by Studs Terkel
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
© 2001 by Studs Terkel
Foreword © 2014 by Jane Gross
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“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” by Gwendolyn Brooks, from Blacks by Gwendolyn Brooks, copyright 1987.
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Originally published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2001
This edition published by The New Press, 2014
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Remembering Ida
You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley,
You’ve got to cross it by yourself,
There ain’t no one can cross it for you,
You’ve got to cross it by yourself.
—as sung by Richard Dyer-Bennett
You’ve got to stand your test in judgment,
You’ve got to stand it by yourself,
Ain’t nobody can stand it for you,
You’ve got to stand it by yourself,
—as sung by Big Bill Broonzy
We have loved ones gone to glory
Whose dear forms we often miss.
When we close our earthly story
Shall we join them in their bliss?
Will the circle be unbroken,
By and by, Lord, by and by.
There’s a better home awaiting
Far beyond the starry sky.
—as sung by Doc Watson
. . . She’s gone forever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives.
She’s dead as earth.
. . . Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
and thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more.
Never, never, never, never, never!
—King Lear, Act V, Scene III
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Jane Gross
Introduction
Prologue: Brothers
Tom Gates, a retired fireman
Bob Gates, a retired police officer
Part I
Doctors
Dr. Joseph Messer
Dr. Sharon Sandell
ER
Dr. John Barrett
Marc and Noreen Levison, a paramedic and a nurse
Lloyd (Pete) Haywood, a former gangbanger
Claire Hellstern, a nurse
Ed Reardon, a paramedic
Law and Order
Robert Soreghan, a homicide detective
Delbert Lee Tibbs, a former death-row inmate
War
Dr. Frank Raila
Haskell Wexler, a cinematographer
Tammy Snider, a Hiroshima survivor (hibakusha)
Mothers and Sons
V.I.M. (Victor Israel Marquez), a Vietnam vet
Angelina Rossi, his mother
Guadalupe Reyes, a mother
God’s Shepherds
Rev. Willie T. Barrow
Father Leonard Dubi
Rabbi Robert Marx
Pastor Tom Kok
Rev. Ed Townley
The Stranger
Rick Rundle, a city sanitation worker
Part II
Seeing Things
Randy Buescher, an associate architect
Chaz Ebert, a lawyer
Antoinette Korotko-Hatch, a church worker
Karen Thompson, a student
Dimitri Mihalas, an astronomer and physicist
A View from the Bridge
Hank Oettinger, a retired printer
Ira Glass, a radio journalist
Kid Pharaoh, a retired “collector”
Quinn Brisben, a retired teacher
Kurt Vonnegut, a writer
The Boomer
Bruce Bendinger, an advertising executive and writer
Part III
Fathers and Sons
Doc Watson, a folksinger
Vernon Jarrett, a journalist
Country Women
Peggy Terry, a retired mountain woman
Bessie Jones, a Georgia Sea Island Singer (1972)
Rosalie Sorrels, a traveling folksinger
The Plague I
Tico Valle, a young man
Lori Cannon, “curator” of the Open Hand Society
Brian Matthews, an ex-bartender, writer for a gay weekly
Jewell Jenkins, a hospital aide
Justin Hayford, a journalist, musician
Matta Kelly, a case manager
The Old Guy
Jim Hapgood
The Plague II
Nancy Lanoue
Out There
Dr. Gary Slutkin
Part IV
Vissi d’Arte
William Warfield, a singer and teacher
Uta Hagen, an actress
The Comedian
Mick Betancourt
Day of the Dead
Carlos Cortez, a painter and poet
Vine Deloria, a writer and teacher
Helen Sclair, a cemetery familiar
The Other Son
Steve Young, a father
Maurine Young, a mother
The Job
William Herdegen, an undertaker
Rory Moina, a hospice nurse
The End and the Beginning
Mamie Mobley, a mother
Dr. Marvin Jackson, a son
Epilogue
Kathy Fagan and Linda Gagnon, mothers
Acknowledgments
MY DEBTS ARE OWED to a legion of strangers, friends, and acquaintances. My first is to the heroes, unacknowledged in this book, though they have offered me their precious time and generosity of spirit. To them, my deepest bow as well as my apologies.
They are listed in alphabetical order, along with the scouts, who guided me toward them and toward the sixty whose testimonies are in the following pages: a burglar whose name I didn’t catch, Charlie Andrews, Anndrena Belcher, Dean Alison Boden, Laurie Cannon, Susan Catania, Dr. Mardge Cohen, Tony Fitzpatrick, Tom Geoghegan, Jane Jacobs, Tony Judge, Dennis Hamill, Pete Hamill, Jim Hapgood, Claire Hellstern, Carol Iwata, Jamie Kalven, Soyun Kim, Donna Blue Lachman, Jack Lawrence, Alan Lomax, Bonnie Miller, Erskine Moore, Dick Muelder, Charlie Pachter, Andrea Raila, Bob Rasmus, Florence Scala, Dr. Gordy Schiff, Mary Schmich, Helen Shaver, Dan Terkel, Tish Valva, Rob Warden, Bob and Laura Watson, Yoriko, and Dr. Quentin Young.
