Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  Sometimes when I go to sleep I say, “Well, I might not wake up.” And I say, “If I don’t wake up tomorrow, am I satisfied with my life right now? Do I think I did a good job? If there is a God—if I’m wrong and there really is someone who’s going to be waiting up there to judge me—do I think that I have more checks in the plus side of the book rather than in the negative side of the book?”

  I used to live in the John Hancock Building, and this happened in 1987, I believe . . . I was living by myself on the eighty-second floor. I was divorced, my children were away at college. Again, it happened at night—I was asleep. I had been sick, I was dehydrated and that caused me to lose my sight and my hearing for a very short period of time. They took me to a hospital in an ambulance. My sight came back, my hearing came back. I was in bed, this was a day or two later. In the middle of the night something woke me. There was a bright light in my room and there were twins. I call them the twin Virgin Marys. They were on my wall. One was the Black Madonna, as I’ve seen her in pictures, very similar to the one who was venerated in Latin America and Poland. The other was the traditional picture that you see of the Caucasian Madonna. In front of them were three infants. One was Caucasian, one was black, and the one in the middle was a mixture of all the races of the world. And they said, “This is the true one, and he hasn’t come yet”—kind of a Christ child. These Madonnas communicated with me telepathically—their mouths never moved. They said, “This is the true one, he hasn’t come yet, and we are entrusted to take care of him until such time as he is coming.” That made me think that if there is a Christ, he hasn’t been here yet . . .

  I think Roger deals with death much better than I do. He’s more pragmatic about it: he knows that people are born, they die. When they’re gone, they’re not coming back. He doesn’t expect to be reunited with them again—even though he was raised Catholic. That’s why he wants to be cremated. He doesn’t think there’s anything more. Cremate him and spread his ashes in all the places he loves: London and Venice and everywhere.

  Some Buddhists think that you can choose when to die. I fly a lot, so I might die in a plane crash. If I do, I hope that Roger is sitting next to me and we’re holding hands.

  My mother died in November, and she had a very beautiful funeral. When I looked at her in the casket . . . to me, that wasn’t my mother. Sometimes people will kiss a corpse. I can’t do that because that wasn’t my mother. Even though that was her body, embalmed and looking not like her at all—to me. I still feel my mom around me, so that’s why I think that there’s some energy, something that happens. When you die you’re not completely gone. But I do think some people disappear completely. Some people don’t leave a trail of dust or anything behind. I know this contradicts what I said earlier about energy not being destroyed. I think people who went timidly through life and really in their souls did not want to leave a mark . . . I think that people are born with different amounts of cosmic dust. Cosmic dust to me, it means a lot of things. It means our thoughts, our actions, what energy we had before. I think that you can expend your cosmic dust by doing good deeds. People can do bad deeds and still expend it. But they leave something, and they make an impression on other people. But one thing bothers me. I’m still grieving over the deaths of my mother and my sisters. If that energy or matter somehow goes on, why am I still so sad?

  Antoinette Korotko-Hatch

  She is the development director of the ninth-oldest Catholic church in Chicago. “I’m in charge of raising fifteen million dollars, so they can renovate this church. The buildings are quite old. The parishioners are mostly African-American. The school is a hundred percent African-American, with eighty-five percent of the children non-Catholic and below the poverty line.

  My father was a widower with four children when he married my mother. She had married before and was pregnant when her husband died. So, at their marriage, they had five children. I was born twelve years later—I’m the youngest.

  ALL MY SIBLINGS were half. I never thought of it that way until our parents were dying. It was amazing to see the change in family. All those years . . . nobody ever talked about “my mother,” “your mother,” “my father,” “your father.” It was always “our mother.” As my parents became ill and my father died, slowly I could see it was happening: “your father,” “my father,” “my mother,” “your mother.” By the time my mother was dying, the family was really splitting up. It had been very cozy. It was the death of our parents that split us up.

  One sister would start talking about her First Communion—my mother sent her to school the next day in ankle socks—that my mother was a cruel stepmother for not realizing children weren’t supposed to wear ankle socks. It was against the school rules. Another sister talking about when her mother died, they were put in an orphanage. What does a man do when he’s got four children under the age of four in the 1920s?! You might put your children in an orphanage for a month to get your bearings back. But memories just suddenly became bad.

  I was raised Roman Catholic. My father was a very religious man. I would come home from a date, and he would be at the kitchen table saying a rosary. And I’d say, “Stop, I want to talk to you about my date.” He’d stop—and then he’d take it up again when I’d go to bed. I went to church regularly. My father went to mass more than just on Sunday. Tuesday-night devotions. I had three cousins who became priests. That didn’t always have the happiest of endings. One of them became an alcoholic and left the priesthood and died an alcoholic. Another’s parents—my aunt and uncle—were millionaires. They built a shrine in Michigan which allowed their son to leave the Franciscan order and become a secular priest, so that he could inherit the money.

