Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  Actually, my responsibility a lot of the time when I was sick was to make other people feel better because they felt so bad for me. I realized that I was better at making them feel better than they were at making me feel better. There are those that just feel so bad because they’re so frightened about dying themselves. The laughter was life-giving. People have told me, “God, Randy, I don’t know how you got through all that.” I’m convinced that a lot of it was that my bent was really toward the positive and all the funny things that were said—because I was a wreck, an absolute wreck. I mean, I cried for weeks and months. I couldn’t figure out how this could possibly happen to me. I’m convinced, if there’s anything in your body that’s not quite right, and something bad happens and you dwell on it, it can make you sick. The bad marriage . . . We were young, stupid, but we had a wonderful kid. The stress played a role. Laughter was the antidote.

  There’s the other things too: my out-of-body experience during this whole thing . . . I don’t know what to believe. Anytime I tell anybody I get pretty emotional about it. Through all the chemotherapy, I lost most of the veins in my body. The veins got burned up and scarred. Now they do these little ports in the heart area, but in that day they just would give it to you intravenously. The drugs were so bad they would burn your veins and they couldn’t use the veins again. It got more and more painful as I was taking the drug. One of the things they gave me was Prednisone, a steroid which everybody’s on. In that day, they gave it to you in super-high dosages. When you came off of it you had like a heroin withdrawal. Nobody told me about that . . . The other consequence, because it was a steroid, you tended to bulk up on foods even though you weren’t hungry. So I was eating like boxes of mashed potatoes.

  I don’t remember exactly what happened that day, but I called my dad and said, “I’m sick. Something else is wrong and I gotta go to the hospital.” At any cost I would avoid going to the hospital. My goal was never to stay overnight in a hospital—I thought that if I could stay out of the hospital, I could probably stay well. But at that point, I don’t remember if it was that I was constipated or what, but I went to the hospital and the doctor said, “You don’t look well. I can’t get ahold of your oncologist right now—he’s not on call. They want to admit you to the hospital at once. You’re dehydrated.” I said, “I don’t want to have an IV because I just can’t have you poking my veins. How much liquid do you need in me?” The guy said, “I need gallons.” I said, “Fine—I’ll drink it. I’ll be willing to drink as many gallons of water as you want not to have to have an IV.” And the guy said, “No, you can’t drink enough.” I said, “Let me try. Tell me how fast you need.” He said, “You need to put down two gallons in the next hour.” I said, “I can do that.” He brought the water in and I started drinking. I started drinking cup and cup after cup after cup of water . . . I’m in the emergency ward, and I’m behind one of those curtains. I’m not in the cancer-care ward, but I know where I’m going the next day if I stay there, and I know they’re going to throw an IV in me. They’re going to try to convince me to have chemotherapy out of synch. I don’t want to stay the night. And I’m a fairly convincing guy—that’s been one of my strengths, I can talk my way out of just about anything. So I convinced this doctor I could drink the water, which I did. I convinced him to let me go home and the reason he needed to let me go home is that my daughter was now at my mom’s house, and so that she wouldn’t wake up frightened that something had happened to her dad the next morning, I needed to go home to my parents’ house. I’d always spent every night in my own house when I was having chemotherapy. I said, “If you let me go to my parents’ house, my mom and dad can watch me, and if there’s any problem, my dad will certainly bring me back to the hospital.” I was apparently convincing enough, because the doctor said, “Against my better judgment, I’m going to send you home.” In hindsight, he probably should have kept me there, but I was adamant because I didn’t want Amelia to wake up and not find me there. Amelia knew what was going on—she was only three years old, but she knew her daddy was dying of cancer. She could see it. If you see the pictures of me from then, I look like I was an Auschwitz guy: I’m just completely sunken in, my jaws, my weight, I’d dropped down about twenty pounds. I felt she’d been through enough.