To the Chicago Historical Society’s president, Lonnie Bunch, and its staff members with whom I work, especially Usama Alshaibi, its demon engineer, who like an alchemist transmuted my slovenly, drossy tapes into gold.
And to the Big Three, who are most responsibl
e for the book that has come forth. Sydney Lewis, who beyond being the transcriber, making sense of my indecipherable hieroglyphics in scrawled hand, was my chief scout and day-to-day colleague, offering invaluable suggestions. Were it not for Tom Engelhardt, the nonpareil of editors, who was uncanny in cutting the fat from the lean (something I found impossible to do) and who gave this work much of its form, I’d still be in the woods. And, of course, to my publisher and editor for thirty-five years, André Schiffrin, who conceived the idea of these “oral histories” and who has been my cicerone through twelve such adventures, my gratitude.
Foreword
THERE IS SOMETHING DAUNTING—beyond daunting—about writing a new foreword to the last book of oral history published by Studs Terkel in his lifetime.
Terkel died in 2008 at the age of ninety-six. That is three decades older than I am now, which makes me feel the imposter, standing in for one of America’s most renowned authors, who turned conversation into a popular literary form—oral history—on subjects ranging from the Depression to World War II to work and race relations and finally, with reluctance, to the mysteries of death.
It was, as he said in the 2001 introduction, “the one experience none of us have had, yet all of us will” and “the one book I never thought I’d write” because it was “too big,” “too abstract,” and “more in the domain of the metaphysician or the minister.”
His technique, by his own description, had always been to ask, “How did it feel to be a certain person in a certain circumstance at a certain time in our country’s twentieth century?” But surely that modus operandi could not apply when it came to death: “What is there to remember of a time and place at which none of us has yet arrived?” Terkel wondered.
For thirty years he’d pushed the idea of writing about death to the recesses of his fertile mind. Nevertheless, like most of us, he’d thought a lot about it. He had known childhood asthma, mastoiditis, and chronic insomnia that resisted the nonsensical counting of sheep.
For a brief period, reciting the roster of the 1920 championship Cleveland Indians helped him get to sleep; later it was a five-line stanza from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; and much later still a list of “departed buddies” that grew “exponentially” over the years. Most telling of all, from childhood onward, gripped by a fear he would die in his sleep, Terkel made it a point to unclasp his hands from his chest before dozing off, lest he tempt fate by assuming that telltale position.
His father and two brothers all died of heart disease by their mid-fifties. He himself had multiple heart surgeries, keeping symptoms in check with nitroglycerin always at the ready until, midway through the home-team Chicago Bulls/Seattle Supersonics 1996 National Basketball Association finals, a major heart attack all but did him in. So, told he was the oldest person ever to undergo such a massive procedure but with his cardiologists citing ten-to-one odds in his favor, Terkel endured a quintuple bypass at eighty-four. One of his caratoid arteries was “shot,” he reported five years later, at eighty-nine, when Will the Circle Be Unbroken? was first published, and the “other hangs in there barely.”
Here is a man who really wanted to live—and did—even after the loss of his beloved wife of sixty years in 1999 and a fall and neck surgery five years later that required, for the rest of his days, the tender ministrations of a home health aide eighty-four hours a week. At the time Terkel died, in 2008, at ninety-six years old, “to touch his arms was to feel a living skeleton,” wrote Rick Kogal in his obituary in the Chicago Tribune.
I have seen such things, thought more deeply than most about them, and—more by accident than design—old age and death have been the signature topic of my writing since 2003. That was the year my mother died, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that our family, despite myriad financial and intellectual resources, had made so many avoidable and costly mistakes—mistakes that made the last years of my mother’s life more tortuous than they needed to be as well as more expensive to her, me, and my brother. I had also become well acquainted with the burdened American health care system and the entitlement programs for the elderly. Maybe I could help others avoid those mistakes, keep friends and strangers from having to reinvent the wheel.
First in the pages of the New York Times, then as founder of its “Now Old Age” blog, and eventually as author of A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Parents and Ourselves, I tried to do that. “The angel of death,” my brother calls me (and he does not mean it as a compliment). “Morbid,” others have said.
Why would anyone volunteer to spend so much time thinking about things like voluntary starvation and dehydration (my mother’s chosen exit and a surprisingly gentle one), assisted living vs. continuing care retirement communities vs. nursing homes vs. home care, the pluses and minuses of long-term care insurance, the mechanics of a so-called Medicaid spend-down in a society where all but the 1 percent will run out of money and depend on government largess if they live long enough?
