Lessons From Living, Dying and Living Again

Splenomegoly Days

            A sultry August late night in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in the middle of the 2009 racing season. Beneath a full moon, the downtown streets – Caroline, Putnam, Phila – were crawling with college kids and overserved railbirds pounding one last pint and hanging around for one last song. Our little group of four was escaping up Broadway in the general direction of our motel. It’d been a long day. Up at dawn after way too little sleep for an early golf starting time, 18 holes, back for a shower, a change and a long walk to the track. Then race after race, losing hard-earned money with mechanical regularity, grabbing a few beers and some fried chicken, baking in the sun in between races. Later, rum drinks at Siro’s, the trackside bar, then a downtown crawl, bouncing from place to place, nodding to the live music, girl watching, as if it was 1977 again when we, delusional as always, saw ourselves as the stars of the show.

            We’d been making this Saratoga trip for 34 years. It began as a day excursion, about a 2-hour-plus drive from our Waterbury, Connecticut, home, for three guys – old friends – then four of us. As the years went by, the trip came to include one overnight, then a two-night stay, while our numbers grew to eight, then twelve, and even fourteen at one point before coming back down to eight again. We all went back a long way. Some had even gone to grammar school and played Little League together. For years, we’d played softball and golf in summer, basketball in winter, and then retreated to friendly locals for beers and true camaraderie. But Saratoga every summer was the undisputed jewel on our social calendar.  It was much anticipated as it neared and lamented in its passing. The previous 33 trips had supplied us with innumerable memories and stories that we repeated among ourselves until they passed into legend. So when one in our group wandering up Broadway that August night in 2009 suggested a final stop at a newish place called Limoncello, who were the other three of us to say no?

            The truth was, however, that I was in quite a bit of pain and very, very tired. As we found a booth at Limoncello, I was hurting enough to be seriously alarmed by my condition. As had been the case for months, maybe even longer, the pain radiated from my lower left abdomen and up my left side to the shoulder, where it perched like a dyspeptic parrot. As types of pain went, it felt deeper and more fundamental, and had certainly lasted far longer, than a pulled muscle or a bruise. It radiated down there in my terra incognita, south of the heart and lungs, just north of the digestive tract, where the lesser known organs joined together and practiced their unknowable mumbo-jumbo. Every now and then over the months I’d wondered what the specific source might be. The kidneys? Didn’t seem likely given their location. The liver? Wrong side (although hadn’t I read about people with the liver on the left side?). The spleen? Could be, but why, and what does the spleen do anyway? The stomach? Maybe, and come to think of it I had experienced unusual feelings of fullness from time to time. The gall bladder, pancreas, duodenum? Now we were getting into the truly deep splanchnic jungle, one I felt unqualified to explore.

            But sitting there at Limoncello, weary and probably a bit withdrawn, I made the decision to at last deal seriously with the problem. The pain and fatigue, and my putting up with it, had reached a critical stage and I was not too drunk to realize it. I was 59 years old, after all. I had a family I loved – a wife of 25 years and children aged 23, 22 and 19. It was time to take these red flags seriously. Even as I downed an unnecessary Sambuca nightcap, I vowed to call the doctor as soon as I got back home.

            Steve Rubenstein was my hometown GP. I’d come to him by a circuitous route. Marcia and I had become social friends with him and his wife, June, some years earlier. He was from the same city in New Jersey – Bayonne – where my mother had grown up – practically the same block. This gave us some gritty common ground to chat and laugh about. When I finally got thoroughly fed up with my previous doc, I asked Steve if I could climb aboard his patient list. I liked his serious, low-key, common-sense approach, his experience and confidence, and the way he began many of his sentences with the phrase “In terms of,” in the manner of a beloved med school lecturer. I hadn’t been much of a believer in annual check-ups, so he probably hadn’t seen me in quite a while. Still, after only a little prodding and probing of my abdomen, he came right to the point.

            “I terms of your complaint, your spleen is enlarged,” he said. “It might be pointing to a problem in your blood. Do you know Joe Bowen? I’m going to send you over to him.”

