Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  Terkel tells us that it was Dr. Messer, and other doctors he knew, who urged him to pursue this topic, which had licked at his imagination through the decades while he avoided it. Their argument to him was that “we, as a matter of course, reflect on death, voice hope and fear, only when a dear one is near death, or out of it. Why not speak of it when we are in the flower of good health? How can we envision our life, the one we now experience, unless we recognize that it is finite?”

  There is still not enough of that kind of talk but surely more—much more—than there was in 2001, when Will the Circle Be Unbroken was published. Certainly, it helped open that door, let some sunshine into a dark stigmatized room. Now, in this new paperback edition, publishing at a time when eight thousand boomers a day are turning sixty-five—what better honor to pay its author than to use his brave book to keep that conversation going?

  —Jane Gross

  June 2014

  Introduction

  I’VE COURTED DEATH ever since I was six. I was an asthmatic child. With each labored breath, each wheeze, came a toy whistle obbligato. At my bedside, my eldest brother, to comfort me, would whistle back “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” in cadence with my breathing. It was funny, and pleasing, but not much help.

  That plus a couple of bouts with mastoiditis, head swathed in bandages, made my awakening the next morning a matter of touch and go. What troubled me was not that I wouldn’t make it, but that I would no longer enjoy the whimsical care of my father and my two brothers. My mother was another matter; her hypertense attention more often than not added to my discomfort.

  Death itself was too abstract an idea for me then, though I had, in a cursory fashion, become acquainted with the fact of death. For a week or so, there had been a warning sign on the door of the adjacent house: SCARLET FEVER. CONTAGIOUS. It was taken down the day after the girl inside died. She was my contemporary. Still, near as she was, I felt somewhat detached, only vaguely saddened. My ailments, though serious, were not of epidemic proportions. Nor did the unfortunate girl have two brothers and a gentle father who brought forth phlegmy laughter.

  Of course, I had some difficulty, a fear really, of falling asleep. The idea of counting sheep might have worked had I been the child of a Basque shepherd in Idaho. I really knew nothing about sheep, not that I had anything against them. I was living in Chicago, where a fair south wind blowing in from the stockyards wafted the aroma of slaughtered cattle toward our rooming house on Flournoy Street. No, there was really nothing soporific in counting cows.

  My brother, an assiduous newspaper bug, suggested counting celebrated names, names that made headlines. Charlie Chaplin. Caruso. The Bambino. Clara Bow, the “It” Girl. Peggy Hopkins Joyce. In an inspired moment, he dropped the names of the celebrated lovers Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, who had just been executed for bopping her husband on the head with a heavy, leaden window sash. Nah. It did nothing for my sleeplessness.

  Astonishingly, it was my first awareness of baseball that turned the trick; at least, for a year or two. The Cleveland Indians had beaten the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series of 1920. Each night, the names of these new celebrities rolled from my tongue as I signed off. Stanley Coveleski, the Indians’ pitcher, who had won three games. Stan-ley Cov-el-es-ki. Six salubrious syllables. The peerless Tris Speaker, who covered center field like a comfortable quilt. (A sports writer’s apt phrase, my brother informed me.) Bill Wambsganns, the second baseman, who pulled off that unassisted triple play. Wambsganns. The name’s slow pronunciation had the pleasant, slumberous effect of a Dutch hot chocolate.*

  After a few years, when I had recovered from my childhood ailments, the effects of this nocturnal ritual wore off. Once again, I was in the thrall of sleeplessness. Now, a touch of fear that I might indeed die in my sleep distinctly possessed me. It brought forth a habit that still obsesses me. Whenever I’m about to doze off, I deliberately unclasp my hands and remove them from my breast. Every night. Even now.

  Was it that photograph I saw on the front page of the morning Hearst newspaper seventy-eight years ago? The late Pope Benedict XV lay in state. On the catafalque, the pontiff’s hands were clasped across his breast. It was the first image I remember of a dead person in a casket. From time to time, my young Catholic friends suggested a prayer. “If I should die before I wake. . . .” No soap. I didn’t want any Lord my soul to take because I obstinately insisted on waking up the next morning.