Maybe I am the angel of death, hard-wired to morbid thoughts. But who would even want to live forever, likely suffering and surely crowding the planet and bankrupting the government with their needs? And good luck to you if your end-of-life plan is to drop dead on the tennis court or in your sleep. It’s such a bad bet that I can only guess the people who cling to it have mastered putting the entire unpleasant subject out of their minds.
I have come to realize that I was hubristic enough to think denial could be trumped by information. If the only certainty in life is that it will end, surely people would want to understand how to make that passage as easy on themselves and their loved ones as possible. Surely, the care-giving process and the huge cohort of baby boomers who would experience it as no generation before them has because of scientific strides in longevity was not only a filial duty and often an unexpected gift but also a way of preparing for one’s own old age. If witnessed from a front-row seat, wouldn’t we be more prepared and mindful when our own time came?
The answer, in my experience, is often “no.” But for the very rare soul—and Studs Terkel was one of them—many people would just as soon not think, wonder, or plan. They instead will take their chances on either living forever (impossible) or dying with no fuss or bother (which happens to only one in five people past the age of eighty). This book is not for them! This book is for the rest of us, those who find comfort or solace or interest in knowing how others have confronted their mortality.
Well, Terkel being Terkel (in his New York Times obituary William Grimes quotes him as having said, “It isn’t an inquisition; it’s an exploration. . . . If they think you’re listening, they’ll talk”), found sixty-two people—nobodies and somebodies alike—who did just that. Talk.
First responders. The author Kurt Vonnegut. A parolee from death row. A Hiroshima survivor. Doc Watson, a blind folk singer, who popularized the hymn that gives this book its title. Veterans. Doctors. Nurses. A woman who came out of a coma after two years. Community activists. Clergy. The actress Uta Hagen.
Some ramble. Other require Terkel’s gentle prodding, what he has described as no more than “And then what happened? And then what happened?” Some recount the deaths of others dear to them, their grief, or their guilt, with virtually no reference to their own mortality. Among those who have had near-death experiences, some saw the fabled white light, others something else equally eerie, most nothing at all.
Some are emphatic that the dead wind up in a better place, whether they call it heaven or not. A few chuckle at the potential discomfort of sharing that pink cloud with both friends and enemies or with a multiplicity of spouses. Others call themselves believers but not in God, as a deity, or heaven, as a place; rather, they believe in something more nonspecific but spiritual. Terkel concludes that those with “faith” have an “easier time with loss.”
I don’t find evidence of that in the sum of the interviews. But without having counted the faithful and the unfaithful or tallied the many vacillations within individual stori
es, I could easily be wrong. Indeed, most likely, I bring my own belief system to my reading. Dead is dead for me, as in six-feet-under or ashes-in-an-urn. I talk to them—my private ghosts—and they to me. They live on in my life in that way, and in the other lives they touched and the good deeds they did while on earth. That is why, like most Jews, when I learn of a death, my chosen benediction is “May his/her memory be a blessing.”
That Jewish perspective is reflected by Ira Glass, host of public radio’s This American Life, forty-one at the time of his conversation with Terkel. Glass, noting that he thought about death all the time and “I always have since I was kid,” blames the Vietnam War on his preoccupation. He was “convinced that the war would go on forever”—his uncle Lenny was there—“that I would get called up” and die in the jungle. Obviously, he didn’t.
The acute fear subsided but instead gave way to something chronic, which he attributes to being both an atheist and a member of a religion that doesn’t promise something better in the by-and-by. “You treat other people the right way because that’s the right thing and that’s that,” he told Terkel, “not because you’ll get a reward for it.” Christianity, by contrast, he notes is “such a reassuring paradigm.”
Dr. Joseph Messer, a Chicago cardiologist who cared for Terkel’s wife, Ida, and had the terrible task of telling him when she died, mused about death from two overlapping perspectives. His father was an undertaker—“Having people die was part of the life I lived,” he said—and his childhood was spent assisting “with what we called ‘removals’ ” of dead bodies, tending to the hearses, observing embalmings, singing hymns at funerals.
“My father’s real goal in life was to be a physician,” Dr. Messer said, and he “lived out that desire vicariously” when his two sons and later a granddaughter became doctors. He credits “the memory of my father dealing with families in the funeral business” with great gentleness and empathy for his own very personal reaction to the deaths of his patients, rather than what is often the extreme “insulation” so many physicians maintain to guard their objectivity and protect themselves from the immersive suffering around them.
As for belief in an afterlife, Dr. Messer said, “My science background makes it difficult for me to accept some of the assumptions of organized religion.” He told Terkel that he doubts “that there is a hereafter,” while recognizing “the solace it gives survivors.” These are astute and honest personal observations, but for me the wisest part of his commentary is more global: “Dealing with death is a third-rail issue in the United States,” Dr. Messer said. “We don’t talk about death and dying as a societal problem, but it’s going to become more and more of one,” as indeed it has.