            I didn’t know Bowen personally, but I knew who he was. He was an oncologist, a cancer guy, and not the category of specialist that you wanted popping up on your go-see list. My Limoncello concerns were escalating rapidly. I had a few questions for Dr. Rubenstein, but he danced around them. I’m sure he believed Joe Bowen could answer them more authoritatively. I probably didn’t quite believe a sore spleen could be anything too serious, at least not right away. But I couldn’t dismiss the look on my good doctor’s face. 

            Bowen’s office was located in the Harold Leever Regional Cancer Center, an up-to-date joint effort opened in 2002 by our two local hospitals, Waterbury and St. Mary’s. It was located in Waterbury, about 15 minutes from where I lived. I’d driven by it many, many times, seen it under construction in fact, but now I’d be making my first visit. It was, and is, a full-service facility, housing doctor’s offices and examination rooms, high-tech scanners and other equipment, a chemo wing, meditation room, meditation garden, and a cancer-savvy nutritionist and social worker. Of the most interest to me on my first visit, however, was the patient waiting area and the people who were waiting there. After checking in and finding a seat, I took a look around at my neighbors. Could this be my new cohort? I studied them as hard as I could without being caught out as nosy or weird. The L-shaped room was small, seating maybe 15, but it was large enough to allow me a good sampling of our illness’s impressive range. So many hard miles on their faces. Those few in wheelchairs were most prominent. They were approaching the final frontier and might, if they wanted, have terrible stories to tell the others in the room who were further back in line. The guy in the corner with the smoker’s mug tried to muffle his persistent liquid cough. Others stared vacantly or spoke quietly with the person who’d brought them in. And although the nurses who circulated in and out were friendly and even cheerful, they couldn’t do much to ease the worry and fear that hung in the room like wallpaper.

            I didn’t say anything or strike up a conversation with anyone, but I tried to silently convey that I didn’t really belong there. I was an outsider. The new kid. If all went the way I hoped, this might be my only visit. These weren’t my people, I thought. They were sick. I really wasn’t, and I wouldn’t easily be brought into their ranks. But of course I hadn’t even seen the doctor yet.

            The feeling of being examined by Joe Bowen was very different from that of being looked over by Steve Rubenstein. Both were worthy veteran doctors, but Bowen was a specialist, Rubenstein a generalist. Bowen had immersed himself in the many faces of cancer and was qualified and ready to make pronouncements that could land like hammer blows. He came into the examination room, listened to my story, asked me some questions and had me lie back on the table for a little probing and poking. Like a conjurer over a Ouija board (and like Steve Rubenstein), his fingers came to rest over my spleen – my stupid bloated spleen. He sat me up again and in an avuncular, oddly comforting Waterbury way of talking (he was a native of the city) covered all the bases, but with a notably special emphasis on a condition, a cancer of the blood, called “myelofibrosis.” It was the first time I’d ever heard the word. He said it was probably what I had, and he didn’t leave much room for doubt. He asked me if I’d had fevers, vomiting, diarrhea, bruising, rashes or night sweats. I was relieved to say that I hadn’t. In response to my questions, he said myelofibrosis had no known cause and no cure yet, but that an encouraging number of treatments were becoming available. He added that for confirmation he wanted me to come back in for a bone marrow biopsy, another first for me, and the sooner the better.

            I returned to Leever a few days later, this time feeling I had a bit more in common with the waiting-room crowd. As I waited, I wondered what the set-up for a biopsy might be. I fantasized bright operating-theater lights, a rack of IVs and a bristling medical team. Instead, I was ushered into a nondescript back room and told to remove everything but my boxers. After several minutes, Dr. Bowen came in and had me lie flat, face down, on the examination table. I think he gave me a local anesthetic in the region of my pelvis. As Bowen set to work, my general feeling was one of disappointment. Where were the movie-set color and lights? Instead, I felt that I’d been transported back to an earlier, possibly illicit, gas-lit practice of medicine, maybe in the frontier west, where a crusty old solo practitioner played by Thomas Mitchell would do the best he could with a bottle of whiskey and the few tools at his disposal.

