Death and the Evening News

 It was natural for us to become cadaver partners in freshman anatomy lab.  One of my favorite photos of those years is a picture of us standing over our cadaver, whom we’d irreverently named Masterson after a particularly difficult Rice professor.  Don’s smile is typically subdued and has a cat-that-ate-the-canary quality.  Don was always snatching the canaries. 

 Despite my superior academic record, he projected an air of affluence and assurance that in my naïve mind smacked vaguely of west Texas oil money and big city ways.  I felt inferior and envied his smooth confidence. 

 The first hint of Don’s future troubles occurred in our third year when he was required to do remedial work in the summer of 1961 because of poor performance in Internal Medicine, arguably the most important course of all.  It came not from lack of intellect but from his irreverence for established norms: sometimes it just didn’t make sense to him to go to this conference or to do that chore—so he didn’t. 

 Another hint came our senior year when Don was elected to represent UT Southwestern in the new Student American Medical Association.  This involved some travel and long-distance telephone calls (expensive then) and Don became the subject of an investigation about abuse of his privileges—something about padding his expense account or making unauthorized calls.  It sounded serious to me, but he shrugged it off and somehow it came to nothing—it was just another canary. 

 After a year’s internship, we served in the US Army for two years.  In the fall of 1963, Marianne and I and newborn Anne were stationed in Washington, DC, which was memorable for our involvement in the Kennedy funeral and for the socializing we did with Don and Dee.  The latter reinforced my sense that Don had powers that escaped my understanding—they lived far better than we could imagine and Don confidently spoke of important military matters in his administrative job that made my daily drill tending to the aches and pains of soldiers seem dull by comparison. 

 We went our separate ways after being discharged in 1965: he did OB-Gyn training in Washington and I came back to Dallas to study pathology. From that point on I knew only that he had finished his training and had established a thriving practice in Washington with famous name patients.

 Don and I became friends at Rice University.  Though we’d been in some classes together, we were not close until my junior year when I concluded to forego my senior year and attempt to gain admission to medical school a year early.  Don was a year ahead of me but my new plan put us on the same schedule.  As luck would have it, both of us wound up in the class of 1962 at UT Southwestern Medical School. 

 Then one day in the late 1970s I picked up the phone to hear his voice.  He was calling from a hospital bed saying he had hepatitis and wanted me to look at his liver biopsy slides and discuss the findings with him.  This marked the beginning of a series of trips to Dallas to ask my advice and just to talk about his marital problems and his romance with Jessica Savitch. 

 Don had other problems as well.  He confessed to smoking marijuana and to using drugs with Jessica, who shortly before her own death in 1983 gave a confused, slurred one-minute report on national TV that in retrospect was due to drug or alcohol intoxication.  On one of his visits he offered me a marijuana cigarette, but having seen my father’s life wrecked by drugs, it was easy to decline.  But more troubling was that he was manic: unnaturally high in a way that reminded me of the bipolar (manic depressive) patients I had seen while working at Timberlawn psychiatric hospital the last two years of medical school.  I also knew enough to worry that he might become depressed.  And to compound matters he was enmeshed in a dispute with the hospital where he practiced: they were concerned about his sterile technique in the operating room and other matters as well.  He dismissed the medical staff as too uptight and the administration as meddlesome bullies—in short, it was their fault, not his; they were picking on him because he was successful.  This, too, had psychiatric implications: I worried he was paranoid, as some bipolar patients are.  Though I can’t recall where or when I learned he wanted to be cremated when he died, he did tell me, and in retrospect, he must have been planning suicide even then. 

 He married Jessica in March 1981 and within weeks I was in the middle of their difficulties, getting calls from both about the behavior of the other.  My last call from him was from the psychiatric hospital affiliated with Cornell University Medical School.  He minimized the seriousness of his mental state: he was okay, the doctors were wrong, and besides, he said with wry humor, it was Jessica who was driving him crazy.  He left the hospital and went back to Washington, where he killed himself. 

I don’t recall how I learned he’d died, whether it was from Dee, his former wife, or Jessica.  Dee, however, called to ask my help in seeing that his wish to be cremated would be honored.  Jessica opposed it and was very difficult with the funeral arrangements.  I tracked her down in New York and we had a get-right-with-Jesus discussion in which I made it clear that I would go to any length to enforce his wishes and she should acquiesce.  She did. 

 I was a pallbearer at the funeral, where once again I had to mediate: this time between Dee and Jessica.  Jessica haughtily informed the minister that she was the widow and Dee was nothing more than an ex-wife and that she, Jessica, was entitled to sit at the front of the church and Dee must sit further back, which separated Dee from her four grieving sons, who were still youngsters.  I tried to get Jessica to relent, but she was adamant and the service went on with Dee in the back.  Dee accepted this insult with the class for which she is widely admired.  She remains a friend. 

Epilogue 

 Don’s ashes rest in a small outdoor columbarium in a nook at St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square across from the White House.  I visited his grave soon after the funeral and was so impressed by the quiet dignity of the setting that it led me to propose the creation of a columbarium at Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Dallas, where I have been a member 50 years. 

 As I write this I can see on my desktop a small, stylized brass owl, a reminder of the owl mascot of Rice University, and a gift from Don on his first visit to Dallas to ask my advice about his hepatitis.  He was always thoughtful that way. 

 Jessica died accidentally in 1983: she, her boyfriend, and her dog, the one Don hated, drowned when the car in which they were riding took a wrong turn after dinner and tipped upside down into a canal.