by Studs Terkel
I always said I’d like to come back as myself but with a great voice like Johnny Mathis or Tony Bennett. Well, this one time, I got off the subway train at Seventy-ninth by mistake, and there’s a black man about fifty, in rags, with a bag to put money in, singing “My Funny Valentine.” He sounded like Sammy Davis, Jr., a beautiful voice—unbelievable. I’m saying, Holy Jesus—I just wanted to come back as myself with a great voice and you can end up on the goddamn IRT, penniless.
Right now, I’m OK. My hearing’s going, I got a ringing. My eyesight’s going. The thing I still got left is my taste buds—I still love food.
These days I get out of a car like my father used to get out: grab the roof and pull yourself out. I got a bad back. My father passed the baton on to me, and I’m passing it on to my kids.
I’m not going to worry about any hereafter. A few months ago, my sister got a call at one in the morning. The police told her that they found her husband dead in bed. They were divorced, but they still loved each other and called each other up every day on the phone. I drove her in about two in the morning. My sister told me she had a dream a couple of days before that there was a hand coming out to her. I went into the bedroom where her husband was laying and he had his arm outstretched. My sister is strong, they got two sons. He was a young man, fifty-five. Like I said, it’s a spaceship and we gotta keep going on.
So, here I am, a retired firefighter who almost died from drowning in the ocean. It was 1994, I was down in Bermuda, walking along this beach, hardly anyone in the water. It was a beautiful day. I went in. I’m not a good swimmer. Before I knew it, I was dragged out in the tide. It was up to my chest. The lifeguard was on a hill, couldn’t hear me scream. I figured this was it, I’m going to die in Bermuda. Everything went through my head, the kids, memories—it’s all over. The water was way past my chest and dragging me out. So I took a deep breath and dived toward the beach. My legs were kicking, hands moving, hoping when I came down I wasn’t stepping on water, and when I got to the beach, I was like . . . [gasps] . . . heavy breathing. Barely made it. That was 1994. I’m sixty years old and I have a second chance. Yeah, I think about death more and more, but I can’t do nothing about it. It’s gonna come. Suppose somebody said, “You can be alive forever, but you gotta drive through the Holland Tunnel for the rest of your life”? What would you do? Would you want to live forever driving through the Holland Tunnel?
*I first met him twenty-seven years ago. He appeared in Working, along with his brother Bob, a police officer, and his father, Harold.
*As a longshoreman, Harold Gates, a union man, was one of the independents who fought the thugs on the New York waterfront. He was the hero of a novel by the poet Thomas McGrath.
Bob Gates
Tom’s brother. He is sixty-one. A New York City police officer, retired for thirteen years, he was a member of the Emergency Service and then joined the Police Crime Unit, the homicide squad.
Emergency Service is like a rescue squad. You respond to any call, any incident: a man under a train, trapped in an auto, bridge jumpers, floaters, psychos, guys that murdered people and then barricaded themselves in. We go and get these people out. It was sometimes a little too exciting. On a couple of incidents I felt I wasn’t going to come home.
EVER HEAR OF the Statue of Liberty job? We had a guy climb to the top of the statue, break through the center port window of the head, and stand on the top of the crown. For over an hour. He’s there for a cause, and he’s jeopardizing our lives by doing so. He was threatening to jump from the crown to the head.
After speaking to him for a while, my partner and I saw an opportunity and pinned him down, handcuffed him, and held on. We were tied in through a rope, but the tie was below us. If he had thrown either of us off, just the stress from the rope would have killed us.
