” she wrote. “But it was the last thing he said when he left for California last November, ‘If anything ever happens to Pa let me know so I can come.’”

  The Red Cross confirmed that Harry Junior was on his way to Ohio and would probably be there in time for his grandfather’s wake. He never showed up, and a telegram delivered the following morning told my grandmother that Harry had died in a plane crash.

  A train carried Harry’s body from Albuquerque. My grandparents met his body at the train station in Cleveland. Her description of her son’s return home made me think about all the families who have lost loved ones in the Iraq War. It’s a different era, a different war, but my grandmother’s anguish sounded so similar to that of the surviving parents I’ve met or interviewed since the war began.

  “It was an awful feeling to see that shipping case removed from the train,” Dad’s mother wrote. “I just couldn’t believe my boy was in it, for it was a little less than eight months when I had stood at the same place and saw him off to Rhode Island after he had been home last August. I could still see him standing on the platform and waving good-bye.”

  Until my father sent me a copy of the letter, the only thing I knew about Harry’s death was that the telegram had misspelled his name and that my father was only nine when his brother died. Dad and I talked for nearly an hour that day on the way to Dayton, and throughout the conversation, he kept pausing, clearing his throat, and taking deep breaths. “This letter was really hard to read,” he said. “My mother was never the same after Harry died. I remember when she was dying, she kept calling out his name, and she kept saying he was in the room with her.”

  My dad had mentioned that to me only once before, when my mother was in her last days and started talking about seeing her beloved grandmother and father in her hospital room. My dad shot out of the room, and I found him sobbing in the hallway. “That’s what my mother did just before she died,” he had said, finally acknowledging what he had refused for so long to believe.

  I don’t know why Dad wanted me to read the letter then. He knew I felt a tie to my grandmother even though I had no memory of her. She had died when I was only two, but she had wanted to be a writer, and my father had given me a scrapbook I cherish, full of the tiny stories she had written about her community for a local newspaper.

  “Pa died in his chair,” he said that night. “Isn’t that something? You can have dinner, sit down in your favorite chair, and just die.”

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, WE HAD JUST FINISHED HAVING lunch with the columnist Mary McCarty when I checked my voice mail messages. It had been such a fun lunch, full of laughter and the stories journalists inevitably share. My face was still warm from whooping it up when I listened to my sister Leslie’s frantic voice: “Con, I’m sorry to leave this message, but I’m at Dad’s house and the paramedics are working on him. He had a heart attack. I swore I felt a heartbeat when I found him, so I started pounding on his chest while Theresa called EMS.” She started to cry. “He was gray when I found him. He was gray, just sitting in his chair.”

  Jackie turned the car toward Cleveland in the time it took me to say “Dad’s had a heart attack.” As we sped north, Jackie mined the news for hope.

  “Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds, Con,” she said. “She said the paramedics were there. Maybe he’s going to be all right.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “The air’s already different. He’s gone.”

  Isn’t that something, I thought. You can talk to your dad for a whole hour the night before, but then, just like that, h
e sits down in his favorite chair and dies.

  BY THE TIME I GOT TO UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS OF CLEVELAND, Dad was in intensive care, tethered to every machine he’d always sworn he never wanted. There was no one to blame. You call paramedics to save a life, that’s what they try to do. My sisters and my brother were all there, and one look at their ashen faces told me all I needed to know about Dad’s chances.

  For two days, he lingered, never regaining consciousness. I had called Sherrod in D.C. on the way from Dayton, and he called repeatedly for updates. At one point, he asked if I wanted him to come home.

  I did, more than I wanted anything, except for Dad to come back to life, but Sherrod would have to miss important votes in Congress on national security. They would not be close votes, but they were votes nonetheless, and it was his job to weigh in. And if he didn’t…I said what he didn’t dare:

  “If you miss these votes, you’ll be attacked, probably in an ad, for not caring about Americans’ safety.”

  “I don’t care what the Republicans say.”

  But we both knew he did, and there was no point in pretending we were a normal couple allowed to make normal decisions in a time of crisis.

  “I won’t be able to bear it,” I told him, already imagining the attack ad. “I don’t want to hear you explaining over and over for the rest of the campaign why you had to miss the votes.” I could imagine how he’d start every response. “My father-in-law was dying,” “Connie’s father was dying,” “My wife needed me because her dad was dying….”

  I joined my siblings in a two-day vigil by my father’s bed as the medical staff tried everything they could to prove there was something still going on behind my father’s frozen face. His pupils did not respond to light or touch. He never moved so much as a finger.

  Sometimes, I was by myself, holding on to Dad’s swollen hand, and I would look toward the doorway thinking, maybe, just maybe, Sherrod had found a way to come home. But he couldn’t, and I knew that. I was angry at him, angry at the Republicans, angry at the campaign, but I was angriest with myself for feeling so needy. Sherrod called constantly, his voice full of pain for me. “I’m sorry I’m not there,” he said, over and over.

  Finally, I reminded myself that what I was doing was no different from what I had done as a single mother for so many years. Nobody ever said marriage to a member of Congress meant never being alone. Time for me to snap out of it.

  Late into the second night, I traded places with Leslie, who would spend the night with Dad while I went home and got some sleep. I left around 2 A.M. and collapsed into bed a half-hour later. Shortly after falling asleep, I started to dream about my father. For some reason I can’t explain, in the dream I am wearing a ridiculous denim jumper with a Superman emblem on my chest, running from room to room, down one hallway after another in the hospital, searching for my father. Finally, I find him as he is about to leave the hospital. He looks younger, and happy, and he turns to me and gives his trademark little wave.

  Immediately after this, the phone rang. The woman’s voice was soft and urgent.