  Fortunately, at the age of thirteen, I had a young English teacher in my freshman class at McKinley High School. With his scraggly mustache and tubercular mien, he bore a remarkable resemblance to Robert Louis Stevenson. He had assigned us Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” And—bingo!—there was a five-line stanza that did the trick.

  Oh sleep, thou art a gentle thing

  Beloved from pole to pole!

  To Mary Queen, the praise be given,

  She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,

  That slid into my soul.

  For years, I mumbled those lines before sacking out. And it worked—after a fashion. (Ironically, my young Catholic friends had scored a point. They knew who Mary Queen was; I didn’t.)

  Now, at eighty-eight, after a quintuple bypass among other medical adventures, those words have lost their charm. Too many of my old friends, contemporaries, have died. Fortunately, I’ve discovered a new way of popping off to sleep. I count down the names of those departed buddies. Unfortunately, the list has grown exponentially during these last few years. Amend that: every month, every week, I spot more familiar names in the obituary columns.

  Mordant though it may sound, it’s not an unpleasant way of sacking out. I recall funny stories, jokes, and even imagined amours, especially after a few drinks, say, at Riccardo’s, a favorite watering hole in Chicago, but now transmogrified into an “in” place for Generation X. I have a good number of young friends, who are delightful company, generous-hearted, witty, and all that. Yet, there is that slight ache—heimweh, as Bill Wambsganns put it.

  My fellow octogenarian Charlie Andrews explains: “Have you heard the one about the old sport who married a much younger woman? It worked for a couple of years. One day, a mutual friend encounters him. The old boy informs him that they’ve split up. ‘She didn’t know the songs.’ ” My young friends do my heart good every time I see them, but they don’t know the songs.

  Naturally, when I pick up a newspaper these days, the first place I turn to isn’t sports, or arts, or the business of business, or the op-eds. I immediately turn to the obituaries. The old doggerel with which many mature readers may be acquainted has replaced Coleridge as my mantra.

  I wake up each morning and gather my wits,

  I pick up the paper and read the obits.

  If my name is not in it, I know I’m not dead,

  So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

  This is the one book I never thought I’d write. It was too big for me; too abstract. It was more in the domain of the metaphysician or the minister. Yet the idea was put forth some thirty years ago.

  Was it 1970? ’71? Gore Vidal, at the Ambassador East Hotel bar in Chicago, suggested death as the subject for a book. I stared into my drink. No bells rang. My works had been concerned with life and its uncertainties rather than death and its indubitable certainty.

  In all my books, my informants—mostly the uncelebrated, heroes of the “ordinary”—had recounted, in their own words, the lives they had lived, the epochs they had survived. How did it feel to be a certain person in a certain circumstance at a certain time in our country’s twentieth century? During the Great American Depression, what was it like to be that twelve-year-old boy seeing his father trudge home at eleven in the morning with his toolchest over his shoulder only to become an idler for the next ten years? During World War II, what was it like to be the mama’s boy sitting tight in that landing craft crossing the English Channel, heading for Normandy? What was daily worklife like for the schoolteacher, the waitress
, the spotwelder or the storekeeper? What did blacks in our society really think of whites or the other way around? How did the elders feel as they grew even more so in a society where their power ebbed as their span increased?

  These were challenges I could handle, for better or worse—something I could put my hands on. In recalling actual experiences, my colleagues, the true authors of these works, found their own eloquence and poetry. Words from the seemingly inarticulate flowed like wine. At times they were as astonished as I was.

  Consider the young mother in the public project. It was an integrated complex of the poor. I can’t recall whether she was white or black. The conversation took place in the sixties. The tape recorder had not yet become the household tool it is today. Her three little kids were hopping around, demanding to hear Mama’s voice on tape. I played it back. As she caught her words, she gasped. Hand touching mouth, she murmured: “I never knew I felt that way . . .” Bingo! A score for me as well as for her. An experience recounted, a revelation to oneself.

