Daring

by Gail Sheehy

“Hi, Gail, I’m so glad to see you back out here!”

  Recalling Howard Wolfson’s parting words to me almost a decade earlier, I was pleasantly surprised by her friendliness. She needed me now.

  What continued to impress me deeply was Hillary’s persistence. She had never given up, not once in her life. She tried valiantly to revive her poorly managed campaign. I watched her virtually bleed when stalwart supporters like the Kennedy family and the African American congressman John Lewis pulled away. But she hung on until her old friend Congressman Charlie Rangel had to call her up in June and tell her bluntly, “It’s over.” After seventeen months of running for president, it took Hillary four days of internalizing the loss of her dream before she could let go.

  When Hillary conceded on June 7, 2008, in the finest speech of her career, she sounded to me like a woman of full humanity. Yes, ruthless, nakedly aggressive, hawkish, and often tone-deaf—qualities common among politicians who dare to compete at this level. But she was also extraordinary: killer smart, empathetic, unsparing of her energy and commitment, and so resilient, she could eat scandal for breakfast. Hillary would not allow her heartbroken supporters to dwell on the what-ifs. “Life is too short, time is too precious . . . We have to work together for what still can be.”

  Like millions of women, I took that message to heart. I would work for what still could be—for our country with its first black president, for Clay’s best last days, for a life of meaning after Clay. If I dared to begin walking the back half of the labyrinth, maybe I could come back.

  DR. MORRISON HAD TOLD ME that the chief worry he heard from people with serious illness was not about themselves: it was about the well-being of the loved ones they will leave behind. I assured Clay that he was leaving me a world of people who had been a part of our life together. “You’ve left a part of you in each of them. I’ll feel it when I’m with them. That’s what I’ll hold on to.”

  “But what about your writing?” he insisted.

  I fell silent. When I tried to sit down and compose a coherent narrative out of the four months of reporting on the dazzling presidential campaign, I froze. My mind was splintered between the twenty-four-hour cable-news squawk cycle and our own twenty-four-hour life-or-death vigil. I had one week to capture the whys and wherefores in a ten-thousand-word story for Vanity Fair. I also had to plan a funeral. My powers of concentration deserted me. The fear persisted: Could I still write?

  My sister told me that she and Maura hardly recognized me anymore. I had lost myself. And they couldn’t bear to lose both Clay and me.

  Dr. Morrison called another family meeting at Clay’s bedside. He told Clay that he was ordering me to go somewhere in the country for a week, to do nothing but write and rest. He wanted Clay’s endorsement.

  Clay gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up. He would wait for me to finish the story.

  In my week’s getaway to a farm in Upstate New York, blanketed by the simplicity of the buzzing and greening and mooing of early June, I began to find myself again. An early bike ride, freshly laid eggs deposited on my porch, a day of writing, a late-afternoon walk to the song of frogs, and a night for a second burst of writing, was the best medicine anyone could have prescribed.

  Clay couldn’t wait to hear me read my first draft when I returned. We reverted to mentor and disciple. He commented. I listened. I felt a surge of his old intellectual force. More important, he felt it, too. One night, after I came home from closing the story at the magazine, I found Clay sitting up with a broad smile.

  “I’m feeling happy,” he said.

  I looked at this man propped up in a hospital bed with a special valve that permitted him to speak, and I could barely ask the question: “Why are you feeling happy?”

  “Because they liked your story.”

  WE HAD NOW BEEN THROUGH nine months of palliative care with no emergency we could not handle at home. It was time to decide whether to treat the next episode of pneumonia or to suspend feeding and let nature take its course. Shortly thereafter, Clay sent us all a message without speaking. He pulled out his feeding tube. When Safoura tried to reconnect it, he pushed it aside. She sensed it was deliberate. But when I later asked Clay if he meant to disconnect it, he insisted it was just an accident.

  “Don’t keep asking him!” Dr. Morrison chided me. “Look, a husband can’t admit to his wife, ‘I don’t want to fight anymore,’ because that would be abandoning you. Leave that role to me. Your role is to keep him living as long as he’s alive.”

  I had to ask Clay, “Sweetheart, you’ve been in and out of pneumonia for two years now, what keeps you going?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Are you doing it for me?” A long pause.

