Death Be Not Proud

by John Gunther

  Parenthetically I might mention the K R episode. We were committed to Gerson for a time at least, and he was a dictator who permitted no opposition; but this did not preclude our fishing quietly in other waters. Frances in particular never for an instant gave up searching. She saw in the papers that Russian scientists, working with a trypanosome, had successfully treated certain exposed cancers such as those on breasts or nostrils. This led us into a telephone chase almost like that on the mustard. I talked to the United States Public Health Service and to a doctor in Philadelphia who had actually worked with K R in Moscow. But there was none available in this country, and it could not be shipped because it would not keep. Again parenthetically, we explored several other long-shot chances, but from these and other forays, nothing at all resulted. As of the autumn of 1946, it was the Gerson regime or nothing.

  Our routine was now established. Mrs. Seeley’s nursing home was only a few minutes’ walk from my flat. Johnny telephoned us the first thing in the morning, and again just before lights-out at night. He was frightfully depressed some-times, and he hungered for contact with us the first and last minutes of the day. But he would always say, even if his voice was quavering, “ I feel wonderful!” As a rule I dropped in to see him at noon, and again briefly in the late afternoon or evening; Frances came at lunch and stayed with him until he went to sleep. Soon, we thought, we would move him home—though this would entail a difficult lot of routine because all his food would have to be cooked specially with special paraphernalia. Frances worked on this and got the apartment ready. She moved in presently, and I took quarters in a small hotel nearby. But as it worked out it was several months before Johnny was able to come home.

  I read him the typescript of the Montana chapter of Inside U.S.A. “Father,” he grinned, “it’ll sell a million copies.” This week too, I took him for a brief ride. He said, “Ah! I feel alive again!”

  I asked him what he wanted most to eat when the diet should be over.

  “A glass of full milk, an artichoke with hollandaise sauce, spaghetti and meat balls, and a chocolate ice-cream soda.”

  One night he had a heavy nosebleed, which could have had the most disastrous consequences. Both Gerson and Traeger raced over in the middle of the night, and since Johnny had a slight bronchial cough that might have started the bleeding again, Gerson relaxed his inflexible rule against drugs and let me rush out to a pharmacy open at that hour and bring back some codeine. Johnny was frighteningly tired. He started to cough again at about five in the morning. Mrs. Seeley crept into his room, and he whispered to her, “I’ m afraid I’m being too much trouble.” She replied with a cheery “Don’t worry about me!” whereupon he considered for a moment and then said, “Somebody’s got to worry over you.”

  Once Frances had an argument with the doctor. Johnny told the doctor later, “The way to handle my mother is to stand up to her.” Once, smiling, he exclaimed to me as she came into the room, “Mother looks just like a schoolgirl!”

  Frances was lifting his morale all the time. She bought bright-colored scarves which he wound around his bandage, and this amused him no end. She read him biographies of great scientists and all manner of news items and stories about science. Another thing that helped his morale was, if I may say so, my book. He was passionately interested in it—almost as interested as I. He knew what a race I was running, against time and circumstance, and constantly he egged me on. He read every chapter in manuscript, calculated its length and weight and how it would fit into the book as a whole, criticized its content adequately, and continually watched out for errors in judgment and inaccuracies.

  Miss Gerson’s little girl, aged about six, was fascinated by Johnny, and often came in to see him. He was polite, but bored. Girls of six were really not his dish. Once the little girl tiptoed in and asked if it were all right to stay. Johnny replied. “Okay, if you don’t compromise me. Keep the door ajar.”

  Again from Frances’s diary:

  Today Johnny said, “Oh, Mother—I’ve been waiting for you—I have a confession to make—You were right—as usual—about the dancing. At the end of this term, you know, they have the senior prom. When I get back to school, what’ll I do? . . . I’ll have to dance! Oh, Mother, I’ve been so depressed—” He was cheerful, confessing. . . . Now he said would I practice with him and I said I’d love to. I was surprised. But then injections interrupted and dinner. But after dinner he asked again, and I pushed back the chairs and rug. And we danced!

