Going Home

Eight weeks after the call, I was on my final road trip with my father. I was taking him home to Massachusetts to die.

In early March 2001, while shooting a commercial campaign in Vancouver, my cell phone rang. I looked down at the handset and saw my father's number on the screen. That was the first surprise. My father almost never called and when he did it was exclusively to my home phone where he left long-winded messages, barking at the machine uncertain if it worked or not.

My dad, a cum laude graduate of Harvard University, seemed to have a mental block when it came to "new" technologies. He could barely figure out the TV remote. The stereo I gave him one Christmas sat unused in the living for nearly six months until I returned to visit and found the pause button inadvertently pressed on the cassette machine. For years he wrote countless articles and more than one book on his fifty-year-old Royal typewriter though he did learn to use the Macintosh I gave him to write his final book.

He had a thing about cell phones, a distrust of sorts or perhaps he found it to be an invasion of one's privacy. So he never called mine until that day in March.

I knew immediately something was wrong. In his typical concise and matter-of-fact manner, he proceeded to tell me of his diagnosis: lung cancer. This wasn't a complete shock. He was 84 years old and had some pneumonia issues the Thanksgiving before which landed him in the hospital for a week. He had smoked two packs of Marlboros for 25 years though he had stopped back in 1967. And his home was in New York City where the air is supposedly so bad that just living there is the equivalent of smoking two packs a day.

Still the definitiveness of this news was unsettling. I had just finished eating breakfast and was well into my second cup of coffee. The food backed up almost immediately and I barely made it back to my room before I vomited.

Two days later I found myself in his one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He had lived there since 1972. Dad and mom couldn’t wait to leave suburbia behind—so much so that they moved to New York while I was still enrolled in high school. New York City energized them both and they had many happy memories of West 74 Street.

Over the next few days my father and I went to a barrage of medical tests and oncologist appointments. One afternoon I managed to sneak off and spoke with his personal physician who was uncharacteristically blunt about my father's prognosis. "Michael, he's 84 and his body is betraying him, " his doctor told me. "From what I can see, the cancer has spread into his lymph nodes and other organs and there is nothing that can be done." He went on to discuss chemo, radiation and other possible treatments but his intentions were clear. My father's condition was terminal and the doctor regarded any extraordinary efforts to save his life as futile, even misguided.

That night I spoke of this with my father and he agreed with his doctor. Dad didn't want to proceed with any measure that would keep him alive artificially while seriously contradicting the quality of his life. He was a New Englander and his stoicism was well known to friends and family. Think DH Lawrence and his view of the quintessential American (“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer”) but without the killer part.

My sister died in 1991, followed two years later by my mother. Both were difficult, painful deaths and each left huge holes in all of our lives, particularly my father's. Slowly but certainly his friends were dying as well and my father's social circle grew smaller and smaller. So one morning sitting in the lobby of a medical facility while waiting for yet another test, I vowed that my father would never be alone again.

My brother lives in Minnesota and I now live in California. My brother instantly agreed: one of us would with dad every day until the cancer finally took him.

So I arranged a weekly schedule for my brother and me. My brother is a talented painter, particularly of black and white portraits that look like photographs but he is chronically short of money so I arranged for his tickets and mine. Thank god for frequent flyer miles. Little did I know that I would cross the country 12 times in the next 12 weeks. For the first few weeks we scheduled our arrivals and departures to overlap by a couple of hours so we could update one another on his condition.

As my luck would have it, dad's medical emergencies seemed to coincide with my visits. More than once I had to drag him to the emergency room after midnight when he had trouble breathing. One night I took him to St. Clare's Hospital in what used to be called the Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan. This time they checked him in.

He would not leave until I took the trip home to Massachusetts. Dad was New Englander, born Springfield in 1916 and though he had traveled all over the globe, Massachusetts was very much a part of his world. The family roots were there. My dad was a descendent of Francis Cooke, a member of the Mayflower Company that settled in Plymouth in 1620 and of Benjamin Waite, the hero of the Deerfield Massacre in 1703 who family lore has it was probably the role model for Natty Bumpo in James Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. He was also a descendent of the explorers William and George Rogers Clark, the former of whom was better known for his exploits with one Meriweather Lewis. He also spent his entire life as a Red Sox fan which put the two of us squarely at odds. I grew up idolizing Mickey Mantle and was (and remain) a New York Yankees fan ever since I was a little shaver.

By early May, the cancer had spread beyond his lungs to his lymph nodes and bones and he was deteriorating rapidly. The doctors were having trouble adjusting his medicine so he was either in pain or completely and utterly delirious.