  “Yes.”

  The secret was out at last. I had to let him know that I was ready.

  CHAPTER 41

  All That Jazz

  IT IS EASY TO SLICE MUSHROOMS with a sharp knife but this knife is like so much of my life now. Blunt. Worn down, eroded, made weary by constant overuse.

  This is probably the smallest kitchen of the many kitchens of my life. It is unusually hot for June. The fan on top of the refrigerator has to be small so it will clear the ceiling. It groans as it swivels and barely parts the air. I am slicing astragalus mushrooms because the Chinese speak highly of their potency in boosting the immune system. I still can’t give up.

  Could he have left already?

  Once the hospital bed invaded our apartment, everything changed. We no longer sleep beside each other. We occupy different realms. He sleeps now in our former sitting room, not facing the window, facing inward. So unlike him. He was always looking out, looking ahead.

  I hear the TV droning in there. Somebody is haranguing. Who? I know the voice. It must be Bill O’Reilly. The substitute aide must be a Fox fan. Is Clay too weak to change the channel? Or does he not care?

  I am slicing earth-moist organic ingredients for his breakfast, or is it lunch, whatever. Shiny purple aubergine, baby-skinned zucchini, garden-grown garlic. I like to imagine the clove rubbing all the insides of his anatomy down to the smallest intestine, to give him flavor.

  I remember the first time he took me to his apartment not far from the East River. When we came off the elevator, his door was held wide open by a pair of brass lions, his avatar, with a view out a pair of cathedral-size windows to the ramp of one of Manhattan’s grand bridges. I felt as if the world itself was opening to me.

  Now I am alone. With the blunt knife. In the dim kitchen. A blunt knife is more dangerous than a sharp knife. When a blunt knife cuts you, it leaves a ragged wound.

  He has been slow-dying for two years now.

  Don’t leave yet. Stay another day.

  It will take another twenty minutes to simmer the whole mixture down with pasta and protein. Then whirl it in a blender, mash it through a strainer, thin it to a stingy soup, and pour it into a feeding tube with the diameter of a drinking straw. Praying that it will not clog.

  I feel a wave of nausea. The sudden memory, so sharp it’s painful, of our long lazy Sunday mornings sifting through the papers together, correcting the mistakes of the world. After breakfast we would walk through Central Park all the way up to the Shakespeare Garden at 110th, stealing kisses behind rocks, swooning under the first bursts of magnolia, returning home in time to make supper for friends. That was in the larger apartment, when we had a larger life.

  Slowly, I step across the threshold into his world. He is a pale giant under a white sheet, his still face dissolved in the white vastness of a hospital bed. This is the mentor who sculpted my career, the lover who haunted me for decades, the husband who shared my life for twenty-four years, a man who never had time to sleep. I bend over him and find the place where the surgeon’s knife cut out the invader.

  The surgeon’s knife must have been sharp. The crater it left in Clay’s neck was so big, at first it looked like his head was on crooked. I kiss that place in his neck. I whisper, “Sweet as honey.”


  Don’t leave yet. Stay another summer. Another lifetime.

  IN LATE JUNE, Clay’s body began to shut down. As he approached his final deadline, his life force returned once more with gusto. He asked Dr. Morrison, “How long?”

  “Not long,” he said. “Days to a week.”

  Clay accepted the news with equanimity.

  “Do you want to do one great thing, darling?” I said. “Something wonderful?”

  He nodded vigorously.

  “Jazz?”

  The light flared again in his eyes.

  “Tonight?”

  He shook his head up and down.

  I ran to the computer. Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola had a show that night. I ran back to Clay. “The show starts in two hours—think we can make it?”

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. He pressed up from the hospital bed and slid himself into the wheelchair and rolled it to his wardrobe. He picked out a linen jacket and a blue shirt and a suede cap. He even let me touch up his face with tinted sunscreen, “to give you color.” I wheeled him in front of the full-length mirror.

  “How’s that for handsome?”

  He looked pleasantly surprised to see a picture of near normalcy.

  A taxi driver took one look at Clay’s wheelchair and tried to avoid us until Safoura snapped out a few choice words and he backed up, reduced to quivering obedience.

