Extraordinary, Ordinary People

by Condoleezza Rice

  Mother got on the phone. “I’ve got this little thing in my head,” she said. “It’s not in such a bad place.”

  “Yes, Mother, but I want to come home for a little while,” I said.

  “Okay, but don’t hurry,” she replied.

  When I got to Denver, my father picked me up at the airport. We went directly to the hospital where Mother was undergoing more tests. The room was pretty dimly lit, but Mother was remarkably upbeat. We talked for a while, and I didn’t notice any of the mental deterioration of which my father had spoken. But the conversation with Dr. Hamilton couldn’t have been clearer. When I asked how long she had, he said, “I’ve seen some people make it a year. But it won’t be longer than that. I’m so sorry.”

  The doctors prescribed a treatment regimen for her. They were certain that surgery wasn’t an option but believed tumor-shrinking radiation and medication could prolong her life.

  Every day I’d accompany Mother to the hospital where she would undergo treatment. The effects were pretty devastating. Her once beautiful hair began to fall out. She’d also lost some of her hair during the previous treatments in 1984, and we had actually had a little fun finding a wig that she loved wearing. But this was different. This time she was left with almost no hair. I was absolutely crushed when I saw her sitting on the bed holding a large clump of her hair in her hand and crying.

  The four weeks in Denver were the hardest of my life. Mother’s mental capacity was clearly diminished. One day I saw her sitting at the piano. She couldn’t remember how to play. Yet when I sat down next to her on the bench and began to move her hands toward certain keys, she started to play—a few notes at first, then miraculously a song, and then another and another. “I can play,” she proclaimed. When she started to play “The Lord Knows How Much You Can Bear,” I said to myself, Mommy, I hope so, and left the room in tears.

  Daddy and I didn’t really talk very much about what was happening. Life revolved around trying to make Mother comfortable. We went about the daily routine, even going out to brunch for her sixty-first birthday on July 21. As Daddy tried to raise his glass and say “Many happy returns,” he finally broke down. Mother looked confused, not sad. It suggested to me that she didn’t fully comprehend that she was dying.

  I returned to Palo Alto at the end of July when my mother’s sisters, Gee and Mattie, came out to be with her. I told my father that I needed to go back home for a few weeks. I planned to teach my scheduled two-week alumni summer school session, go to a conference at Cornell, and then return to Denver in the middle of August.

  Though I knew that she was gravely ill, I realize now that I just didn’t let myself believe that I was losing my mother. Somehow I kept expecting a miracle, or perhaps I was just putting the awful truth out of my mind. I called Sarah Donaldson, a friend and radiologist on the Stanford Medical School faculty, and asked whether I should bring Mother to Palo Alto for a second opinion. She offered to call Dr. Hamilton, and after talking to him said that she thought it best that she finish her treatment in Denver. We could then think about whether it made sense to have her come to Palo Alto. I suspect that she knew that there was little point in doing so, but I clung to the idea that Stanford might have an answer. Then one day I was sitting at my desk at Galvez House when Herb Abrams stopped by. He was a world-renowned radiologist who was working at the center studying the potential effects of nuclear war. Herb had heard about Mother and wanted to offer his support. I think he was taken aback by my optimistic assessment of my mother’s chances.

  “They say it’s not the worst kind of brain tumor,” I told him.

  “Well, you make sure to spend time at home with her now. Don’t wait,” he replied.

  THE LAST session of the summer course I taught at Stanford was on Saturday, August 18. I had planned to leave the next day and stop in Denver overnight on my way to Cornell just to check on Mother. After the two-day conference in Ithaca where I would give a paper, I intended to return to Denver and stay for several weeks. There would be no pressure to return to Stanford early in the fall, since I was beginning the Hoover sabbatical. And I was pleased that the summer teaching and the conference paper were yielding additional income. I intended to use the money to help my parents, since my mother would no longer be able to teach.