One afternoon I found him stark naked standing in the hospital hallway. He was shrieking that the doctors and nurses were trying to kill him. I caught his eye. "Do you know who I am?" I asked. "Yes," he said and he began to calm down. "They're trying to kill me,” he whispered. "Dad, you have cancer,” I replied. “You are going to die anyway. Why would they bother to kill you?" He appeared startled but then relaxed as he considered the point, calming down enough for a nurse to slip a hospital gown around him. "Do you understand?" I asked. He nodded as I took his hand and escorted him back to his room.

That night I spoke to most of his doctors. One oncologist was a cowboy with a hero complex who thought he could save everyone. He recommended chemo and radiation, giving little thought to the repercussions these powerful drugs would have on an 84-year-old man. The other oncologist, a wonderful young Korean woman whose name escapes me, disagreed stating that the quality of my father’s life would be horrible. I agreed and also consulted my father’s general practitioner who sided with the second oncologist.

The next morning I received a call from the Korean oncologist informing me that my father was scheduled for surgery. Apparently the rogue oncologist thought my father should have a chemo stint inserted, "just in case". In my dad’s living will, I was the responsible party assigned to make decisions so I stopped the surgery just as they wheeled Dad out of his room towards the operating theater.

Clearly I needed to move quickly. So I renewed my search for hospices with available beds. My brother and I had compiled a list in the first few weeks of my father's illness. My dad longed to return to New England where he was raised and where we still had family. On the many occasions when he was delirious he muttered words that evoked Springfield, his parents, my mother, his brother and his childhood.

On one of my earlier visits, I had gone through his address books. My father had friends all over the world and though many of his own contemporaries were dying, his political work and his writings made him close friends and colleagues of all ages all around the globe. The sheer number was overwhelming so I sat down and drafted a form letter explaining his diagnosis and prognosis, created address labels for over 400 names and sent them off. I included my cell phone number.

It was at this moment that the phone calls began.

In between calls from his concerned friends, I contacted several facilities and called them constantly to a point where they must have considered me a royal pain. Undoubtedly I angered more than a few administrators but I needed to find an available bed as soon as possible. My perseverance paid off in a late afternoon phone call from one hospice facility in Northampton Mass. A bed had become available but I need to get my father up there immediately.

This was incredible luck. My cousin and his wife live in that small college town. My uncle, my father's brother, lived in Suffield Ct, just 40 miles or so south of Northampton. And some of my other cousins live in Leeds, just a few miles from the hospice. All of these people would play a great role in embracing what was left of our family and providing much comfort for my father, my brother and myself over the next weeks.

We had to arrive on the following day by 3PM or they would give the bed away. So I frantically started calling doctors, ambulances and so on to schedule his transportation but got little help. None of the ambulance services would guarantee a pick up or delivery time. Others thought it would take six hours or more to drive the 200 or so miles from New York to Northampton.

Other obstacles appeared. My dad could no longer breathe on his own; he needed oxygen. The process of obtaining oxygen tanks was surprisingly onerous. I would have to rent the oxygen myself but no one would rent to me without a doctors approval or unless I would commit to an extended rental. Pure oxygen is volatile and some companies were uncertain about putting their product in the hands of an unprofessional, as if I would fire up a cigar while handling the flammable gas.

But by far the most thorny issue was his medicine. He was receiving a very restricted narcotic every two hours. Since there would be no medical professional available, the hospital would not give me the drugs to give to him. I tried everything, talking to virtually every administrator at St. Clares. My pleas fell on deaf ears.

Then the Korean oncologist stepped up big time. She escorted me into see one administrator and sat with me as I explained the situation. She spoke convincingly on my behalf, on my father's behalf. I would rent a car, put two oxygen tanks in the back seat and my dad in the front seat with blankets and vomit bags and I would drive him myself to Massachusetts. I would borrow some oxygen tanks and I would need for them to trust me that I would not steal my father's pain medication.

I proposed that they give me two pills: one to be consumed just as we left New York and the other to be consumed along the way. That would essentially give me four hours to get my father to the hospice. Surprisingly everyone agreed to the plan. Thank goodness for the kind hearts of the Korean doctor and the St. Clare’s administrator.

The next morning I picked up the largest rental car I could find and headed to the hospital. Two oxygen tanks waited for me in my father's room. The oncologist personally escorted me to the hospital pharmacy where they carefully doled out two pain pills to her. She promptly handed them to me and we both then marched back upstairs to get my dad.

