Day of Life and Death

The doctors were optimistic.

Supporters cheer during a Trump rally on Nov. 5, 2024 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

It was 52 years ago when I sat with my mother and brothers on the vinyl-covered visitors’ room loveseats at Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia. My father, at the age of 51, was awaiting surgery after a heart attack.

The plan was to bypass several clogged arteries. Even now, a half-century later, no such surgery is exactly routine, but in 1972 it was extremely high-risk, partly because the imaging of the era was quite primitive. The doctors didn’t know exactly what they would find.

On the other hand, the medical team expressed optimism that they could deal with the immediate problem of the blockages, then over time use diet, drugs and exercise to prevent subsequent crises. They told my mother, “We’ve come a long way.” And my dad looked fine. Before surgery he was in no pain, he was awake and alert, and the communications issues that had bedeviled him for three years after a stroke were no worse. 

But we were scared out of our gourds. My father had a long history of health problems. From the spinal meningitis that washed him out of the Army during World War II to pleurisy, phlebitis, high blood pressure, a carotid artery blockage and, four years earlier, the stroke. Just one year earlier, I’d been sitting at the foot of the bed watching TV with my dad when he bolted upright. He had suddenly gone blind in one eye, a micro clot having lodged in a tiny capillary feeding his retina. “Oh, shit,” he said.

But he rallied. He always rallied, one reason the medics urged calm. He’s young, obviously resilient and he’s in very good hands, they said. I suppose it was comforting. Still, we took turns breaking into tears. We imagined life without him. We wondered how we didn’t see how sick he was. Me, I relived all of the many shouting arguments I’d had with him over my past three adolescent years, when he was emotionally compromised with post-stroke lability and I was a teenage piece of shit. On the night of his heart attack, we’d had a shouting match over who would drive to Thanksgiving dinner. What if he died and that was our last conversation? I sobbed. And sobbed. Too much for a boy to bear.

Surgery was scheduled for 12:30 pm. We were hunkered down for a 4- or 5-hour vigil.

Then, at 1 pm a nurse came in to take my mother into the recovery room, where my father had already been wheeled. The surgeons had opened him up and immediately closed. His arteries were irretrievably shot, his lungs were riddled with blood clots. Already awake from the anesthesia, he gasped for breath. Then he spoke his last words. “Oh, shit.” 

On that horrible afternoon, I experienced catastrophe, heartbreak, the loss of something not merely precious but priceless. It was beyond comprehension. I wept. I grieved. To this day, I have never gotten over it. Nor did I ever imagine I could feel such an excruciating loss again.  

I was wrong. 

Last night, déjà vu. Never mind me and my pain, my grief. The loss belongs to America and the world. Catastrophe, heartbreak, the loss of something not merely precious but priceless. American democracy is a shambles. American exceptionalism is exposed as a lie. As I’ve been endlessly repeating, America is no shining city on a hill; it’s just the latest weak-willed, hard-hearted, populist volunteer for authoritarian menace. We are Hungary, Turkey, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, India and one giant step closer to Nazi Germany. It will be incalculably catastrophic, this MAGA fascism. Start counting. The reign of terror is 76 days away.

Ironic number, 76. It conjures the birth of our republic. But the optimistic experts were wrong and the dream of our founding fathers is dead. This was the last gasp. Oh, shit.