Did I mention the World Trade Center job? That’s a hundred and ten stories high. We had a guy, he defeated the tower security system. There was a rabbi there, with a priest on the way. The guy had climbed over the top of the World Trade Center and dropped approximately a foot onto a window washer’s ledge, which was about four inches wide. My partner and I were looking down from above, trying to talk him into coming in. His problem is he was born a Jew and is now a Christian. He was mad at the Jews because, he claimed, they were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. I said to him, “Well, suppose they’d only sentenced him to seven and a half to fifteen years? We wouldn’t be Catholics today.” He said to the rabbi, “I’d like that officer to come down and talk with me.” They rappelled me over. I kept on talking to him. As I handed him a cigarette, I grabbed him in a bear hug and we both swung over, up on top of the World Trade Center. Besides being dangerous, it was such a beautiful sight . . . At a hundred and ten stories up, the East River is a half-inch wide. Talking to him, I just wanted to concentrate on him not grabbing me. I wasn’t sure if he had a knife. At that point, it was life-threatening. I thought briefly about dying, but I had partners there to back me up—and it happened so fast.
You don’t have time to have fear because you have to prepare psychologically, get focused on what you’re gonna do—you got a job to do. With the sirens and the lights around, you’re thinking about equipment, about who’s gonna get the rope, who’s gonna wear the Morrissey Belt, that looks like a safety pin . . . You’re so hyped up, keyed up, you can feel and hear your own heart beating.
If it’s a barricaded psycho, and he’s got a gun and he’s threatening to go out and kill somebody, you’re focused on that person, on not killing him. They don’t like the word “kill” anymore—you’re gonna stop ’em. But you’re there to try and save his life. If not, you have to take other measures.
You always look at them as another human being. You try to get into a conversation and tell him what he’s giving up, find out if he has a family. Sometimes it’s not so good if he has a family, ’cause they’re the ones he could be mad at. When they show up, that’s when he may jump, or shoot himself.
Then there’s the floater that drowns and eventually comes up. We pulled this kid out of the pond. You look at him with the hook in his eye. A woman asked me, “What color was he?” I said, “Lady, he’s ten years old—what difference does it make?” She said, “You pulled him out, you should know.” I just walked away from her. It never entered my mind whether he was white or black. He was a life that had to be saved, but it was too late. And people that hang themselves . . .if the body’s there for a certain period of time, it decomposes. Sometimes we call that “the smell of death.” You come into an apartment, the body’s been there for a couple of weeks, and the acids are floating through the air. The body swells up and the gases inside penetrate the air and stick in your nostrils while you’re cutting the person down. Maybe people should ride with emergency service, get into the shoes of a cop and see what it’s like, see what they go through. The average life span of a cop today is fifty-nine years old—twelve years short of an average person.
Death . . . The most vivid case in my mind is a space case I had. A guy was caught by the train and rolled between the platform and the train. When we got there, the transit police were in conversation with him. He had a family, several children. He was caught in a four-inch space. The reason he was still alive is because everything was still intact above, keeping his heart pumping blood into his system. So you could converse with him while he was sitting there. There wasn’t much else you could do. The medical people said the minute that we start to jack this train away from the platform, he would pass away. You could almost predict his death, but meanwhile you’re talking to him.
I thought about the family as we jacked the car away from the platform with what we call a journal jack. You fit it between the supports of the train, the subway car, and the platform. As you start jacking, it pushes the train away from the platform, giving you another six inches to take the body out. The body is rolled like a bowling pin. He just went off to sleep, he passed away right there. Was he wondering, “What are they gonna do to get me out
? What’s the story here?” I was talking to him: “We’re doing the best we can.” “I don’t feel my legs . . .” “We’re handling that now—we got people under the train . . . Where do you work?”—just questions to take his mind off what was happening.
We get to go in where your heart is pumping, your adrenaline is running and you’ve got your hand just off the hair trigger. You’re in there because this is your job, and if you have to kill you will—but you don’t want to. You have fear of accidentally pulling the trigger. You think about these fears afterwards. If you can save a life, you’ll save that life. Thinking about the death end of it and your safety end of it usually comes after.
Since the time I first met you, I found spiritual solace and guidance. I stop off in church once in a while now. I believe in the hereafter. Yeah. But I have questions, too. Why do young people have to die? Why do people have to threaten to kill themselves?