            It would take me a long while, and several more biopsies administered by others, to appreciate how sure-handed Joe Bowen was in his technique and how good he was. He explored expertly but, I gathered, came up empty – a dry tap, as it’s known. Fibrosis had built up so much in the bone that it prevented an extraction of marrow. I wish I could have witnessed the process, but with my face down on the table, I could only go by what I could hear. It wasn’t a terrible process. I didn’t feel pain so much as that weird, uncomfortable sensation of bone – inner bone – being disturbed by a metal tool.

            He patched me up and asked me to come back a week or so later, when he confirmed his initial diagnosis. He described the things in my blood/bone/marrow that didn’t belong there, things I’d never heard of but that were without a doubt cancerous. He said there were courses of chemotherapy that could be helpful to me. He even mentioned the removal of my spleen, a splenectomy, as something to possibly consider further down the line. He wanted me to come back in three months for a blood draw. I thanked him and told him that as a matter of course I’d seek a second opinion. He said he understood.

            My next stop was Yale-New Haven Hospital, about 30 miles away in New Haven. It’s a large teaching hospital, highly respected, and affiliated with the Yale School of Medicine. But I wasn’t there to sample all of Yale’s many wonders. I was merely asking for confirmation – or not – of Joe Bowen’s verdict. I presented myself, and my data, to Dr. Peter Marks, who looked me over, did the Ouija board thing with my spleen, asked me some by-now familiar questions and then retreated for consultation with his team of oncologist/hematologists. I liked Marks, and enjoyed talking with him (he’s the same Peter Marks who more recently, as the nation’s top vaccination administrator, resigned his post after butting heads with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), but I wasn’t yet in the mood to seek an alliance with a particular doctor. I don’t remember if it was the same day or several days later that I sat with his team of three specialists. They felt certain that the diagnosis of myelofibrosis had been correct. They recommended I keep a close eye on blood counts, fatigue levels and any other worrisome symptoms that might appear (the forbidding “night sweats” rose once again like a vagrant moon).

            When I got back home, I understood that an initial checkpoint had been reached. With the verdict so plainly in, Marcia and I needed to spend some time going over what it was, what it meant and what we might do about it. Luckily for me, she loved nothing more than talking through a difficult personal problem, ideally over a glass of wine. Generally, I preferred she do this with one of her friends rather than with me. I was less likely by nature to open up, but in this case didn’t see how I could avoid it. So for a couple of weeks in the fall of 2009, I’d get home from my job as Editor of Connecticut Magazine and Marcia from hers as a development officer at Choate-Rosemary Hall School and we’d take stock. Our conversations took many different sidetracks and scenic routes, but they always ended up in the same place. There was no doubt that I had a serious, essentially incurable form of cancer, one I’d never heard of and didn’t know anything about. Day to day, I felt its presence, but as long as I didn’t overdo things, as I had at Saratoga, it didn’t really intrude. True, I couldn’t sleep on my right side because I felt it a little too much, but any other position was fine. In other words, in its present state, I could live with it. And Marcia could, for the time being, live with me living with it. Someone along the way, I think it was Dr. Marks, had told me the cancer could blow up and demand action in six months or in as many as ten years. I told him I’d opt for the latter.

            Yet something inside me demanded even further confirmation. I felt the need to consult a doctor, and a practice, and preferably a whole research team, that specialized in what I had. I wanted to visit a place where they talked about and thought about myelofibrosis all the time, even in the break room and on the elevator. I wanted the keenest myelo minds and the latest myelo breakthroughs. Even myelo gossip would be fine. Another thing Dr. Marks had mentioned during our consult at Yale was the name of a doctor/researcher in New York who seemed to be at or very near the head of the field. It wasn’t long before I put the words “Ronald Hoffman” into my Google search box. And it was shortly after that that I found myself driving down to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan for a visit to the third floor of its Ruttenberg Treatment Center on Madison Avenue.   