  But what about the one experience none of us has had, yet all of us will have: death? Now in my late eighties, Gore Vidal’s challenge of some thirty years ago had come back to haunt me. What is there to remember of a time and place at which none of us has yet arrived? Boy—what a challenge! I no longer stared at my drink. I downed the martini and the bells began to ring.

  In what follows, you may be as astonished as I was, while scrounging around, to discover that we reflect on death like crazy much of our lives. The storytellers here, once started on the subject, can’t stop. They want to talk about it; whether it be grief or guilt or a fusing of both on the part of the survivors; or thoughts about the hereafter—is it is or is it ain’t? You’ll hear voices offering all sorts of opinions: some are believers, others put forth the challenge, “show me.”

  For so many there’s a recurring refrain, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual,” as though they sought separation from the institution, yet, as individuals, truly believed.

  Invariably, those who have a faith, whether it is called religious or spiritual, have an easier time with loss. They find solace in believing there is a something after—that they will in some way, in some form, again meet or even merge with the departed one. Nonbelievers have no such comfort. They go with Gertrude Stein’s observation in another context: “There is no there there.” Nada.

  All of the doctors I have come to know and respect, including my cardiologist, my surgeon, and my internist,* have urged me to undertake this project. We, as a matter of course, reflect on death, voice hope and fear, only when a dear one is near death, or out of it. Why not speak of it while we’re in the flower of good health? How can we envision our life, the one we now experience, unless we recognize that it is finite?

  It is a sweet irony that my first book of the twenty-first century (possibly my last) is about death. Yet these testimonies are also about life and its pricelessness, offering visions, inchoate though they be, of a better one down here—and, possibly, up there.

  My father and two brothers died in their mid-fifties. Angina. Bad tickers. I had a touch of it, too. It was in our genes, I guess. My mother, a tough little sparrow, fought out her last days in a nursing home. She hung up her gloves at eighty-seven.

  From my fifties into my mid-eighties, the sublingual nitro pills were mother’s milk to me. Whenever that tight fist would punch or grab at my left side, I’d slip a nitro under my tongue and all would be well. For a time. I still carry that tiny bottle in my side pocket. In 1996, while I was watching the Chicago Bulls and the Seattle Sonics in the NBA finals, a sharp zing stabbed me. It ran crazily up and down my left arm. I was perspiring freely and coldly.

  The next day’s angiogram was not that great. My arteries were a mess. My doctors were of one mind: unless something was immediately done, I had maybe six months to live. A quintuple bypass was suggested. Quintuple! I was impressed, though somewhat disturbed because I was in the middle of work on a new book.

  “What are the odds?” Very good, the surgeon assured me. He had performed this one a number of times. He said something about ten-to-one in my favor. I liked those odds, and the procedure worked. Since 1996 there has been no sign of the fist, let alone the zing, and I’ve yet to touch the tiny nitro bottle. Of course, I’m aware that mortality is lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce. One of my carotid arteries is shot, the other hangs in there barely, if obstinately. Stroke, stay away from my door—at least for now.

  All in all, it’s been a good run. Going on eighty-nine, I was born the year the Titanic went down. Who would want to live to be ninety? Churchill is reputed to have replied: “Everyone who is eighty-nine.” We are a greedy lot, aren’t we? We old ones secretly sing the words of a little-known bard, Ralph Hodgson:

  Time, you old gipsy man,

  Will you not stay,

  Put up your caravan

  Just for one day?

  These days I think constantly of my father and brothers. They died in what should have been their prime. I, the favored, sickly little child they loved (as did my mother in her own wild way), have had so much the better of it. Though I grieved when each of my brothers died, my father’s death, the first in our family, brought upon me a heartache that was too much to bear.