  Mother had not been doing very well that weekend. I had talked to her several times Saturday and she seemed weak, unable to finish a full sentence without running out of breath.

  “Why don’t you take her to the hospital?” I asked my father.

  “She doesn’t want to go,” he said.

  I called Saturday night before going to bed.

  “She’s a bit better,” Daddy said.

  Hours later the phone rang, jerking me out of a very deep sleep.

  “Ann isn’t breathing,” Daddy said.

  “What?” I asked, still not fully awake.

  “I’ve called the ambulance because your mother isn’t breathing,” he said, clearly frightened but relatively calm.

  “Call me when you get to the hospital,” I said.

  I just lay in the dark and prayed. Over and over, I asked God not to take my mother.

  Daddy called back less than an hour later. “She’s gone,” he said.

  “I’ll be there first thing in the morning,” I told him.

  “No need to hurry. She belongs to the ages now,” he replied.

  After hanging up the phone, it occurred to me that Daddy must have been alone at the hospital. I called Beverly Phillips, my mother’s friend with whom she’d taught school. She agreed to meet my father at the hospital. I didn’t want to be alone either, so I called my dearest friend, Chip Blacker. When he answered the phone, I simply said, “Mother’s dead, Chip. Can you come over?” He did so, sleeping on the sofa while I tried to go back to sleep for a few hours. I already had reservations to Denver the next morning. Chip drove me to the airport, and I boarded the United Airlines plane for what seemed like the longest flight of my life. Going to my seat, I ran into a former student.

  “Hi, are you going home to Denver for a visit?” she asked, knowing nothing of my mother’s death.

  “My mother died last night,” I said. Then, to reinforce the point more for myself than for her, I said, “My mother’s gone.”

  Beverly picked me up at the airport. My father greeted me at the door and we hugged each other, tears flowing gently. His first words surprised me. “She was such a fighter. She fought to stay with us. She fought so hard,” he said. He was right. Ever since her first bout with cancer Mother had refused to let her own circumstances intrude on our family’s life. Because she’d been so tough and unyielding to her disease, sometimes even making light of it, we had been able to get on with our lives.

  Daddy continued pouring out his thoughts, saying that he already missed her but that he had thanked God for answering his prayer.

  “What prayer?” I said, somewhat puzzled.

  “The one that asked him not to leave me alone with a fifteen-year-old girl,” he replied. I was hurting then more than I ever had, but I too felt just a touch of gratitude that my mother had died when I was thirty, not fifteen. She’d seen me grow into a successful adult. I was so grateful that she’d held my first book, attended the Gores teaching awards ceremony, and shared with my father a glimpse of how well I would do at Stanford.

  Still, I was so incredibly sad. I went into my parents’ bedroom and sat on the side of the bed. There I looked around a room filled with my mother’s belongings: her jewelry box, family photos, and the heavy mahogany furniture that had been her pride and joy since I was a child. And then something happened. I felt my mother’s spirit release, breaking its bonds with earth. There was the unmistakable sensation of someone or something leaving the room. I had not made it home before she died. Had she in some sense waited? This was a mystical moment that I have never been able to adequately describe. Yet I suddenly felt at peace. The Apostle Paul had called it “the peace that passeth all understanding.”
I got down on my knees and prayed that God would take care of Mother’s eternal soul.

  Daddy and I planned a very small funeral, not making a newspaper announcement of her death until the day after the services. My mother did not have many close friends outside of her family, and a public funeral just seemed wrong. About fifty friends and family—her brothers and sisters and my cousins—gathered at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church and then at the cemetery. We laid her to rest elegantly dressed in a gray and black dress and very high black heels. Even after all that she had been through, she still looked very beautiful. It wasn’t too hard to picture the long-ago image of the pretty young teacher. The thought crossed my mind briefly that I should have dressed her in red.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “The Moving Van Is Here”

  IT IS often said that the hardest days after the loss of a loved one are when all of the mourners leave and you’re truly alone. Mother was buried on a Wednesday, and the last family member, my cousin Denise, left that Sunday. My father and I went back to the apartment and there was truly nothing to do. We tried watching television but finally decided to go out to dinner. The two of us had never been at a loss for words, but now we were. Daddy kept ordering vodka. I snapped at him that he had had enough. “I need you to be with me,” I blurted out. He didn’t drink any more. We sat in silence.