            The waiting area at Ruttenberg was enormous, with seating for about 100. With its steady murmur of voices and stream of half-intelligible announcements, down-on-their-luck patrons, and names being called for blood draws and appointments, the room had something of a bus terminal vibe, only, tragically, with all the buses headed to the same destination. Just about everyone was identifiably sick, some in that late stage of uncaring, disheveled stupor, and all were clearly in need of care. They sat with their phones or laptops or a book or knitting. Others just sat. A few were in wheelchairs or even came through on gurneys. Others came with friends or family who’d be able to help them get around or take down what the doctor or nurse had to say. Every once in a while, a volunteer came around with crackers and apple juice. Even knowing what I then knew about my own condition, I remained aloof. I had trouble thinking of myself as this deathly sick or of these poor souls as my new tribe.

            If Mount Sinai was the healthcare equivalent of Yankee Stadium, with its 7,400 doctors and 42,000 employees spread out across several campuses, Dr. Hoffman was one of its most reliable all-stars. For more than 40 years he’d been helping to pioneer the fight against myeloproliferative disorders. His stated long-term goal was to “advance the cure,” identifying abnormalities in the stem cells and then finding ways to deplete or eliminate them. Progress by 2009 had come in fits and starts, stalling but not ending the takeover of the disease with various chemo pyrotechnics. Meanwhile, stem-cell replacement, also known as bone-marrow replacement, was emerging more and more as a viable alternative. It was increasingly being performed but was still too uncertain and risky to have entered the main stream of treatments.

            Certainly it was not mentioned by Ron Hoffman during our brief get-together. He saw me in his office, and I think he knew what he was going to see. He asked me the usual questions and probed the usual places. His manner was affable, open and absolutely authoritative, and he was ready to hear my questions. He even gave me his cell-phone number. But his analysis was straight to the point and nothing I hadn’t already heard. My myelo had not yet reached a critical stage and might not for some time. I would feel the effects of anemia and my enlarged spleen. I might want to play 9 holes instead  of 18. I would need to get my blood counts read regularly.

            So ended my initial run of doctors and their waiting rooms, and so began a decade of pax sanguis – of treading water, feeling not so terribly bad, and defiantly taking 10 more trips with the boys to Saratoga. I didn’t keep my condition a secret. I thought it best for people to know that something might be coming. But I really spoke about it very little. And if someone asked me about it, I’d smile and say, “It’s asleep.” But of course it wasn’t asleep. With cancer’s unerring industriousness it would remain hard at work over the course of the coming 10 years – fully occupied with the perverted, single-minded task of turning my own blood against me.

One writing form I’d never really tried my hand at was the short story. Until now. One day recently I heard about a distinguished old couple who’d made a very difficult decision – and a story, a short one, immediately took shape for me. I know that elderly WASP couples aren’t fashionable these days among fiction editors and publishers, but I do think that life in our nation’s retirement communities and assisted-living facilities, where millions reside with their stories and fading memories, is well worth exploring.

The Washburns

The news raced through the corridors of The Hearth at Pilgrim Hill from the moment Rick and Kit Washburn announced that they were going to starve themselves to death.

By the next day, the initial shock had begun to wear off, but only a little.

“They’ve obviously thought it through,” said Gigi Sands at lunch. “They don’t want to wait for the unknown to come and sweep them away. I think we get that.”

“We also get that they want to go at the same time,” said Gene West, who just two days earlier had played gin with Rick Washburn.

“More or less the same time,” said Evie Coviello.

“Yes,” said Gigi. “It’s an inexact science.”

They spooned through their soup. Cream of broccoli. Carl Nevers, who was not a broccoli person, busied himself with a tiny packet of oyster crackers. They’re starving us already anyway, he thought but didn’t say. Their group of five—three widows and two widowers—tried to gather for lunch every day. They called themselves the Lost Spouse Club. On many days, doctor’s appointments or other obligations interfered with their having a full table, but today all were present. Each of them, either openly or not, had been shaken by the news of the Washburns.

