Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  When it’s time for you to go, when you’re near there, they say it’s usually someone from the other world who you know who will come and get you. And not that I wouldn’t mind seeing my sister, who’s been dead for twenty years or so—in that automobile accident. Or my father. But I see now that it’ll probably be someone like John Husar. And in your mind, Studs, you would be at a radio station, doing a radio show of fifty years ago. And you would see someone that you haven’t seen in a long time. And they’d say, “Studs, where have you been? I’ve been looking for you. We’ve got another show to do on the other side of the river.” I see myself, I’d be in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, either on the South Side, on Western Avenue, or downtown on Dearborn. And this guy will come up all dressed in white, and it’ll be John Husar. And he’ll have the torch—he ran with the torch in the Olympics one time—and he’ll say, “Rick, I’ve been looking all over for you. It’s time for you to run with the torch. We’ve got somewhere to go!” Or I’ll be sailing my boat and out of the corner of my eye I’ll see this rowboat will be trying to catch me. I’ll try to get the boat to go faster because rowboats aren’t supposed to catch my sailboat. And I’ll see it’s John. John will say, “Rick, I’ve been looking for you. Come on, get in the boat. We gotta go rowing.”

  POSTSCRIPT

  When John Husar died, it’s not that I was mad at God. I was just like: How could this be? How could this be? Because here was a person, although I’m sure he looked at death, he wasn’t ready to die. He didn’t write his final column. The day he died, the bass came into Chicago, the fish—that’s something he worked at. So I’m thinking to myself, he has to live so he can cover the Bass Masters Tournament—it was where they came from all over the country to fish for bass in Lake Michigan, around Chicago. He always had a Sunday and Thursday column and I went out to buy the newspaper, like I had expected to see his column there. Can’t be. Couldn’t be. Can’t be. ’Cause I tried to give this person life . . . If you put a new set of tires on your car, you figure you get another fifty thousand miles out of it. You put your money in the tollbooth, you figure you can at least drive to the end of the road. But see, that’s the odd thing. Life is so precious. Life is not the given. Death is the given. Death is the certainty. Life is this gift. Life is kind of . . . we make it as we go along. For every birth there is a death. The real thing in life is the journey. Now that’s an odd thing in America where you think the goal is how much money we make, or the car we drive, or the position we have. We’re getting away from what life is actually about. A lot of times I see the person selling Streetwise, the magazine put out by the homeless, and I talk to them. You have to give people dignity. The dignity you give is the dignity you see in yourself and you carry yourself.

  I usually pray in the morning—usually a Hail Mary, like that. But there’s this one website I go to, the website for Henri Nouwen. He was a Dutch priest, a theologian. He taught at Notre Dame University, Harvard, and Yale. At the last part of his life he was with people with Down’s syndrome. I met him once, and his books are just phenomenal for me. You look at the computer and there’s a thought of the day, a prayer of the day. He would write whatever thought was in his head for that day. A lot of times, even in this past struggle that I’ve had in the last month, they really spoke to me. I’ll never forget the day that John Husar died, Henri Nouwen’s thought of the day was about the Good Samaritan. The person that crosses the road to try to help the other individual. They say that my kind of transplant was a Good Samaritan transplant because it wasn’t within the family and it wasn’t a close friend. So it spoke very profoundly to me for that day.

  *His mother says she finds it more comfortable now than she did before the neighborhood changed from white to black. “In the old days, when Johnny would amiably pat a woman’s bottom, she’d angrily mutter, ‘Why don’t you have him put away?’ Today, when he touches a black woman, she turns around, smiles at him, and says, ‘How ya’ doin’, honey?’ ”

  Part II

  Seeing Things

  Randy Buescher

  A former carpenter, he is an associate at a Chicago architectural firm. He appears at the door, somewhat gaunt, bearing a stuffed briefcase. On occasion, I’m told, he uses a cane. Not this time.

  I have a younger sister, two years younger. We were raised Presbyterian, which always seemed so bland that I could never figure out what it was. We quit going to church when we were kids when the minister wouldn’t stop talking about donating more money to the church.