  In college, I was beginning to question more and more, and to doubt more and more that there was anything after this life. Once the Second Vatican Council came into being I began to think, What happened to all these people who supposedly went to Hell for doing this and it’s no longer wrong? Eventually I came to believe that there wasn’t anything—that we were born just as our pets are born, and that there is nothing after we die. I firmly believe that. This doesn’t give one license to do whatever one wants. I still believe in the Ten Commandments, really. I just don’t think there’s going to be any reward for having followed them. I simply don’t believe in Heaven or Hell—or God, for that matter. I can’t believe that there’s somebody watching over all this. How could anybody judge what people have been doing? How can you judge a young man in the projects who commits murder? How can you say, “That’s a mortal sin—he’s going somewhere”? There’s so much that played a role into his committing this murder. My friends always say to me that if they ever are tried with some major crime, they hope I’m on the jury. [Laughs]

  I had been married to an African-American law student at Harvard. At first, he was concerned that I was not religious enough. By the time he left me three years later, he said I was too religious. I hadn’t changed at all—I was the same person. He had problems. I have three grown children. One worked in China for six years. She’s now back, got her MBA, and is now, between jobs, traveling in Burma. One son went to Harvard. He’s trying to break in as a screen-writer in California. The other, who went to Princeton, worked with children with aphasia, and is now working with mentally challenged adults in psychiatric units.

  I raised my children my way. People would say to me, “While they’re young, can’t you get them to believe?” I’d say, “You’re putting God on the level of Santa Claus.” You believe one thing when you’re young and something else when you grow up. You either believe or you don’t believe.

  I think you just die. That’s it—there’s nothing. There’s been some need with humans to feel that this can’t happen to them, and therefore they have to think that there is something else. It would certainly make me feel a lot better if I thought there was something else, but I just don’t. When I was young, we were taught that you went into Heaven with the body that was when you were at your peak. When you
get older and you start thinking about that, well, what about newborn babies, guys? Is that the way they go to Heaven and they stay with that mentality forever? Even now, at the church where I’m working, they talk of a force: you’re aware that you are dead and you’re aware of what has gone on. But few have really come back to this old-fashioned belief in Heaven and Hell. And to say that you’re going to see somebody that you knew before . . . Take a look at my father with two wives, my mother with two husbands . . . [Sighs] How will they get along up there? [Laughs]

  As a child, I was very aware of death. When I was a little girl, we were very good friends with a family that owned a funeral parlor. There were many in Milwaukee, my hometown. They had a family similar to ours—older brothers and a younger boy my age. We would go over there and play in the funeral home. We would make hopscotch marks on the rugs and make marble rings and play right there. Sometimes there was a body there. The father would come out and say, “Come on now, we have to clean up this rug.” We would be shooed out because the funeral was going to start. This never bothered me.

  My father went to a lot of funerals because of the church and being active in the community. Sometimes he would take me to the undertaking parlor and I would sit in the back. Then we’d go off for ice cream. I don’t think he was really aware as to what effect this was having on me. I would be terrified when I would go with him at night. I could have been playing in that room with that same body in the afternoon. I had visions of the body coming to life, of the head turning and the eyes opening.

  We lived in a house that had two stories. If I had to go to the bathroom, I’d go as fast as I could, running down the stairs terrified. I had cousins a little bit more savvy than I was, telling me all these tales that I took very seriously, and scared me. So I was always aware of death. Always, with my father. I thought about death a lot, actually, when I was in boarding school: I’d be sitting at the bus or at the train and looking at my father, who would have taken me to the station, and concerned that maybe I wouldn’t see him again. The feeling would pass once I got to school . . . It wasn’t something I dwelled on. But in those brief moments on the train or the bus I’d look at him, and I often felt that I would not be able to get through his death. This was something the undertaker’s son and I would talk about when we were both kids. We would sit there on the rug, making things from branches in the lilac bushes. We would talk about who did we want to die first, our mother or our father. Way deep down, as much as I loved my mother and didn’t want anything to happen to her, it was my father I was most concerned about. I didn’t think I would ever get over his death if he did die. It was my father who died first . . . I went to that funeral in somewhat of a numb state. I never really truly cried about my parents’ deaths. There just was no time: I had three small children and no husband. It didn’t mean I loved them less.

  It was one of the times my husband got back in touch with us and he wanted the children to come to California . . . They didn’t know him—they were very little when he left. I wanted him to come to Chicago to introduce himself at least, before I sent them to a total stranger. This was 1979. I had cancer surgery, and I didn’t want to cause any problems. I was doing a lot of crying, a lot of smoking, and I sent them off. The next night I suddenly felt very tired. I was trying to read and I kept going to sleep. Tired and weak. I couldn’t walk across the room. I got horrible back pain. I went to the closet to get the heating pad, which probably would have killed me, but the pain was so bad I couldn’t reach up. I remember just putting my head against the door and thinking, I can’t get it. So I went to bed. I woke up the next morning and the first thing I was aware of was this back pain, but now I also had hand pain—I could barely move my hands. I called the pharmacist and I said, “What could this be?” He said, “I don’t know—call the doctor.” So I called the doctor. I had a lot of drug allergies—I couldn’t take penicillin. I couldn’t take any antibiotics. And they were afraid of the anesthetic when they did the cancer surgery. The doctor said, “You’ve got so many medical problems, I don’t want to guess. Just go to the emergency room.” I almost stayed home to clean the bathroom instead, thinking, “This is my imagination.” I got to the emergency room and I tell this young doctor, “My hands are hurting so I can’t stand the pain.” He made a classic statement—he came up to intensive care later to apologize. He said, “Do you make it a habit of coming to the emergency rooms on weekends for attention?” He later said, “You’re young, you’re thin, you’re a woman. I didn’t think anything was wrong with you . . . But you taught me a lesson.”