  Max Kopf came in one day with his cheerful “Hello, Chonnie” and played him a game of chess. He played well for an hour, and then got tired; Max eased off, to try to let him win. Then I discovered that Johnny’s field of vision was so limited by this time that he could no longer see the entire board at one glance, and hence had to memorize during the whole game the position in the rook files. Other friends dropped in during the placid afternoons, became duly appalled by the number of pills he had to take, and were cheered up by him. Clare Luce organized prayers for Johnny—if that is the proper way to express it—and she offered us her Connecticut house for his convalescence. On November 4, his seventeenth birthday, we had a party, and Mrs. Seeley made a kind of imitation ice cream. Johnny adored parties, and that he should have been well enough to receive guests on this his own special day was a happy event. We tried to record everybody’s laughter on a soundscriber—the instrument into which, on other days, he sometimes poured his secret fears.

  Of course he was fretful sometimes. Sometimes he was subconsciously hostile to me as if out of resentment at my good health. Once he did a modest amount of complaining and then changed mood and exclaimed, “Father, you ought to slap me down when I talk like that!” Sometimes he reminisced about mild escapades at school, and he gave me to understand that he had cut quite a swathe smoking forbidden cigarettes and so on. Once he inquired, “How many cigarettes do you think I actually did smoke, Father?” I replied something or other. Johnny went on: “None.”

  He never lost his brightness. Frances ordered some hand-kerchiefs for Christmas as a gift from him to me with the word “Father” embroidered in his handwriting. He asked her how much they would be and she replied, “Nineteen dollars a half dozen for cotton, thirty-six dollars for linen.” Johnny thought a moment and replied: “Let’s give him Kleenex.”

  His views about the tumor had not solidified; he erected a protective rationale which told him (a) the tumor had never been bigger than “a plum” (b) Putnam had got it out all right; (c) what was happening now was merely to clear up “odds and ends.” Nothing could shake him from this belief. “ I don’t get just any tumor,” he told Traeger, “it’s like me to get a special tumor.” He would joke about it often enough. He said, “I’ m afraid the tumor has gone to my head,” and once he chorded ironically to Frances, “ I must take my mind off my brain!”

  Stoutly he refused to concede defeat. But he was getting more easily tired and he half-dozed a good deal. Once after he tried to do some card tricks and couldn’t hold the cards— they cascaded to the floor as he stood up crookedly—he said in a measured, quiet voice, “ I daresay my left hand will always be a little clumsy.” It was very rare for him to make such an admission. He fiercely picked up the exercise balls which were supposed to strengthen the left fingers, and which never did.

  Cancer is a rebellion—a gangster outbreak of misplaced cells. Extremely little differentiates a normal cell from a cancer cell. One theory of the origin of cancer, which I believe Gerson subscribed to in part (of course I am expressing this in very unscientific language), is that during pregnancy a cell may be displaced in the embryo and may lie dormant for many years in the wrong place. Then it may suddenly get kicked loose, so to speak, and break out with savage violence—a cell that is tooth may wake up in the liver, or one that is bone wake up in the lung. The cell, its energies thus fiercely released by some unknown eruptive force, tries insanely to catch up. But it is in a foreign environment and hence destroys relentlessly what it is surrounde
d by. Gerson apparently thought most cancers have this embryonic origin; hence he excluded from his diet all those items which, by restless experiments with sodium and iodine, he thought might be the factors that encourage the fast growth of an embryo. Johnny had, as it were, a fetus growing in his brain.

  Tuberculosis used to be called “consumption” because it consumes. It dissolves a lung or bone. But cancer produces. It is a monster of productivity, creating a voracious growth that eats up the surrounding healthy tissue. Gerson’s first great cures, which made a considerable impression in Europe before the war, were of tuberculosis of the skin. But Johnny’s illness was of a type much more dangerous and implacable.