  I HAD VERY, very severe cancer, I was diagnosed at the age of about thirty, advanced Hodgkin’s disease. I was working as a carpenter, I was raising a kid by myself, and I was running a crew of about five guys. So I wasn’t paying attention to my body real well. I had these night sweats and I had these fevers. But my big concern was really to raise my daughter. I’d been divorced for a year, and I’d taken that pretty hard. My wife had run off with somebody else. In the long run, that was actually a very good thing. I somewhat attribute the cancer to the fact that I was so depressed and I was having such a hard time trying to raise this kid by myself.

  I had won the custody battle. It was unusual to be a man raising—especially—a daughter in that day and age. This would be about fifteen years ago. My daughter Amelia’s eighteen. I’m now forty-five. She was three at the time. I finally said, “I have to go see a doctor.” This poor man came out and he was white. He said: “I need you to go get an X ray. Your blood counts don’t look very good—you need a chest X ray.” So I went in and had a chest X ray and he saw it. He said, “You’ve got to go get tests done right away.” I said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “You’ve got cancer, and not only that, it seems like it’s fairly full-blown.” My biggest concern was to find out what was going on. I didn’t really worry about the fact that I was dying as much as I wanted to know what you could do at that point—that was really the concern.

  When the doctor told me the news, there was a certain amount of relief because it made sense why I was having the night sweats. So what do I do about it? My take on these things has always been: Let’s get some information, we’ll figure out what to do. Once I got diagnosed, other people’s reactions were really interesting.

  I had this group that I used to see at the Gare St. Lazare—that was sort of our bar hangout. A group of probably thirty people that were real close. It was a drinking club, let’s face it. And the owner was one of my close friends, but he was the most morose guy. He would say things like [in lamentory fashion], “I know how you’re feeling . . . Oh, oh . . . It’s OK, Randy.” I’d say, “No, actually I feel OK this week.” “No, no, no, no . . . No, I really know.” By the same token, my closest friend, who’s this theater director, we sort of got through it more by joking.

  At one point I went through a biopsy, they took out a big lymph node in my neck. Then they sent it to all these doctors across the country. I was an anomaly because it happened fast. They weren’t able to quite pinpoint what kind of stuff I had and it went to all these different people. And the first doctor I went to see gave me odds on survival. He said, “Well, you have maybe a sixty–forty chance—whatever it was, it was less than fifty–fifty. I said, “I can’t believe that somebody would give me odds. What a depressing methodology!”

  Once I had gotten diagnosed, I had a lot of doctors. This one doctor, this oncologist, was a real beaut. He looked at my charts and said, “You’ve got it bad. It’s very advanced. There’s only four stages and you’re already in stage three. It’s throughout your whole body, down to your abdomen. It’s spreading rapidly, your spleen is enlarged.” I remember because I didn’t have anybody else to help me along, I asked, “What do you think my odds are?” And he said, “They’re not very good. You might have a fifty–fifty chance or less to make it.” Something clicked. I said to myself, “I need to talk to somebody else.” I didn’t tell him—I just left. I thought: Do I want somebody taking care of me who doesn’t think I’m going to make it? I was of the belief
, if you don’t have a real positive attitude, there’s not a chance in Hell you’re going to get through this thing. So I asked around. I had some friend who was a nurse and she said, “If I had cancer, I would go to this doctor.” So I called this guy up and he said, “Look, I’m a surgeon and you don’t need surgery—you’ve already had the one lymph node removed. What you need is treatment. I’d go see this guy at Evanston Hospital. Because if I were sick”— this is the doctor saying it—“the only guy that I would let see me is this guy.”

  I went across the street right then and met this guy. He looked at my charts and he said, “Ah, we gotta start doing treatment now . . .” I said, “What are my chances?” He said, “I wouldn’t give you chances—I wouldn’t give you odds. We have to start treatment and we’ll see results and we’ll see what happens. But I’m not going to give you odds.” He says, “I’ve cured people who have had your condition and I haven’t cured people who have had your condition. Everybody is different. It depends on your personality, your strength, your fortitude.” And immediately I said, “OK, you’re the guy.” He said, “OK, you need to start tomorrow.” This was going to be massive and very heavy chemotherapy. I said, “I can’t imagine doing that. I have a little girl, and I don’t want her to see me this sick if she doesn’t have to. She goes to her mom’s house every other Friday for visitation. Could I wait till Friday.” He said, “Yeah, you could.” I said, “Well, actually, I’d like to get another opinion.” He said, “Look, we don’t have time for this.” He said, “If you don’t start treatment now, aggressively, you’re not going to spend Thanksgiving with your daughter.” I was at that point in Stage Three B, and Stage Four? Most people don’t get turned around in Hodgkin’s Stage Four. He was determined for it not to get to that next stage. So I said, “OK, fine, I’ll start on Friday.”