Twenty minutes later we were on the road. Well, almost. My dad wanted to stop by his apartment one last time. Luckily we found a space right in front of the building and I helped him out. It took him a considerable time to make it to the front door. I held the door open so he could take one last look. Perhaps because there were so many memories and so many personal treasures there, he could not bear to step inside. So we made our way back to the car and we were off this time for good.

At first my concerns were simple: to get him to Northampton on time and to make his as comfortable as I possibly could. I could care less about speeding tickets. I am what some might consider a fast driver, however I prefer the racing parlance: I am quick.

We headed north on the West Side Highway to the Saw Mill Parkway. As we approached our old hometown of Mt. Kisco, I asked my dad if he wanted to see our old house, the house where I grew up. He did.

Minutes later, we continued on our way and made very good progress until he had the first episode of sickness. He was nauseous and struggling not to vomit. Lung cancer is a particularly hideous disease in that it essentially stifles your breathing by destroying your lungs. And the coughing that accompanies this disease is particularly disturbing, especially for those who are unnerved at the sight of blood because… well there is a lot of it.

I stopped the car at a rest area and opened his door. He welcomed the fresh air. I held the bag as he vomited. The white translucent bag turned blood red, then purplish as the blood began to congeal. Mixed with the blood were bits of things that I had never seen before and have never seen since. A kind gentleman in the next car came by to offer assistance. I asked him to bring me some paper towels with cool water, which he did. He inquired once again and my dad waved him off with a wave of thanks. My dad, like me, prefers to be sick alone, in private.

Ten minutes later we resumed the journey. The producer in me finally gave way to the son in me. I now fully realized the import of this trip: that this would be the last time we would ever be driving anywhere together, that the awful certainty of my father’s imminent death would preclude more trips, more conversations, more moments of a youngest son trying to measure himself against the old man.

At once I remembered making this trip hundreds of times as a kid when we went to visit my grandmother or other relatives in Massachusetts. Dad would drive, mom would settle in the front seat and the three of us piled in the back, bickering over who had to sit in the middle. That was so long ago. Now there were just three of us left and for this ride, it was just the two of us.

I had so much to say and I knew that this would be my last opportunity to say it...

So we talked. Well I talked and he listened as best he could. My father was not a man who shared his feelings easily, if at all. And I learned this from him. But in this regard I have tried not to be my father’s son.

So I spoke openly about my mother and the tragedy of her final illness and his betrayal of her; about the heartbreak of my sister’s premature death and about my talented brother who often seems lost and struggling to find his way in the world. I spoke of myself: my hopes, my dreams, my frustrations and my fears. For a brief moment he was a captive audience and through his pain I could tell he was struggling to stay engaged.

Sometimes he would nod off for a few minutes and I would welcome the respite since it gave me a few valuable moments to gather my thoughts. But eventually I would continue talking because I knew time was short.

As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he uttered some incomprehensible, yet perplexing words. While most were unintelligible, he kept jabbering on about his mother. I could not make sense of it.

I stopped again to give him some water. Of course he had no appetite but my stomach was aching--I realized that I had not eaten since the night before. Still I could afford to miss a meal and I felt uncomfortable taking the time to eat while he was so sick. So I grabbed my cold caffeine of choice—Diet Pepsi—and handed him the last pain pill. He took it gratefully. We continued.

We stopped two more times so he could purge the poisons in his system.

Surprisingly enough, we made it to Suffield by 1PM. I swerved off the interstate and headed to his brother’s house. From the road while heading north on I-91, I had called my uncle, who is three years younger than my dad, to make certain he was there. I told him what I was doing. He was standing at the foot of the driveway waiting as we pulled up.

My uncle, like my father, does not share his emotions readily. But as we drove up I noticed the redness in his eyes. This was the first time they had seen one another since my father’s diagnosis. He and my father exchanged the familiar warmhearted convivial greetings, the welcoming by a younger brother still very much in awe of his older sibling.

Tethered to his oxygen tank and weakened by the journey, my dad could not move from the car. My uncle leaned in to the passenger window to talk. I decided to vacate the driver’s seat and offered it to my uncle.

They sat in the car alone together for 30 minutes or more and talked. Discreetly, I watched from afar, hearing little except for some boisterous laughs from my uncle and the occasional grunt from my father.

Soon it was time to leave as our deadline loomed. My uncle didn’t want us to go. And he didn’t know what to say. He clasped my hand tightly, commanded me to look him straight in the eye and thanked me profusely. He went to the passenger side and grabbed my dad’s hand, holding on. He only let go as the car started to pull away.