One of the jobs I had was a private house where a man placed a twelve-gauge shotgun under his chin and blew his head off. Half of it went onto the ceiling and half onto the walls. We had to take the photographs and notes. I noticed the serenity of a death scene, how quiet. I was writing notes on this body, sitting at the kitchen table, when part of the skull and face drops onto the table and onto my shoulders. All I said to myself was that it was raining death, raining death in that kitchen. Sometimes you’re a little annoyed because if somebody is going to kill themselves, why do they want to make such a mess? If they’re gonna do it, if they made up their minds . . . [Suddenly] Police officers are one of the highest rates of suicides in the country—because of the strain, the stress, the problems. I knew a guy that committed suicide, a cop. I went to the scene. He was on the top of the stairwell. He had a picture of his wife and kids leaning against the wall, and he shot himself in the head.
I never had that thought, thank God. But if I ever get to that point where they put the tubes in me, and the IVs, and I’m gonna vegetate, I want to have mind enough to tell them, “Pull the plug.” If I’m put in an old-age home and I still got my faculties, I want my kids to bring me up some chocolate chip cookies, wipe my mouth, and wheel me out of the sun.
Part I
Doctors
Dr. Joseph Messer
Chief of cardiology at Rush–St. Luke’s–Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago. Former chairman of the Board of Governors of the American College of Cardiologists.
I WAS BORN in 1931. Watertown, South Dakota, is thirty miles west of the Minnesota border. I lived there until I left to go to college in 1949.
Dad was an undertaker. It had been the family profession for five generations: all the way back to cabinetmakers in Maine. They were the ministers, the circuit riders who marked the trees for molasses. This was the 1600s . . . Their interest in wood led them to become cabinetmakers.
In small towns, the furniture business and the undertaking business were the same people. My father’s father, going back several generations, had been in this business. My dad left it, being more interested in banking and finance. It was while traveling through Watertown that he ran into the town banker, who offered him a job. He married the banker’s daughter. An interesting coincidence: my mother’s side of the family were in the funeral business. My father gave up his banking interests and ended up in the funeral part of it. So I was raised as an undertaker’s son.
We used to play in the chapel where the services were held, run up and down the aisles. I loved to play the piano. When I was about ten, eleven, my dad got a Hammond organ for the funeral chapel—I loved to play that. I was always admonished that I had to play somber music. A few times I would accompany my father—he had a beautiful voice—when he sang the old hymns at funerals.
By the time I was ten, I was working there after school, taking care of the hearses, the limousines. I attended a lot of funerals and, in time, I drove the coaches and the ambulances. In those smaller towns, the funeral directors ran the ambulances because the hearses were convertible. This was before the days of paramedics.
I grew up with grief, though I didn’t experience it because I wasn’t part of the grieving families. Having people die was a part of the life that I lived. I remember the enormous respect my father had for the deceased—he insisted that anyone in the funeral home share that respect. That was one of the important influences in my life. I remember going with my father to farmhouses where people had died. I would help with what we called “removals.” He was on one end of the stretcher and I would be at the other end. I would watch my father interact with the relatives of the deceased, who were in grief. He treated people of all economic and social classes the same. I’m sure that watching him with people under stress, more than any other lesson, helped me become a good doctor—I hope . . .
I don’t believe that I really felt grief until the boy who lived across the street was killed in World War II. I was about eleven, twelve. He was a wonderful young man. When we learned that he had been killed, it really struck home. It’s my first memory of true grieving.
My father’s real goal in life was to be a physician. He actually started to go to medical school, but had to drop out because his father contracted tuberculosis—not an uncommon disease in those days. That’s what led him into business, supporting the family. He clearly had great respect for physicians.
I think he has lived out that desire vicariously to some extent because my brother and I became physicians; he’s four years older. We were learning the bones of the body when we were six. I knew every bone in the body when I was seven or eight. He had all sorts of medical textbooks. He would teach me about blood vessels and veins and arteries. I saw him embalm many times. Preservative chemicals infused in order to replace the blood lost so that the remains could be preserved.