  Dizzy’s was the quintessence of New York. A window wall offered a larger-than-life vista across Central Park. A full moon. We watched it slide across the star-studded sky. Clay’s attention locked on the jazz pianist, a man of his vintage.

  “There’s a lot of pessimism and feelings of futility out there,” the pianist said. “It’s the job of music to dispel those feelings.” Then he played an original composition called “Life Is What You Make It.” Clay’s philosophy. I asked the waiter for swizzle sticks.

  When the drums kick-started an up-tempo piece, Clay picked up the swizzle sticks and began drumming on the table. He was a drummer as a boy. For the next hour and a half Clay sat tall and straight in his wheelchair, drumming, and drinking in the music as his sustenance. He was young again. A drummer boy again.

  We were back in our apartment shortly before midnight. Clay was not the least bit tired. He wanted to talk. He gripped my hands and said, with absolute clarity, “That was a magical evening.”

  TWO DAYS LATER, on the morning of July 1, 2008, I laid my hand over Clay’s. I felt a slight movement. His eyes did not open. His lips inscribed two words on the air.

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you saying good-bye to me?”

  His lips closed in a yes.

  A few stop-start breaths and he slipped the last fetters of this fragile life and floated to that imagined realm beyond time. I rolled into the bed beside him and pressed my body to his. I felt a last imprint of our mated souls, and it felt good. Safoura wrapped the blood pressure cuff and pumped it up. The numbers slid to 0.

  Not more than twenty minutes later, the phone roused me from a sobbing reverie. Safoura handed me the receiver. It was a reporter from the New York Times obituary desk wanting to confirm the time and cause of death. I snapped into journalist mode.

  “He died at eight twenty-two, of natural causes.”

  “We never use that. It’s not Times style.”

  “But it is the style in which some people go out.”

  “Didn’t Mr. Felker have cancer?”

  “Yes, four times. We beat it four times. He hasn’t had cancer for the last two and a half years. And he wouldn’t want anyone to think he died suffering.”

  The reporter persisted. “Well, then, what did he die from?”

  A cascade of emotions silenced me for a moment. Then I came to rest on an inner smile. “He stopped breathing.”

  AT NOON, MAURA AND TRISH drew me outside to escape the phone. We sat quietly over tea. It hit me when we returned and saw three men in black rocking on the curbside like great crows. Waiting to take my love away. We went in ahead of them to say good-bye for the last time. I bent to kiss his forehead. Cool. He looked like an alabaster carving of a Sophoclean wise man from ancient times, his nose aquiline and skin whitened and brow serene. An unfamiliar scent wafted through the apartment, strong, but light as wisteria. His spirit, ascending.

  Out on the street again, as the black crows passed us, we nodded in mutual consent for their turn to take possession of the vacated body. Sobs began grinding through my body, rattling my ribs; heaves of emotion doubled me over. Maura held me up. The three of us threaded arms over shoulders and wept together on the street until we were spent and could sit on a bench in Central Park and reimagine the joyful times with this man.

  That evening my girlfriends were summoned by Maura to smother me in food and hugs and to share stories. My dear friend Sherrye Henry took one look at my face as the last guests left and crooned in her Memphis drawl, “Pack a nightie, sweetie, you’re coming home to spend the night at my place.”

  The funeral fell on the Fourth of July. Scores of people interrupted their holiday to come to Sag Harbor. Led by the sound of a harp’s haunting sweetness deep inside a country cemetery, friends gathered under a canopy of tall trees to watch Clay lying in his final sleeping place. A navy honor guard played “Taps.” The image of a skinny sailor boy Clay came to me, climbing a flagpole in the South Pacific to shout about the Japanese surrender. He didn’t have to die in battle after all. He lived eighty-two years.

  Tom and Sheila Wolfe invited guests for a lunch of reminiscing in their buzzing, blooming backyard. Tom gave me a long brotherly hug. It brought to mind his tenderness in visiting Clay and engaging him in talk of the world. For his last visit, he charmed someone on the New York Times obituary desk to give him a copy of the obit, always prepared in advance for any notable. He had read the first paragraph to Clay in his mellow Virginia accent.

