The Death and Life of the Father and the Son

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I answered the phone in the hallway of a cheap apartment in Houston where I lived with three Rice classmates, sophomores like me.  The caller was a family friend. She said my dad died. He’d been sick for years.  Even so, it was a shock. 

I gathered a few things and raced north through dim little East Texas towns with my customary companion, XEG radio, one of several ultra-powerful stations aimed at late-night America with studios on the Texas side of the Rio Grande and broadcast towers a few hundred yards away on the Mexican side, safe from US limits on signal strength. They blasted away with 100,000 watts, maybe 500,000 or 1,000,000, no one knew for sure, but enough to overcome the signal-sucking strength of East Texas red, iron-laced soil. I loved the commercials: Geritol, a vitamin tonic in 12% alcohol, was a big seller in bone-dry East Texas. Also popular, Dr. Brinkley’s Goat Gland cure for prostate troubles and other male maladies. “Genuine” Jesus prayer cloths “from the hem of his garment.”

At home I learned Dad died of a heart attack at a roadside restaurant on his way to Dallas. His heart was debtor to his excesses—scarcely a picture remains that doesn’t show a cigarette in his hand,  he injected intravenous opiates, he worked incessantly, and he enjoyed rich food. It was a deadly combination that initiated a string of heart attacks beginning when he was forty-one-years old. At the end his rhythm began to stutter and fail, sometimes stopping for a minute or so, and he would collapse into a mini-death from which he would be raised as the stammering throb resumed, reviving him to wonder: Will the next time be the last?   

His drug habit, which he tried to kick until the day he died, began with tincture of laudanum (liquid opium) used to treat childhood asthma. Later, he developed migraine headaches, also treated with laudanum. In medical school he was known for an inability to tolerate pain, which he blunted with codeine, another opioid then available without prescription. He did not become addicted to morphine until he established his practice in Sulphur Springs and could order opiates for his office.

Charismatic beyond the experience of everyone, patients worshipped him. Mother said he was “…the most democratic person I ever knew. Rich or poor, black or white, he treated everyone alike. He had beautiful manners, the air of an aristocrat.” Aware of his power, he once asked Mother, “Hazel, do you think I hypnotize people when I talk to them?” Though never addicted, Mother, a nurse, snitched drugs from time to time. His demons swallowed him whole; hers merely gnawed at the fabric of her life. 

These are not the usual ingredients for the happy and, by most measures, successful life I have enjoyed.  Nature and nurture, each of which is easy enough to explain, deserve credit, but while necessary they do not seem sufficient.  

Nature blessed me with good genes.  My father’s intellectual power and charm were on full display, overshadowing my mom and everyone else within the radius of his magic.  His, however, was the lesser influence. Mother was a force in her own right.  She was very smart woman, a widely read registered nurse, and crossword puzzle whiz who acted as my father’s surgical assistant.  More important, she was keeper of the code, a stern ethic of hard work, honesty and right behavior embossed onto my mind by her every word and act apart, of course, from her smoking and occasional drug use.

My younger brother, Jim, and I were nurtured well, albeit unusually. Though often painful and uncertain, our childhood was not the storm it might have been.  There were happy times, too, and despite their troubles our parents preached a firm moral code, which had the effect of making their failings seem biologic.  While smoking, drinking and abusing drugs, they sermonized the family gospel—always do right, follow the Golden Rule, and above all, don’t smoke, drink or do drugs. 

Certainly, the workings of DNA and love were necessary.  But on reflection it seems that an invisible hand added a measure of miracles on my behalf.  From the time I was in elementary school I have been graced by unlikely, liberating turns of events.  In each instance, I got the credit, but could never escape the feeling that I was an impostor whose fraud would be unmasked at any moment.  

The first such little miracle came in the third grade—I was bored and restless, so at mid-term they put me up to the fourth grade, where I thrived. 

In high school my grades were good, but nothing outstanding.  The miracle is that Rice University, famously picky then and now, accepted me and, as was their practice in those days, proffered a full academic scholarship to all who were lucky enough to be admitted.

I went from the cozy confines of a rural high school to the rigors of a highly competitive university in a big city.  Culture shock and worry about Dad and our financial straits nearly did me in.  My grades were poor and I skirted the edge of academic probation the first three semesters. Getting out of bed was a struggle.  All I wanted was to go home.  

Then, at my lowest point another miracle: Dad died early in the second semester of my sophomore year.  I was not glad to have him gone; far from it.  The lasting sentiment I took away from the funeral was sadness, that my chance to know him was gone forever.  It remains at the core of my dreams fifty years later.  

But freed from the burden of his existence, my grades shot up and I made the Dean’s List each semester thereafter.  Then it was on to medical school, where I flourished. 

His death was my salvation, and, I pray, his, too.

And so, by other unlikely turns, my good fortune continues to this day.