  They took my blood pressure and they couldn’t get a blood pressure. They did an electrocardiogram and he came to me and said, “I think you’re having a heart attack. It’s different from the electrocardiogram from your cancer surgery.” They took me up to intensive care, and I started gagging—you know how you gag when you’re having a heart attack? They left me in the room. I was monitored. All of a sudden, everything went black. My first reaction was: The pain is gone. And then I saw my three children—it was like a portrait. Anthony was in the middle—that’s my second child. And Zachary and Jane were on each side of him, just as you would pose children for a picture. When everything went black, I had had a cardiac arrest. They told me later that everything started ringing down at the nurse’s station. Everything went black. But my mind was working and I said to myself: “The pain is gone.” I saw my children as posing in a picture, a picture for a formal portrait. Now I can talk about it . . . I can still feel the sadness. The sadness that I was dying, that I had died . . .

  Let me jump ahead. When they brought me back, my chest was completely burned from the paddles, the electric shocks. My chest hurt from all the pounding that they had done. This happened in August, and my chest was so sore as late as December, Christmas—if I hiccupped or coughed, I felt like I was being thrown across the room. They had to really work on me to bring me back.

  When it happened, I have never felt this sad in my life. All I was thinking was, I never had a chance to tell my children to be happy . . . I’m going to cry, Studs . . . That it’s OK that I died, that they should just be happy. I wanted to have a chance to tell them, but now it was too late. I kept thinking, If I could just get over into complete death, there would be nothing—I wouldn’t know how sad I should be. I was pushing. Because I had no thought that I was going to come back. I thought I was in the process of dying, and if I could just push myself completely over, there would be nothing . . . I was still aware, which is what amazes me, because obviously my heart was not going—but my mind was going. Evidently they hadn’t tied down my arms—they probably didn’t take the time, they were just working fast. Suddenly I saw this green ball on my stomach. They told me later that was what they were pushing air into my lungs with. And I saw a doctor or intern, a black man, at the foot of the bed. I remember I threw my arm back and I touched somebody and I looked up and there was another doctor there and I said to him, “Is this a dream?” And he said, “No, it’s not a dream—we’re trying to stabilize you.” He said: “Just stay calm. And stop screaming about your children.” And then everything went . . . I just sort of became unconscious, but I wasn’t dead.

  I never went back to hospital records, but obviously, it couldn’t have lasted more than four minutes. I was in the intensive care ward for about a week. My children are in California with my ex-husband. The first day after, I wanted to try to talk but I was very weak . . . The next day, my own doctor came back and said, “Well, what happened?” And so I started to tell him the story. He said, “No, no, that’s OK—you don’t have to tell me.” And they sent in a psychologist with a nurse to talk. She said that she was working with somebody on these experiences and, you know, what happened? And I started again, but nobody ever heard me completely through. It was, “OK, yeah, we’ve got enough. We’ll come back later—you’re probably too weak.” They really didn’t want to hear it. I had the feeling they were uncomfortable. There was all this talk about a light a
nd going to the Creator, going to God, this beautiful light and coming back. I was talking about how there was going to be nothing. One woman did say to me, “Now, what about this light?” And I said, “I didn’t see anything. There was no light.” I said that if I got completely dead there would be nothing. They began patting me . . . and walked away. Later on, I would find that if I talked about this, they would say, “But of course now you believe, don’t you?”—because I’d experienced death. I’d say, “Well, no. I haven’t changed.” “You mean the experience didn’t make you want to believe?” And I said, “No.” I think they were annoyed. It’s sort of like the man who is leading a horrible life and then he comes close to a tragedy and says, “I’m going to change my ways . . .” They expected that because I came so close to seeing death, I should change my ways.

  It was full cardiac arrest. I should go back and ask for my records. They didn’t like the fact that I thought there was going to be nothing. I’ve just done some reading on people’s experiences, and I’ve never heard anybody say that there was going to be nothing. If they believe a certain afterlife, this is what they’re going to see; if they believe there is nothing, this is what they’re going to see also. Which makes me think even more that there’s nothing. You see what you expect. You see what you want to see. I mean, it would be nice to think that you go on, and that all this wasn’t for nothing. The psychologist was the same as everybody else. In fact, nobody really wanted to talk to me about the fact that I had died. That whole hospital stay, nobody talked to me about the fact that my heart had stopped, that I had this chest that was so burned, and was hurting so much. About three months later I ended up back in the hospital because I was having strange feelings. They put me back in intensive care to observe me. A nurse came in and said, “I remember you.” She said, “I was the one who found you and started the CPR until the cart came.” That was the first time anybody . . . I would ask in the hospital, “Who were the people?” ’Cause this is a big event—I could have been dead! Nobody talked about it.