  I didn’t have a wife at that point, somebody who could have been sort of standing by your side. I had a good group of friends, but it wasn’t really the same. So I actually had to do something that I hadn’t done in years: I had to go back to my parents. I had to call my mom and say, “I need some help. I’m going to be going through this treatment and I’m going to do it on the weekends, but you’re going to have to pick up the pieces with Amelia. I want my daughter to stay here. I don’t want her world to change.”

  I didn’t know what the results were going to be. I knew that my hair was probably going to fall out. I already knew that I was looking pretty bad and I thought, you know, why make it any worse? So the first thing I did was to go cut my hair. I said, “If my hair’s going to fall out, I’m going to take my hair out myself.” So I went to this really pretty woman who’d been cutting my hair and I’d been hitting on for a long time. I decided I would shave it to a crew cut. I had heard that if your hair was really short, it didn’t fall out. I just thought, if I can minimize the downsides to this whole dying part, maybe it’ll make it a little better. At that point, I knew I was dying. It wasn’t like when you’re a kid and they tell you you’re going to die someday. It’s not like even when you’re an adult and you’re worrying about getting older and your friends are dying. We all know we’re dying somehow. But in my case, I was dying quickly. Something was going to happen. I was really concerned about leaving this little girl. And I have to tell you, that was actually what kept me going. I really didn’t want Amelia to be left alone.

  So, I thought, I’ll do something—I’ll see if I can stop myself from dying right now. Buy a little bit of time . . . I also knew that people who survive cancer don’t always survive a whole lot longer. But in my mind really I was thinking that if I can get Amelia to some age where there was a stable environment . . . For one year we’d messed up her life. The worst thing you could do, the way I was raised, was to get divorced. I aggressively pursued the divorce when my wife stepped out and wasn’t interested in her daughter. I aggressively pursued putting an end to that so that Amelia’s life would be a little better. And now I’m dying . . .

  When I found out I had cancer and I let the world know, my ex-wife called me and she was real upset. I said, “There’s nothing I would like better than to have had somebody by my side right now. But what do you care? Move on.” I didn’t have time for that. I talked to my parents and I said, “I’m going to try to take chemotherapy on Fridays.” I was doing a hybrid chemotherapy. They were always experimenting because chemotherapy is really no different than bloodletting—it’s just a doctor’s wildest guess as to what might work. And if somebody else has something else that works, they try to blend those things together to see if that works better. The first cycle I go through is a Friday and then another Friday, then I’m two weeks off. And then the next time will be a Friday, skip a week. It can work on a four-week schedule. If we can have Amelia be with her mom during that period of time, maybe she won’t see the worst effects of the chemo. “You need to come down and take care of me,” I told my parents.

  The chemotherapy was as bad as you can imagine. I couldn’t take the antinausea drugs. I tried them, but they made me want to kill myself. Interestingly enough, I’m trying to save myself from dying and the antinausea drugs made me want to kill myself . . . Two percent or something of the people who take those on that day had these suicidal tendencies. I literally tried to jump out of the car on the Eden’s Expressway—I was trying to open the door up! The drugs made me so anxious . . . They made me feel like I had to get out of my body, I just wanted to jump out of my skin.

  So I had about one hour from the time I took my chemotherapy to get home before I started violent vomiting. I would vomit for about eight hours straight. This was on Friday afternoon. Saturday I would recover a little bit. I tried everything. People said pot is supposed to help, so somebody gave me some pot, but that didn’t help. My parents were around and I was stoned with my parents looking at me. That made me more paranoid. I tried everything I could do. By Mondays I was back to a somewhat normal existence.