  We got back and Amelia was already asleep in what had been my sister’s room when I was a kid. I got in bed and was laying there and I thought: It’s a good thing to be home. And somewhere in the middle of that night, I woke up and I noticed I was looking at the bottoms of my feet. I appeared to be sitting up, but I was seeing the bottoms of my feet. And I thought: Well, this is very odd . . . I was on a lot of drugs, but I was able to pull back to where I was up at the ceiling level. My head raised up—but it really wasn’t my head, it was just my eyes, and I could see my whole body laying in the bed. And I said, “Oh, jeez, I think I’m dead. There’s my whole body laying there and I’m not in my body right now.” I had what appeared to be a vision of the room. I could see the two walls to the side of me, I could see the bookcase in front of me, I could see the foot of the bed, I could see myself on the bed. I couldn’t see my hands . . .

  I couldn’t do anything with the body that was down there on the ground. I thought: This is a bad dream. I said, “I gotta prove that it’s a dream, I gotta prove that this isn’t real.” I said, “What can I do? I can’t possibly know all the books in this bookcase—” I hadn’t lived at home in years. My whole body is laid out. I was outside my body. I thought I was dead. But I gotta prove it . . . The worst thing was, Amelia’s down the hallway and I’m thinking about Amelia. I said, “I’ve got to do something empirical that will prove this or not prove it to myself.” I thought: OK, I can’t possibly know all the titles of all the books in this library—I’ll start reading the titles. I went to the left-hand corner and dammit if I couldn’t read the first book. I read the second book title and the third and the fourth. I went all the way down the line, and I read every goddamn book title in the place.

  I’m trying to prove to myself this isn’t real and I got through the whole place and I said, “Shit. This is real . . .” Then I tried to get my body, this vision I had, to move around. I said, “I can’t move it.” I was like stuck right there in that spot looking at my dead body, looking at the books, and I can’t move my body. I can’t go down the hallway—I can’t float out. None of these things that you would hope, that there is some sort of a spirit that moves around. This one’s not moving. I said, “Jesus, I’m trapped in this stupid room and this is not where I want to be dying . . .”

  Then I realized that my daughter was always the first one up—Amelia was going to wake up first. [Fighting tears] She was going to walk down the hallway and she was going to come in, and she was going to find me dead in the bedroom . . . [Sighs] I said, “Goddamn it . . . Everything I’ve done to try to insulate this kid from me dying, and I’m going to die in my parents’ goddamn house and my kid’s going to come and see me.” [Crying] I said, “Fuck. I’ve done everything else I’m supposed to do right and now I come back here stupidly. I could have died in the goddamn hospital and she wouldn’t have seen me. And I would have had a chance to live, ’cause they could have done something.” I said, “Goddamn it. She’s going to see me. What am I going to do now?” I tried to yell, I tried to scream, and there was no sound . . . nothing . . . nothing. I tried to blurt out something and there was nothing. Then the weirdest thing happened. Instinctively, or whatever we do in our world, we sort of go back to our parents or something. I wanted to call my dad. So I said [plaintively], “Dad . . .” And I didn’t hear anything, but I could feel a little bit. I said, “Dad”—and goddamn if I didn’t hear a sound. I said, “Dad . . .” I got another one out. Then I heard footsteps coming down the hallway and I felt my dad touch me on my back, and all of a sudden, I was facedown in the bed, I wasn’t above. He said, “You’re cold—you’re really cold, Randy. Are you OK?” I said, “Yeah, I think I’m OK, Dad . . .” I didn’t want to frea
k him out. I got up and I went down and I saw Amelia in bed and I kissed her and I climbed in bed with my parents. I’m a thirty-year-old man climbing in bed with my parents, and I cuddled up with my dad. And I slept the rest of the night with my dad.

  I honestly believed for a moment I was not alive in that body and there was something that made me—and it was Amelia, it was the agony of a three-year-old girl who had already been through enough in the last year, who didn’t need to have her mother gone and didn’t need to have her dad die and didn’t need to be waking up and finding her dad dead in her grandparents’ house. That pulled me back.