On the final leg of our drive to Northampton, my dad rallied and had a moment of clarity. Perhaps he was energized by the visit with his brother. Or perhaps he was steeling himself for what lay ahead. He talked of cremation, ashes and burial. We had discussed this and I knew full well he preferred to be cremated. What I would soon learn was that he had never picked up his own mother’s ashes from the funeral home—an act of omission for which he never forgave himself. Suddenly I understood everything.

I knew nothing of this since I was only eight when my grandmother died in 1962. I barely knew her and what I knew scared me, quite frankly. She was a domineering old woman who chained smoked cigarettes, smelled of old age and drove the wrong way down one-way streets. She was a bit of a curmudgeon too but she also died of lung cancer and I suspect I only remember the part of her life when she was ill, when she was in pain and when she was suffering, very much like my father on this day.

Later, as friends and family would visit my father I would come understand much more about her. I would learn that she was quite the Victorian, believing in observing certain rituals and social graces. I would find out that she helped the family weather the great depression where what left of the Deane family fortune—and there was one—was finally lost. And I would discover that she was something of a spitfire—a Republican woman who drove to Florida in the 1930s accompanied by a black lady friend with my grandmother all the way insisting that the hotels and restaurants serve her friend just as readily as they served her.

We pulled into the parking lot of the hospice at 2:45PM. The second pain pill was beginning to wear off and dad was noticeably uncomfortable. Fortunately the staff was expecting us. At the front door, we were greeted by a friendly attendant armed with a wheel chair who transported my father to the last available bed in the facility. We had made it.

This final chapter in my dad’s life got off to a better start than I could have imagined. To be honest, I had terribly dark thoughts before and during the trip but they were all for naught. I wasn’t all that positive dad would survive the trip and I wasn’t happy about the thought of my father breathing his last as we cruised along 1-84. But things were coming together. My brother was on his way in to Hartford and would arrive the following day. He would take the first shift and stay with my father. I would leave that night and return in seven days time. Still there was one more thing I needed to do before I returned to Los Angeles.

The next morning I visited dad in his room. He was more sanguine, attentive and even euphoric. The hospice doctor came by and introduced himself. Immediately he managed to put my father at ease and adjust his medications to find the level of right pain relief which made my father comfortable yet still able to communicate.

My cell phone rang. On the other end was a woman about whom I knew nothing. “Is this Michael?” she asked. “You don’t know me but I’m Toni, your father’s first wife.” Stunned, I almost dropped the phone. “How is he?” Nervously, I filled her in best as I could. I knew he was married before my mother, to a woman at Radcliffe who was his college sweetheart. They were together for seven years and they traveled all over Asia together, including a long stint in China while he worked for the Springfield Republican and strung for the Christian Science Monitor. Apparently she had a sense--and wanted no part--of my father’s upcoming political troubles. So when they returned from China in 1945, she left him.

Dad must have had an inkling who the caller was and he sat up and straightened himself, quite alert and eager to talk. I handed him the phone and left the room so they could say their final farewells.

Outside at a pay phone, I called all the local funeral homes with the twin purposes of making arrangements for my father but also trying to glean information regarding the whereabouts of my grandmother’s ashes.

One owner suggested I call every funeral home in Springfield where my grandmother lived. I called my uncle who could not remember anything, “Your father was supposed to take care of that,” he jokingly told me, even then unable to resist the urge to tweak his older brother. “I guess he screwed that up too.”

So I started dialing. I called every funeral home inquiring about the ashes for Geneva Schaffer Deane, a descendent of German immigrants, valedictorian of the 1904 class at Vassar College and my grandmother. None of them had any information about her ashes whereabouts.

Still I did get one piece of good news. In Massachusetts and other states, it is illegal to throw away human remains of any sort. So funeral homes are obligated to keep them for a certain time, then are allowed to bury them but only with the provision that the burial is clearly documented so any family member can recover the ashes at any time. So I had hope.

But I was running out of ideas. Fortuitously, I had the idea to check my grandfather’s obituary and see who handled his remains. That turned out to be the Dickinson Funeral Home but I had already called them and they offered no help.

Rather than call again, I decided to go to the funeral home directly. When I pulled into the parking lot I realized I had been there before.

The building was understandably silent, given the nature of their work. A young woman quietly greeted me and I explained the purpose of my visit. She was indeed the person to whom I had spoken to previously but given the circumstances of my trip she listened dutifully. Without protest, she went into another room and pulled out a long ledger of sorts. Inside were the names of those whose ashes were either downstairs in the basement or buried at a nearby cemetery.