  All that goes into a brain—the goodness, the wit, the sum total of enchantment in a personality, the very will, indeed the ego itself—being killed inexorably, remorselessly, by an evil growth! Everything that makes a human being what he is, the inordinately subtle and exquisite combination of memory, desire, impulse, reflective capacity, power of association, even consciousness—to say nothing of sight and hearing, muscular movement and voice and something so taken for granted as the ability to chew—is encased delicately in the skull, working there within the membranes by processes so marvelously interlocked as to be beyond belief. All this—volition, imagination, the ability to have even the simplest emotion, anticipation, understanding—is held poised and balanced in the normal brain, with silent, exquisite efficiency. And all this was what was being destroyed. It was, we felt, as if reason itself were being ravaged away by unreason, as if the pattern of Johnny’s illness were symbolic of so much of the conflict and torture of the external world. A primitive to-the-death struggle of reason against violence, reason against disruption, reason against brute unthinking force—this was what went on in Johnny’s head. What he was fighting against was the ruthless assault of chaos. What he was fighting for was, as it were, the life of the human mind.

  By this time a perplexing concrete situation was building up. O n one level, the general level, he continued to improve. He was stronger and got dressed in the morning and went out for occasional brief walks. On a specific level, that of the status of the bump, he was not improving. The bump looked awful now, and had become two bumps. Traeger and Mount came to see him together. Traeger thought that he might get some relief if the protuberance were drained; Mount was fearful of doing this because, under no matter what scrupulous conditions, danger always exists of carrying an infection inward. But he agreed to try. Gerson opposed the idea, and we had a long and painful argument. Gerson felt that any anesthetic, no matter how mild, was likely to kill a patient on his diet, since the bodily system had become so purified that narcotics acted as swift poisons. But he agreed finally to permit a modicum of novacaine and Mount made the puncture. The bump had been fluctuant, which was a good sign, but today it was harder than a rock, and he was able to extract only a few drops of fluid. Glumly, we tried to conceal from Johnny the way our faces looked.

  The next time Mount came he made an exhaustive test, and I watched it from beginning to end. What the neurologist seeks to find, if possible, is where the damage to the brain is leading. One test always fascinated Johnny. Mount would ask him to close his eyes, then he would put a coin or a safety pin or a button or something similar in his left palm and ask him to identify it. By working the law of averages, Johnny tried to guess what the object would be, when he could not tell by feeling it, and thus outsmart the doctor. Always, too, the doctor tested his grip, examined all his reflexes, made him try to touch his nose with his fingers with his eyes closed, and asked him a series of standard questions—any tremors, any nausea, any chills? So far, thank goodness, the replies were always negative. What really bothered Johnny at this time was something that seems almost ridiculously minor—the way his head itched. The wound had to be dressed and treated and bandaged each day—Gerson, with his superb hands, did this with speed and immaculate precision; and of course the hair had grown out, but since regular combing was difficult, a good deal of matter had accumulated in the hair and was difficult to remove. What a blessed day it was when, with great shouts of glee, Johnny was allowed a real shampoo!

  It may seem an odd thing to write, but by this time we knew something of how lucky Johnny was, granted that he had to have a brain tumor at all. The tumor was, God knows, murderous enough; but if it had been in another place in the brain it could have produced even more terrible disasters. Some people with brain injuries twitch incessantly; some cannot walk or talk; some can only pronounce parts of each successive word; many lose their memory. Above all, Johnny was lucky in that he had no serious pain and was right-handed. Little by little, his left hand was giving way; if it had been the right, his tortures would have been increased manifold. Johnny’s injury was on the right side of the brain, and there-fore it was only the left side of the body that felt symptoms.

  Mount came again, during a period when everything was very good except the bump. Gerson said, “Your son is saved!” Mount said the exact opposite.

  Now occurred the most remarkable of all remarkable things in the story of this struggle. Johnny accepted with disappointment but good spirit that he could not return to Deerfield—I broke the news to him—and he set out diligently to make up his lost school hours by tutoring. He could hardly walk without swaying; he could scarcely move his left fingers; he had lost half the sight of each eye; he was dazed with poison from the bump; a portion of his brain had been eaten away; and yet he worked.