  I tell you, the haircut is probably the best one I ever had because it was cut by this woman. I’d tried to date her, unsuccessfully. She liked me, and she was real pretty. She’d been cutting my hair for several months and I said, “I want you to take the buzzer, put it down to an eighth of an inch, and cut all my hair off.” I had fairly long hair at that point. I said, “I want to get a crew cut.” She said, “What’s going on?” I said, “Don’t worry about it, really. Just give me a crew cut, it’ll be OK.” She said, “No, something’s wrong, Randy, I can tell. What’s going on?” I said, “I’ve got cancer, my hair’s going to fall out when I go through chemotherapy. I don’t want to wake up with my pillow full of hair. Just cut the hair off. I thought it would be a good ritual if I came to you, even though I’m paying fifteen dollars for a haircut. I can get this from the barber for three bucks, but I thought it would be nice to have you cut my hair off.” So she took the buzzer and she started running it across my head. This was a really fancy salon down in Old Town. She’s running this thing through, and there’s wisps of hair coming back up again because it’s not taking it all off. I’ve got all these chunks of hair standing out. Another hairdresser walks over and he goes, “Be careful, he looks like a chemotherapy patient!” She got so embarrassed she dropped the buzzer on the floor, and then it was doing this snake dance across the floor. I just broke up into hysterical laughter. She broke into laughter. The poor guy said, “What? What?!” Toni looked at him and she said laughingly, “He has cancer.” [Laughs] And the guy, “Oh, I’m sorry sir, I’m very sorry, I’m very sorry . . .” At that point, I actually realized that laughing about it was a much better approach than worrying about it.

  That theme carried through about a week later when my friend Bob and I . . . My spleen was incredibly enlarged, and they were hoping that the chemotherapy would make my spleen go down in size, because otherwise they would have to do a splenectomy. And it hurt. I was in the apartment one day with Bob, and he was, “How ya doing?” I wasn’t doing that well, and he was trying to help with Amelia too. He’d come
and help cook, goof around. I was in the apartment and we were looking at each other and I said, “God, my spleen is killing me.” And then we both realized what I’d said and broke into hysterical laughter because, in fact, my spleen was killing me. We were literally on the floor, one of those laughters that you can’t stop laughing. That’s the poignant part. I told you about this friend of mine in the bar who would get so depressed. It wasn’t about feeling bad for yourself. It was actually better feeling good about yourself, and that’s what I’m convinced sort of pushed me through the whole thing—laughter.

  The humor and laughter got me through it more than anything else. That happened time and time again. I went to a party at the Gare toward the end of my chemotherapy run—it had been going on for like eight or nine months. It was going to be a Halloween party. I didn’t feel like dressing up too much, but our friend Martha Redhed walked in and she was wearing a bald wig. My hair had never really fallen out because I’d cut it. So Bob said to me jokingly, “You know, we never got to see you bald. What a bummer. We should have actually seen bald Randy!” So I asked Martha if I could borrow the skinhead and I put the thing on. By that time my hair was maybe an inch long. I wasn’t real well, but I was seasoned. There’s a certain amount of time you go through chemotherapy, like anything else, you start to get used to it. Believe it or not, you actually get used to sort of the dying, the pricking, the X rays, the CAT scans. If you tried to tell anybody else, they would never believe it. To this day, if I go into a cancer treatment center, I can taste and I can smell the chemo drugs which nobody else can smell when they walk in. They’re in the air, but you have to have had them in your veins. So I put this bald wig on and we started laughing because it was hilarious! I wasn’t feeling well anyway, and with the wig on I probably cut off all the oxygen to my brain. I got really sick to my stomach and I went to the back room and lay down on the floor—because I felt really bad. My friend, the restaurant owner, came back and saw me laying on the floor and of course he thought maybe I was dead. He got right in my face and he said, “Are you OK?!” I said, “Actually, I’m not OK, I don’t really feel that good.” And he goes, “OK, be calm, it’s OK, really . . .” He got real nervous and he was really in my face—it was uncomfortable. I remember Bob came back and made some stupid joke which Francis thought was just awful, but again, we were laughing. Time and time again, that thing sort of changed the way I felt about trying to stay alive.