  The next day we took care of a number of business matters, primarily insurance and financial tasks. Daddy said that he’d like to visit his mother and sister in Illinois. My eighty-eight-year-old grandmother was pretty frail, and Daddy had discouraged her from attending the funeral. The trip to Illinois turned out to be good for him, but I worried about returning to Stanford and leaving him alone. I suggested that we go directly from Illinois to Palo Alto, where he could spend a couple of weeks with me. My friend Randy picked us up at the airport. Years later she’d tell me that she was worried for Daddy’s survival when she saw him. “He was as broken as any person I had ever seen,” she said.

  Many people—doctors, ministers, and colleagues—had told Daddy what people always tell widowers: “Don’t make any decisions for at least a year.” But my gregarious and popular father somehow felt isolated after my mother died. I sensed that there was nothing to keep him in Denver any longer. We had thus agreed that he should look around Palo Alto to see if he might want to move to California in the next year or so.

  One evening during Daddy’s stay, I arranged a little dinner at my house. Harold Boyd, a black colleague from Stanford, invited a few people closer to my dad’s age. Daddy had a great time that evening and in his subsequent meetings at the university, befriending Catherine Milton, the director of the Public Service Center. The Center’s mandate was to connect Stanford students to public service opportunities. Catherine and my dad really hit it off, and my father came back brimming with ideas about what Stanford could do in the broader community.

  After a couple of weeks, Daddy said that it was time for him to return to Denver. He told me he really liked Palo Alto and might consider moving, but he wanted to think about it. I encouraged him to do so, telling him that we only had each other and should be together. I didn’t push, figuring he needed time to decide. So I put him on the plane in early September and worried constantly about him. A couple of times when I called, I could tell that he’d been drinking. I worried less about any kind of addiction than about what it signaled regarding his state of mind—and, I had to assume, his health. My concern deepened when one of his former students called to say that he seemed to be cutting people off. As much as people tried, they couldn’t get him to leave the house.

  I was physically in Palo Alto, but my heart was in Denver with my dad. And I was having a rough time too. I threw myself into my work at Hoover, but the sadness was sometimes overwhelming. I had many friends and found plenty to do, but I felt incredibly empty. Deep despair could be triggered by seemingly innocuous events. One evening in the checkout line at the grocery store I saw a woman of about seventy. She was wearing comfortable, old-lady shoes. My mother will never grow old, I thought. I left my groceries on the counter and ran to my car, where I sobbed uncontrollably until the feeling passed.

  The first weekend in October, Randy suggested that we take a football trip. Perhaps it would help me to get away. I was by this time a rabid fan of the Cincinnati Bengals (the Browns had folded for a time), and Randy loved the New York Giants. The two teams were playing in Cincinnati, where she had family and a place to stay, so we decided to make the trip. I got up that Sunday morning in Cincinnati and called my dad to check on him. I noticed that he sounded more cheerful than he had in many weeks.

  “Daddy, what are you doing?” I asked him.

  “I’m packing up,” he said. “The movers will be here tomorrow. I’ll be in Palo Alto on Wednesday.”

  Daddy had arranged a visiting fellowship through Catherine Milton and rented an apartment at Alma Village (aka “Moon Palace”). I later learned that he was already in touch with Harold Boyd, from the dinner, and new friends Lois Powell and Betty Allen. Harold was a little surprised to find that my father hadn’t told me he was moving. So was I, but I couldn’t have been happier. I wanted to be with my dad. I was really pleased that he wanted to be with me too.