My brother and I were really programmed to be doctors. It turns out that my daughter, my dad’s granddaughter, is a physician. [Laughs softly] I tried not to unduly influence her—I didn’t program her.
My father was clearly trying to influence our career choices. I arrived at college with blinders on. There was only one thing I was going to do and that was to be a doctor. I probably missed out on some other things I might have been interested in . . .
Our major medical influence, our citadel, was the Mayo Clinic. That’s where everyone from South Dakota went when they were seriously ill. I made innumerable ambulance trips for my dad from Watertown to Mayo. Lots of long-distance driving, about 375 miles. My dad was very interested in handicapped children. He had the dream that my brother, now deceased, and I would have the Messer Clinic, modeled after Mayo.
My brother was in the army toward the very end of World War II. He had heard of a place on the East Coast called Harvard—it was just a name to us in Watertown. We were going to go to the University of Minnesota, of course. But my brother decided on Harvard, much to my father’s dismay. My mother said, “If he wants to go there, let him.” I went to Harvard College, too. I stayed there for medical school, for my residency, and for my fellowship in cardiology.
After that, I worked at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. This was in the days of the astronauts—doing studies to get them up into space. Sputnik had gone up, and we were in a race with the Russians. I worked on human centrifuge—gravity and G-force. We would spin people around. That’s how you simulated the tremendous G-forces of a rocket. It was a wonderful experience.
I went back to the Boston City Hospital, one of my favorite institutions in cardiology. Then I came here to Chicago, to be chief of cardiology at Rush.*
During the first eighteen years or so of my life, I looked at death as an objective event that occurs—I didn’t get very emotionally involved. Now, at this end of my life, the other end of my life, I react very personally to the deaths of my patients . . . I sometimes become emotionally involved. I always seek out the families and talk with them and console them and give them my condolences. I’m very much helped by the memory of my father dealing with families in the funeral business. I don’t deal with my pat
ients’ families as though I were an undertaker, but that ability to be empathetic, to share their feelings—I think it’s because I watched my father do it.
As I watch my own colleagues respond to death in their patients, I see quite a variety of responses. A certain ability to separate yourself emotionally from the environment that surrounds a sick and dying patient is important in order to maintain objectivity, to make intelligent decisions about the patient’s care. I think you have to be able to separate yourself in that sense from your patients in order to be a good doctor. In some of us that ability is taken to an extreme. If you become caught up . . . that’s why we don’t take care of our own families, the emotional problem of dealing with illness in your own loved ones. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism so that we don’t get embroiled. Sometimes it’s absolutely heart-wrenching to see what happens to sick people. If you allow yourself to be subject to that kind of emotional trauma over and over and over again, it becomes a very damaging thing. There has to be a certain amount of insulation—but I think there can still be compassion.
A lot of it is experience. I was blessed in having the experience of watching a true master dealing with grief, my father, and maintaining that necessary separation—he had to do his business, he had to take care of the needs of that family. Dealing with death is a third-rail issue in the United States. We don’t talk about death and dying as a societal problem, but it’s going to become more and more of one . . .
It’s a very delicate issue for many people—it probably conjures up all kinds of fear and anxiety in terms of their own mortality. But we need to do a better job of talking about it, thinking about it, preparing for it. As a result of that, I think the physician–patient relationship will be broadened.
Often when patients die, we know that it’s inevitable. We know the condition they have is incurable, and there’s no self-doubt. It’s always “could we have done better in the process of dying, in caring for the patient?” But, in some cases, you always wonder: there was a fork in the road in our decisions about a patient—surgery, no surgery. Surgery, we know there are certain risks but greater benefits. No surgery, lesser risks but lesser benefits. “Should we have turned the other way?” Now, knowing the outcome . . . The retrospectascope—it’s a wonderful tool to learn with, but it’s a vicious mean tool to punish with when you look back and say, “We should have gone this way or that way.” Of course we use it all the time in medicine and as well we should. You look back at how can we do it better next time—that’s the whole basis of the postmortem examination.