  At the rooming house my mother ran, my father was the invalid, bedridden much of the time. I shared that bed with him all of my preadolescent years. In New York, before he was stricken, my father had been a fine tailor. My mother, always nimble with her fingers and more so with her mind, was a magnificent seamstress. I still see her on her knee, pins in her mouth, fitting a neighbor woman into a new gown. I still see my father coming home from the sanitarium, wan, fatigued, gallant, insisting on going back to work. It was not in the cards.

  In 1920, we headed out for the territories. Chicago. A fairly well-off uncle funded us into leasing a rooming house on the city’s near West Side. It was in the heart of Chicago’s huge hospital complex. Among our guests were student nurses, interns, a barber, and a hooker. She was a kid from Terre Haute. She was prohibited from having gentlemen callers. No tricks on these premises.

  My mother was a cross between a harried Ruth Gordon and Eliza Gant, the mother in Look Homeward, Angel. I was bowled over reading it. Thomas Wolfe’s mother, Eliza, was a dead ringer for mine, Annie. Eliza’s boardinghouse in Asheville was Annie’s rooming house in Chicago. They were both sparrowy, tough, and prevailing: living life at its flood tide. Too excessively, perhaps.

  We had a crystal radio set, my father and I. It was at our bedside. Fooling around with that cat’s-whisker wire scratched against the lump of silvery mineral, we caught Wendell Hall, the Red-Headed Music Maker, on KYW, singing “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More.” He played the ukulele.

  We heard Hal Totten, on WGN, coming at us from Dayton, Tennessee; we caught fragments of the Monkey Trial. I swear we heard the voices of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Day after day after day, we followed the ordeal of Floyd Collins, the unlucky guide who was freakily trapped in Kentucky’s Mammoth Caves.* Sharing the earphones, my father one and I the other, we were radio-hip to all that was going on. In 1925, the rooming house was sold. After a brief family breakup, my father refused to play the invalid any further, ailing heart or no. He leased a men’s hotel on the near North Side, the Wells-Grand. For five years, even into the Crash of ’29, he gallantly made a go of it. With considerations from our McKinley-Republican landlord, Henry L. Flentye, a fair man who admired my father’s stick-to-it-iveness, we were making it toughly. Suddenly, in 1931, my father died.

  It was I who found him in bed, his spectacles askew. It was the day we had planned to visit Mr. Flentye’s three-step-down bare office on North LaSalle. “H.F.” was feelingly fond of my old man. He was to offer more concessions. The new contract had already been written in Palmer penmanship longhand and was only waiting to be signed.

  I was remarkably calm until, seated on the Grand Avenue streetcar the next day, heading now
here in particular, I surprised myself by breaking into uncontrollable sobs. Embarrassed, seeking to stifle them, blubbering despite myself, I hurried toward the rear of the car, ready to hop off anywhere, just to escape my show of grief.

  It was not until sixty-eight years later—after up-and-down experiences as actor, disc jockey, radio commentator, book writer—that I was to experience a grief far deeper, though my manifestation of it was more muted.

  Those memories of streetcar grief came back to me when Antoinette Korotko-Hatch, a woman I was interviewing for this book, described an incident on a bus in which she came to the aid of a man having a heart attack. “People on the bus,” she said, “were mumbling about being late to work. I told the driver, ‘Get these people off the bus, tell them to take another one.’” The man, she told me, though in pain, “didn’t want to be trouble.” He was embarrassed that he was “holding up the whole bus.”

  That man’s embarrassment touched off the memory of that nineteen-year-old boy so uncomfortable at daring to grieve out loud for his father. Everything about this book became, unexpectedly for me, a journey into long-suppressed memories and all sorts of ambivalences in feeling of which I wasn’t aware.

  In her memoir of her mother’s death, Myra MacPherson refers to “disenfranchised grief.” During an interview, she said, “I fell in this category. It means you’re not supposed to feel it, certainly not supposed to show it. I was in my late fifties when my mother died. She was eighty-one. People came up with the usual platitudes. ‘After all, she lived a good life,’ ‘You shouldn’t feel so full of grief.’