  Frances found him two tutors and set them into their routine smoothly, while Johnny himself planned his daily endeavor like a general directing a battle. He helped map out the lessons himself, and knew with complete assurance and precision just what he wanted each tutor to cover in every session.

  Here is a letter he wrote to the headmaster of Deerfield, as dictated to his mother:

  November 4, 1946

  DEAR MR. BOYDEN,

  I am desperately worried about my work. Of last year’s physics experiments I did exactly five out of thirty experiments due. Already I am far behind in chem. lab. I’ve forgotten every bit of French I ever knew, and there is this year’s work, too. It is so hard to work when one’s sick. My doctors, all twenty-three of them, agree that my tumor may have been growing six months or longer. Even in spring vacation my father noticed that I was very tired. I think that most of the year I was very tired, and I had a reputation for being “in a daze.”

  I am desperate and utterly miserable, since I don’t see how I can ever catch up. My English marks were so terrible last year, too. It seems I’m going to stay in this hellish place forever. It’s my birthday today (I’m seventeen). I’m going to Harvard next year (I hope) and there will be college boards—and final exams, this year’s and last. It’s absolutely a hopeless situation. I must implore you to persuade Mr. Haynes to forget about my physics lab, and Mrs. Boyden to excuse me of the chem. lab. that the other boys will have completed.

  My English and French notes are lost, and I am desperate.

  Please forgive me for unburdening myself in this way, and give my best to all the boys.

  Yours very sincerely,

  JOHN GUNTHER, JR.

  P.S. You may tell Mr. Haynes that I did finally write up two experiments.

  P.P.S. All this has been giving me acute and chronic neurasthenia.

  Mr. Boyden, great gentleman that he is, not only replied cordially, but sent Mr. Haynes all the way into New York to give Johnny direct encouragement. Mr. Haynes had, I imagine, intended to stay only a moment or two, but he sat with Johnny hour after hour, and the visit helped his morale immensely.

  Then Johnny wrote:

  DEAR MR. BILL:

  I would like very much to make an initial attempt at passing last year’s final algebra exam. During the last month or two of vacation I was tutored in intermediate algebra by Mr. Elbert Weaver of Andover. We covered the whole year’s work, especially what I was weak in—logarithms and trig. I am afraid that unless I take the exam very soon
, I will for the second time forget all the algebra I ever knew.

  Therefore I wish you would send an adequate examination to my father, so he may give it to me, under regular exam, conditions, in the time limits you may set.

  I understand there will be no analytical geometry on the exam, but there will be the binomial theorem and factoring of cubes, all of which I have covered. We will send it back to you for correction, and I hope, if I don’t do well on it, I may have another chance when I get back to school.

  Please give my best to Mr. Boyden.

  Then came a second letter to Mr. Boyden:

  Nov. 20, 1946

  DEAR MR. BOYDEN,

  Thank you so much for your kind and considerate letter. My “neurasthenia” is gone and I am afraid that my letter was one of those that should have been written but never actually sent. I had an exceedingly nice talk with Mr. Haynes, and I am sure that I will be able to make up all the necessary work.

  I am used to the diet now, and it really isn’t at all bad. Every week I feel better and stronger.

  I am trying to keep up nearly with my class in this year’s history and English while tackling last year’s exams one at a time, starting with algebra. Mrs. Boyden’s subjects will be a pleasure any time I do them.

  Came the great day when, under honor conditions, Johnny took a preliminary exam to see how well he would do. This was as much of a landmark as any in the whole course of the illness. One of his tutors thought he ought to wait, but there was no holding him. Johnny exclaimed, “Oh, Mother, tell him I want to get the test off my mind—and do the other things—my chemistry and physics—please tell him!” He repeated what had become a recurrent remark, with a strange, faraway look in his eyes (a “beyond” look, Frances called it). “You don’t understand, Mother; I have so much to do, and there’s so little time!” Finally the test was set for the next day, and he passed it satisfactorily. He commented then to Frances, “Sometimes in life you have to take a chance.”