They were entered chronologically of course and she reviewed the entries from 1960 on. She skimmed page after page, sliding her hand down upon each name to emphasize her determination and attention to detail. Finally she stopped at one name. “I have a Deane here but it is Hugh G. Deane, not Geneva Deane,” she said matter-of-factly. “That’s my grandfather,” I told her.

Hugh Gordon Deane died a month before I was born and not meeting him was and is one of my life’s greatest disappointments. He was by all accounts an incredibly kind man, soft spoken with a slight southern lilt to his accent. As a teenager he moved from Washington DC to Springfield where he met my grandmother. He was a self-made man, president of the Hamden Steel Grinding Co. and quite successful until the depression. He had a knack for working with his hands, particularly carving things or making the odd batch of bootleg wine during prohibition. Everyone loved him and, as my second cousin Jim remembers, he had a kind word for everyone. He and my grandmother were renowned for their generosity. During the depression, their home at 183 Dartmouth Terrace was well known among the transient community as a place where you could get a free meal. The railroad tracks ran nearby at the far end of the dingle, just south of the house. Many times, I’m told, my grandfather would answer a morning knock at the back door with the greeting, “C’mon in. I’ve just made breakfast for you.” And he would give the man his own breakfast.

I knew my father and uncle had claimed my grandfather’s ashes and buried some of them at the old homestead in Springfield, some in Mount Kisco where I grew up and some in New Jersey where my uncle raised his family.

“If you have any family ashes downstairs, they are probably my grandmother,” I told her. She shook her head, still skeptical. “That’s unlikely but I’ll look.”

She hurried off. Five minutes later she returned with a small brown cardboard box. Inside was an urn with the engraved initials HGD. I opened the urn carefully. Inside was a small plastic bag full of gray ash with a tag attached. It read: Geneva Schaffer Deane.

She gasped, then smiled, pleased to have helped. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

An hour later I strode into my father’s room, my grandmother’s ashes in tow. Dad was awake, visiting with my brother who had arrived minutes before. I handed him the box. He and my brother both looked puzzled. “Grandma’s ashes,” I explained. My brother looked shocked. My father, who I never remember seeing shed a tear, started to cry.

Dad treasured family and friendships. He did indeed enjoy his role as the family patriarch, holding court in his final few weeks of his life as generations came to pay respects. It brought him great joy.

My father Hugh Gordon Deane Jr. died weeks later on June 25, 2001. Regrettably, I was not there for his death.

He was far from perfect, not a terribly good father or husband but he a very good man. My father was an intellectual with an unbounded interest in learning. He was quite modest, carrying himself with a quiet dignity. He possessed an almost unerring analytical mind and was always a head of the curve whether it was on China, on civil rights or on the conflict in Vietnam. He had courage, often willing to take an unpopular position and not back down in the face of real hardship.

His moral compass included a genuine and deep respect for each and every human being, not withstanding their thoughts, their values, their beliefs or their origins. His judgment and moral principles shaped his work and therefore his life, his moral compass existing in a world where, as one of his friends pointed out to me, far too many people are engaged in self-serving activity and comfort as a foremost concern.

He was a writer who wrote two books and countless articles. He was also a victim of McCarthyism, blacklisted for a series of articles on China that prophetically predicted the communists would prevail—a casualty of the notion that conspiring Americans had somehow lost China.

My father was compelled to write these stories that reflected the imperfection of the human condition: the paucity of justice, the inadequacy of compassion and the lack of sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellow man. In doing so he was willing to brave the disapproval of his peers, the censure of his colleagues, the wrath of society. Moral courage is a rare but a vital commodity for those who seek to transform a world that yields most painfully and most reluctantly to change.

Like all of us, he was prey for the usual human failures. But on the essentials, for the long run, in good times and bad, he followed his beacon about as well as anyone else kept busy in the heavy engagements of an active and productive life. That simple moral compass held him true on course until the end.

In life, he gave of himself to us. His keen mind stirred us. He offered his moral compass to guide us and a good kind heart from which the laughter came. He gave us a sense of purpose and a profound wit. He gave us kindness and strength.

In writing his eulogy I realized that in death he gave many of us one last gift, that of his love of family and for his roots. In doing so, he introduced and reintroduced family members to one another, allowing once dormant relationships to thrive and flourish. He gave that so we might give of ourselves which, when you think about it, is one amazing farewell.