  I’ve always tended to be a believer that there’s bigger issues. I was reading what people called alternative sorts of religious things in the sixties and seventies. I had other weird experiences. But this one was very poignant, and it seemed real. And I actually thought somehow after that point I might be able to beat the cancer completely. At that point, I thought: If I’ve died and I’ve come back . . .

  Amelia’s eighteen now, she’s going to college next fall. She remembers these years very vividly. I never insulated her from anything I did, but I don’t think she knows about this one particular night. She knew about my cancer—it’s very much a part of her life. And all the hip surgeries because of the damage the chemotherapy did to my bones. It was a turning point. In fact, the cancer was always getting better. I don’t know how much you know about chemo treatments and cycles and that sort of stuff, but I did eleven cycles of chemo—eleven months of chemotherapy. That’s a long time. And I did three months of radiation therapy after that. I went through a lot of pain. I still can’t get blood drawn. My veins are all scarred. But I will tell you something: there is a regenerative power, and a year later they said, “You’re virtually free of it.” I went through five years of coming back on a regular basis. I had no sperm count.

  I met Janet. I was reluctant to get married, because I thought I had so much baggage. I said, “Here’s a young girl who wants to marry a guy that’s not only got a young kid but he’s having hip operations as a result of the cancer. He’s got no sperm count so he can’t really give her children . . .” She’s the best thing that ever happened to me. We actually have three more kids. They say that almost never does a sperm count come back on people. Part of the chemotherapy is that it just wipes out everything, your testicles are one thing . . . and it never comes back. I’m convinced that I came back in a real big way. I went down in a real big way and I came back in a real big way.

  POSTSCRIPT

  As he was about to leave, I made a casual comment about the hereafter. “If there’s a hereafter, I hope to God I’m not stuck in a room somewhere reading my parents’ library books over and over again. That would be Hell. If there is a Hell, I think I’ve seen a little glimpse of it.”

  Chaz Ebert

  A lawyer. She is married to Roger Ebert, a film critic.

  I’m a black woman who’s a mother, I have two children—I’m a grandmother, too. A wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a lawyer. Dad was Baptist, but Mother was spiritualist. She went to the Spiritualist Church—that’s an actual religion. Mother believed in communication with people on the other side. My mother was a prophet, a seer, a psychic, and a minister. Dad worked for the packing house and was also a union organizer. I’m not really religious. When I was in college I called myself first an agnostic and then an atheist. But even when I was slightly atheist, I still said my prayers at night just in case—I wanted to hedge my bets. I don’t know what I believe. I live my life according to certain laws of physics. I believe that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Our soul, our bodies, everything, if it’s all matter and molecules and it can’t be destroyed, it goes somewhere. Some religious people think that’s Heaven or Hell. I think that we still exist, even when we die. Something of our soul or spirit or energy, matters of particles. I think we exist somewhere and I think we can be reformulated.

  THIS SOUNDS REALLY CRAZY, I know, but I’ve had lots of experiences. For instance, the grim reaper came to me one time—and I never believed in the grim reaper, I thought it was just some mythological thing. My first husband’s father was someone that I was very close to. He was dying. He was very sick . . . In the middle of the night, something woke me up. I opened the door of the bedroom, and there was this figure, about seven feet tall. It had the monk’s robe and the whole thing, like the grim reaper. I looked into the face but it was no face—it was just all dark. There were kind of lit orbs where the eyes should be. He communicated to me telepathically. He said, “Don’t be afraid, I didn’t come for you.” He said, “Go over to the bed.” I look in the bed where my husband was asleep, but it wasn’t my husband anymore. This coffin appeared, and my father-in-law was in it. This lasted for a few seconds, then it all disappeared. Then my husband was there again and I woke him up and I told him that the grim reaper was there and about his father. He said, “I think you were dreaming.” I said, “No, I wasn’t dreaming, I’m awake!” So we go to sleep, and the next morning we call and they say his father died. His father died at the same time that the grim reaper came to my house. So I think that there’s something more when we die. I don’t know.