  Clay Felker, a visionary editor who was widely credited with inventing the formula for the modern magazine, giving it energetic expression in a glossy weekly named for and devoted to the boisterous city that fascinated him—New York—died on . . .

  Clay’s face had relaxed. He was assured of his legacy.

  AFTER THE FUNERAL, my immediate concern was Mohm. Having lost a second father, she was inconsolable. Her husband had recently left her. I flew back with Mohm to Cambridge and stayed close for a week. She found some peace when we visited the Asian Art collection in the Museum of Fine Arts. Then we returned to her roots, eating in a new Cambodian restaurant. It turned out to be owned by her former refugee camp counselor, Darvy Heder, who was thrilled to see Mohm and offered her a job and a room in her large home. Before leaving, I found Mohm a counselor she liked and accepted.

  For the rest of that summer, planning the September memorial was a welcome absorption. I wished Clay had been there to lead Louis Armstrong’s Memorial Jazz Band as it marched up Central Park West and down the aisle of the Ethical Culture Center, banging out the beat of irrepressible life. He would have loved it. His finest successor as editor of New York magazine, Adam Moss, gave a stirring tribute, embellished by images of Clay on a screen behind him. It was a rousing celebration of Clay’s progeny: scores of writers, editors, art directors, photographers, journalism students, and the golden moment in American magazines.

  AND THEN, THE VACANCY.

  I returned to the Mashomac nature preserve on Shelter Island where Clay and I were inspired to change our lives. Finding the spot on the shoreline where the osprey nest was in sight, I sat quietly, eyes half closed, praying for the willingness to surrender my obstinate self-will. I couldn’t play God to Mohm, to Maura, or to anyone else.

  After a while, I felt a stirring. Raising my eyes, I saw a huge white-winged bird lift off its nesting pole and rise into the sky with a furious flapping of wings. Then, suddenly, it gave itself up to powerful air currents blowing in from the sound. Swept along, swooping and soaring, this great osprey seemed to trust in something unseen to allow it free flight. This must be what
it means to “let go” to a power greater than oneself.

  CHAPTER 42

  Coming Back

  I TRIED TO THINK OF ONE GOOD THING about being a widow: more closet space. I knew the worst thing about being a widow: five to seven P.M. Here are some things I did in the first year: Made pillow covers out of his cashmere sweaters so I could still lay my head next to him. Tickled my grandchildren. Reached out to my neighbors. At Christmas, I gave his unworn silk pocket squares to editors he admired—Graydon Carter, Byron Dobell, Robert Emmett Ginna.

  “Shouldn’t I be moving on to the next stage?”

  The wise cancer therapist who had talked Clay and me through his journey fixed me with her gently mocking smile. “Move on?” said Ruth Bolletino. “You’re not there yet.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in the agony of grief.”

  It was a year and a half after Clay had died and I still didn’t have the courage to feel the sorrow. Dr. Bolletino urged me to express my feelings by writing them in a stream of consciousness. “Feel it to heal it,” she said, apologizing for the trite motto. “If you don’t go right through the middle of the pain, if you amputate it, cut off the feelings, or drink to numb them, the anger and resentment never go away. They fester. Unexpressed grief comes out as explosions of anger, or in a physical manifestation.”

  “Hmmmm, I have shingles.”

  She nodded sympathetically. “It takes a hell of a lot of energy to keep down the violent grief of loss.”

  I had kept it down by throwing myself into work. After months spent developing a proposal for a book on family caregiving, I was invited to a dinner with AARP executives. I told them my idea for a series of caregiver diaries, blogs with video, portraying families in different stages of the journey. Emilio Pardo, the chief branding officer, was a veteran caregiver himself. He enthused, “We want your caregiver diaries and your stages—what do you need from us?”

  AARP gave me just what I needed. A purpose. I was teamed up with a fast-acting film producer who had a wicked sense of humor and brought along a laid-back videographer who could edit with his eyes closed. We traveled the country for months to scout caregiving families with inspiring stories to tell about how they created their own circles of care. I offered them a framework for where they were in the journey. When it fit, it was reassuring to them. It felt like I might be coming back by giving back.