  Within a few weeks, Daddy had settled in. In addition to diving into his work at the Public Service Center, he once again befriended and began to counsel student athletes. My father was making friends as rapidly as he always had. His little apartment, stuffed with the family furniture, became a gathering place for all kinds of people—especially middle-aged ladies who brought him food. Daddy would, in turn, invite them out to dinner or buy them Valentine’s Day candy. After about six months he asked me, “Do you think I’m dating?” It was so cute. I answered that yes, I thought he was, and that I was very happy about it. He beamed and continued to ask the ladies out—several of them. Yet he kept a crocheted plaque above the refrigerator that said “Angelena’s Kitchen.”

  We still had our moments of great sadness, the most wrenching coming the first Christmas Day after Mother’s death. The holiday season had been tolerable. We engaged in many of the Christmas traditions we always had, decorating both my house and his and shopping for family presents. But on Christmas morning when we lit the last Advent candle the emptiness was overwhelming. We’d received an invitation from my senior faculty colleague Jan Triska to join his family for dinner. I’d declined, thinking that Daddy and I would want to be alone. But as we sat in silence after dinner, I decided that we had to get out of the house. I called Jan and we went to his home for dessert. I have been forever grateful to the Triska family for the kindness of that invitation and the respite it provided on that difficult day.

  Ultimately, I decided that Daddy was adjusting very well, so I felt freer to travel and accepted a three-week visiting professorship at the National Defense Academy of Japan in Yokosuka. I had never been to Japan and I have to admit that it was a somewhat hard place to be under the circumstances. The Academy, their West Point, had never had a woman teach there. In fact, I don’t think they had ever had a woman on the school grounds before I came. One clue was the absence of a ladies’ room. The school solved the problem by making one of the men’s rooms off-limits to everyone else but me. I never knew exactly what the huge sign on the door said, but it had a few too many characters to simply say “Do Not Enter.” I was pleased to learn that the Academy admitted its first female cadet in 1992.

  I also had a hard time adjusting to the rigid hierarchy. All military academies are hierarchical, but in Japan this is exacerbated by cultural customs. Somehow I could never learn to bow at exactly the right level. One day my host professor told me that I was bowing too low, requiring the cadets to try to go lower. The next day I wasn’t bowing low enough. The language, which is also hierarchical, made it difficult to find an appropriate greeting in a case where a female of higher status addresses a male of lower standing. When one of my host professors invited me to his home for dinner and
his wife served us but ate in the kitchen, I was just appalled.

  In general, I found the whole experience stultifying and looked forward to returning to my tiny hotel room every day. I’ve always said that I love sports so much that I’ll watch anything with a score at the end. In Japan that meant watching the Grand Sumo Wrestling Tournament. I actually came to like it, giving the wrestlers nicknames such as “Fred” and “Toby” since I couldn’t understand what was being said. To this day, I still like to watch sumo wrestling.

  At the end of my trip, one of the professors told me that I’d been extremely successful in my teaching. “More important,” he said in heavily accented English, “it shows the Japanese that not all black people are stupid.” I knew that he meant it as a compliment and thanked him for his kindness. Fortunately, I’ve since made many subsequent trips to an evolving Japan that have wiped away some of those early negative memories. I am happy to say that I’m now quite fond of the country, which has changed a lot in twenty-five years.

  Not long after returning to Palo Alto, I left again—this time for Harvard to take up a six-week visiting position at Sam Huntington’s research center, the Center for International Affairs. Huntington was the godfather of the study of civil-military relations. His epic book The Soldier and the State, though published in 1957, was still the most important work in the literature. I wanted to get to know him and to seek his advice. I also understood that developing this relationship was a key to my future. At the time of tenure decisions, universities send out letters asking the most eminent senior faculty to rank tenure candidates against others in their field. A junior faculty member who doesn’t rank number one or two is unlikely to get tenure. The worst thing that can happen is for a senior evaluator to say something like “I am not really familiar with her work.” I was determined that Sam Huntington would be familiar with my work.