  Too many people have had these near-death experiences. Some scientists say these are hallucinations. They say that when people have near-death experiences and they talk about seeing this bright white light, those are things that are already in our brains. That they can make you have a near-death experience while you’re just sitting in a chair in a lab if they stimulate certain parts of your brain. That may or may not be true—but I don’t think it’s a mass hallucination.

  See, I . . . wow—it’s really hard for me to say . . . I believe that there’s something. Let’s say energy—energy after death. I do believe in that. It takes various forms.

  Even as a kid, I was always interested in what happens to us when we die. I think most people are. I don’t shy away from it, because I just lost my mother in November. Within the last five years I lost my two oldest sisters, and watching them die . . . I was very close to my sisters. Both of them died around the age of fifty-nine. I sat with them, and they were very courageous. My oldest sister, Carrie, was not afraid when she was dying. And it’s not that she welcomed death—she just wasn’t afraid. She said there was something very beautiful waiting for her. It’s not just her faith that told her that there was something—she learned that in church. But she saw it during the time she was dying, so she wasn’t afraid. That took away my fear of death, watching my sister . . . My other sister, Martha, who was actually more religious, was afraid to die. She didn’t want to go to sleep because she said she might not wake up. That confused me, because I thought the more religious you are, you should welcome death—because that means you’re going to be with God. But no, she wanted to stay on the earth. It did confuse me.

  There were ten of us. Three dead, seven living now. I had four sisters and five brothers. I don’t recall my first awareness of death; I just always knew that there was something. I was fascinated with my mother’s stories about how when she was growing up in Georgia, when someone died they would have their bodies laid out in the parlor for a month—for a long time. She told me that everyone wore black, and you had the house darkened. The body would just be there and people could visit with it. It’s not like today when we’re afraid of corpses and we’re afraid of bodies and nobody wants to go to a funeral. It seemed like they were more comfortable with it. Back then, death was accepted as a part of life. Now we can prolong life—people live a lot longer. Then, not only was death more accepted as a part of life, but the generations living together were more the norm. I think that’s why death was accepted, because if you had all these generations living together, someone was going to die, and that was just a part of life. My mother died right around Thanksgiving. Because she was a member of the Spiritualist Church, and because she was a prophet and a seer, I fully expected her to come back. So I asked my sister if she had seen my mother yet
, and she said no. This was after she died. The rest of my family believed. We didn’t talk about it a lot when she was alive. When we were kids, we thought our mother was a witch because she had these metaphysical powers. And so we fully expect to see her come back. We do think if it’s possible to come back, Mother will come back in some form. We don’t know what form she’ll take.

  In December, 1999, I was out in California and I had this dream about my mother, about meeting her. In the dream I got up to leave and I realized—I looked at her, I said, “Oh my God, this isn’t a dream! I’m meeting you somewhere. This is, like, some way station and my spirit is meeting your spirit.” And she said, “Yes.” I said, “Mom, this isn’t a dream because you’re not really here, you’re dead.” She said, “Yes, I am, and I can only be with you just this one night, and then I don’t know when you’re going to be able to see me again.” After that, she didn’t communicate by mouth anymore—she started communicating telepathically.

  Even if I cease to exist forever, I realize that some of my energy will be reconstituted. Not that I will be reincarnated, but some form of energy will go somewhere. It will live on somewhere. I’m not scared. Not anymore, no—but I don’t want to be cremated. Roger would like to be cremated. I want to be buried. Cremation—that bothers me. I was in a fire, my dress was on fire when I was a little girl. I still have the scars. I’m very fascinated with fire as a result of that. But I don’t want to be in anything where I’m burning again, ever . . . That’s what I don’t like about cremation. I was already in a fire, I was already burning. I can still remember what my flesh smelled like when it was burning, when I was on fire. I was running down the stairs and my dad had to tear off my dress and roll me in a rug. I just don’t want to be cremated. I don’t want to go through that anymore.