  “Ms. Schultz, we need you to the hospital.”

  “Okay.”

  “Please drive safely,” she said. “But please come right away.”

  I pulled on the clothes I had removed only two hours before and shaved ten minutes off the usual drive to the hospital. Leslie was standing beside Dad, sobbing as she smoothed his hair from his freckled forehead.

  “He had another heart attack,” she said. “They resuscitated him again, but they said there’s no hope.”

  The attending physician came in and kindly, but firmly, echoed the news. Dad’s heart could not survive, he said. It wasn’t pumping on its own, he wasn’t breathing on his own, his whole body was shutting down.

  I reached across Dad’s chest and grabbed Leslie’s hand. I told her about my dream, and then we talked about what Dad would—and would not—want.

  “He would not want to live like this,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, tears streaming down her face.

  A few minutes later, Dad was gone.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, MY EDITOR AT THE PLAIN DEALER, Stuart Warner, sent me an e-mail. He had called me as soon as he found out about my father’s heart attack, and we had talked several times in the last two days. At one point, I had recounted to him a recent conversation with my dad.

  “Do you want to write about it?” he wrote. “It really touched me, the stories you were telling about how he realized all his work meant something, and I think it would touch parents everywhere.”

  I called Stuart back to double-check, assuming that it would suddenly dawn on somebody at the paper that they would be giving prime real estate to a candidate’s wife. But Stuart had cleared it with managing editor Tom O’Hara.

  “If you want to write it, The Plain Dealer wants to run it,” Stuart said. “You’ve written a lot about your father, and his story is the story of so many in Cleveland. They’ll want to know what happened. And it will be good for you to write it.”

  I pounded out my father’s obituary for the Ashtabula paper, the Star Beacon, then wrote what I really wanted to say about him in the column.

  When my mother died, we stood for six hours to receive more than eight hundred mourners at her wake. My father said he never wanted to put his own family through that, but I think a part of him was afraid not nearly so many people would show up when he died. He always insisted on no wake, no funeral, and so Jackie’s partner and our dear friend, the Reverend Kate Huey, held a short private grave-side service two days after Dad died. I was perfectly composed right up to the moment I saw my husband help carry my father’s casket to his grave.

  That same day, my column ran in my usual place in The Plain Dealer. Stuart was right: It helped to tell one more story about my dad. And it was the only chance I’d have during the campaign to really think about Dad and what it meant to lose him now.

  This is what I wrote:

  A few days after my mother died in 1999, I found my father bent over his garden, digging, digging, digging.

  He had spent all of his adult life working with his hands, and so it was with his hands that he tried to excavate a patch of peace for his broken heart.

  On Tuesday, a few minutes after learning that my father had suffered a heart attack, my own hands did what they’ve done all my adult life because of the work my father did with his.

  Sitting in the passenger seat of a car speeding toward Cleveland, I pulled out a pen and started to write. I wrote what my sister told me over the phone, that she and Dad’s dear friend, Theresa, found him unconscious and not breathing. I wrote that the medics had an awful time bringing him back. I wrote what my brother said, that it didn’t look good and I’d better come home right away.

  “I know what I’m doing right now,” I wrote, acknowledging my game of make-believe as we raced over mile after mile of freeway.

  “I’m still far enough away that I can tell myself Dad is going to be

  OK. I haven’t seen him yet, haven’t seen the scared and weary faces of my siblings and Theresa. I can’t see any of them, and so I will myself to see nothing at all.”

  I was digging, digging, digging for the root of hope.

  My first column for this paper was about my dad’s lunch pail, how I wanted it but he couldn’t find it after retiring from 36 years in a job he hated. We shared opposing forces of the same passion for that pail. He wanted to forget what I must always remember, that he wore his body out so that his four kids could live a life he never knew.

  There were moments during the vigil by my father’s bed when I felt I was watching a whole way of life coming to an end. He was a working stiff, a manual laborer who always thought he was a nobody but believed he could raise his kids to be somebodies.

  With a union job and too many nights of time-and-a-half, he pulled it off. There we were, his somebodies, four college graduates with far easier lives, tending to his every final need.

  D
uring the two weeks before my father fell silent, I had my best shot ever to shout out my thanks. My first book had just been published, and its pages are full of stories about him. Twice, I had the chance to introduce him to a cheering crowd in Ashtabula, where I grew up and he still lived.

  “Now, I don’t want any attention,” he told me before both events, but if ever there was a time when I could ignore his orders, it was now. Both times, his eyes grew shiny in his stunned, freckled face as folks hooted and hollered when I described how his hard life had made so much of mine easier.

  Last week, I told my dad that so many people were coming up to me at book signings to talk about him. It helped them, they said, to read the stories about his life. It made them feel center-stage proud to come from the working class, instead of squinting into someone else’s bright light.

  I told my dad about these conversations, and asked how he felt about it all. I’d been a little nervous writing so honestly about his life, about how he was a giant to me but invisible to much of the world.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “If it helps others to know they aren’t alone, that they aren’t the only ones who felt like I did, then maybe what I’ve done did matter.” He shrugged his shoulders, but then he grinned. It was the first time I’d ever seen him proud of the work he did.

  Dad had another heart attack in Thursday’s early morning hours, and it was time to do what we knew he wanted. The machines that pumped his heart and filled his lungs with air were turned off, and I held on to one of his big, gnarly hands for the few minutes it took him to leave.

  At 69, Chuck Schultz finally started to believe he was somebody.

  Now, he’s gone.

  And here I am, left behind, my hands at the keyboard, digging, digging, digging for the reason why.

  Hundreds of readers sent cards, letters, and e-mails over the next few weeks. I saved every one of them.