“Is what they’re doing legal?” asked Betty Samuelson.

“To not eat?” replied Gene West, leaving the rest unsaid.

“Unless it becomes a big deal,” said Evie.

“Yes, right,” said Gene, trying to seize authority on the issue. “If it becomes a big deal, someone will step in and stop it.”

“Put a tube down their throats,” said Carl.

“I don’t think it would come to that, Carl,” said Gene. “Rick and Kit want to go peacefully, not in a struggle with the authorities.”

“They’re trusting we won’t let word get out,” added Gigi. “Even staff isn’t supposed to know, although Kit didn’t mention that specifically.”

“Staff already know,” said Carl. “You can’t keep this sort of thing quiet.”

“Especially when you issue a proclamation about it,” said Gigi.

“I wonder what they’ll do,” said Betty. “Management, I mean.”

“If they do anything,” said Evie.

“Maybe they’ll just let it ride,” said Betty. “That’s what they’re good at.”

Few would feel comfortable saying so, but death and dying were more often than not the topics du jour at the Hearth. On any given day, a new name from the population might be revealed as being ill, or on the way out, or gone. There was even a shrine of sorts out by the front desk, where photos of the recently deceased were displayed, along with brief biographies and expressions of admiration and support from other residents. Death at the Hearth could be quick: familiar faces, longtime staples of the dining room and movie theater, could disappear without warning, never to be seen again. Or it could be gradual: if someone was said to have “moved on,” it meant they’d left independent living for the obscurity of the medical wing. Betty Samuelson once called the medical wing “The Terminal,” and the name stuck.

In most cases, the end was accompanied by familiar language. “X” had waged a brave battle. “Y” had remained notably cheerful throughout. “Z” had faced excruciating pain with equanimity. Which is what was making the Washburns’ decision so remarkable. They weren’t about to go down a dark, messy path chosen for them by fate. They were choosing their own route and their own language. Theirs would be a story of their own making. Suddenly the Washburns were the only thing anyone wanted to talk about. And it wasn’t just the Lost Spouse Club doing the talking. It was all of the Hearth.

Because of a recent joint birthday party, everyone knew that Rick Washburn was 95 and Kit 94. He’d seen brief service in World War II, on a ship in the Pacific, and then had come home to a degree from Bowdoin and a long, far-reaching career with the State Department. Kit was from a prominent Eastern family. She’d been a much-honored newspaper reporter and later a syndicated political columnist under the name of Andrea George. They had two children, a daughter, Harriet, who lived outside Cleveland, and a son, Jim, on the Delaware shore, now both pushing 70 themselves. Rick and Kit had zigzagged across the globe for many decades before finally settling down on the Cape, but, somehow, most likely with some very good and loyal help along the way, they’d made it all work. They’d been married 68 years. Even in very old age, they were a handsome, modest, devoted couple, and a distinguished presence. Day after day, they could be observed roaming the broad corridors of the Hearth, lately with Rick leaning heavily on a cane and then in a motorized wheelchair, and always with at least a nod and a smile to those they encountered along the way. They hosted lively discussion groups and annual carol sings, and more often than not made sure to be present for public events and celebrations. Their minds remained remarkably sharp and even probing. In their own way, and certainly without looking for it, they were considered by most to be the stars of the Hearth.

It was Kit who’d handled the announcement of their starvation plans. She’d come into the dining room at peak dinner time and moved among the tables, distributing a letter—a straightforward disclosure that affirmed her newspaper background:

Dear Friends,

After a long, productive, happy time together and with others, Rick and I have decided that we are going to end our lives. Beginning this day, November 9, 2021, we have stopped eating. We plan to take only water until such a time as our bodies give out entirely and we starve to death. This may seem an abrupt and extreme measure, but we have done the research and thought it through. And, yes, we’ve discussed it with Harriet and Jim, who are both fully on board with exceptional understanding and compassion. They’ve both promised to be with us at the end. As some of you may be aware, we have experienced a number of health reversals in recent months, none serious, but each foretelling an increasingly bleak future. Everything—seeing, hearing, walking, eating, even thinking—has become increasingly hard for us. As we approach 100 years, we’d prefer to go out more or less as we are now—in one piece, as it were. Starvation isn’t necessarily painless, but it is relatively peaceful and organic. We won’t be introducing poisons into our systems or resorting to the violence so often associated with suicide. We figure that at our ages we probably have days rather than weeks left, and after the first few days we expect to be in a weakened state and confined to our apartment, where we’ll be under professional care. We will be doing a lot of hand holding, the two of us, and thinking of past days and of course all of you. We hope we haven’t shocked you. We think it’s only fair that you be informed of our plan, but we ask that you not spread the news too far and wide. We don’t want it to become a “thing.” Again, please don’t think this a rash or reckless decision. It’s simply what’s best for us.

Avec amour,

Kit and Rick Washburn

Kit hadn’t stopped for conversation. She’d simply walked out of the dining room, leaving tumult in her wake. At some of the tables, the statement was read aloud by one voice. At others, it was passed around. After that, it quickly circulated among those who, for one reason or another, hadn’t come to dinner or were confined out in The Terminal. The expressions of shock and disbelief that night were widespread. Yea and nay judgments flowed freely and often loudly. But there was, too, an undercurrent feeling that the Washburns had knocked down a wall of sorts by giving public voice to private feelings shared by many, and, beyond that, that they were openly and even flamboyantly committing to a final act that, in one form or another—whether by starvation, overdose, suffocation, carbon monoxide or gunshot— had up until now been one of the Hearth’s most respected and tightly protected rituals.

After their lunch with the group, Evie Coviello and Betty Samuelson relocated to seats by the gas fireplace in the Hearth’s main lobby. They were old friends, going back to their days as young housewives in Swansea. It had been Evie who’d discovered the Hearth and fallen in love with its scrub pine vistas and frequent infusions of pungent sea air. She and her husband, Ray, bought in and then convinced Betty and Stu to follow. Ray and Stu played golf and card games together, but they never felt happy or at home in their new surroundings. They died within six weeks of each other—Ray of a heart attack, then Stu of natural causes in his sleep. That was eight years ago. Since then, Evie and Betty had become better friends than ever, often sharing confidences they’d never share with anyone else.

“I’ve been wondering what Greta would think of all this Washburn stuff,” said Evie. “God rest her soul.”

“Funny, I thought of her this morning, too,” said Betty.

Greta Jensen had been a close mutual friend who, three years earlier, in order to escape the frightening depths of Parkinson’s, swallowed an entire bottle of Luminal one evening right after dinner. She was discovered the next afternoon, lying on her perfectly made bed, her various letters and legal documents arrayed around her like peacock feathers.

“’Take with food,’” said Evie, which once again made both women laugh. Even for an intentional overdose, Greta had followed the prescription’s instructions.

“She wouldn’t have liked this sort of attention, though,” said Betty after a moment. “She went quietly.”

“Like a mouse,” said Evie.

“And she wasn’t the only one.”

Over the years, there’d been any number of episodes at the Hearth. Some were later confirmed as suicides while others remained mysterious. Hugh Gaffney, depressed after losing Nancy, had certainly shot himself on purpose, even taking care to first cover his head with a pillow. Darby Bly, on the way out with late-stage ovarian cancer, slit her wrist in a warm bath. No two ways about what her intention had been. But Kay Seabright remained an enigma, either confused or purposeful about her major doses of OxyContin. For that matter, always suspicious of the words “natural causes,” Evie had long wondered about Betty’s own Stu, although she never dared ask about it. Anyway, the point was that none of them, or any of the others, had announced their intentions to a full dining room, which now the Washburns had done.

Betty took two sugar cookies from her jacket pocket and gave one to Evie.

“Well, they better go through with it,” she said.

It was four days later that the Washburns’ apartment door, 207B, was shut permanently to the outside world. Except for family and caregivers, no one would be allowed to enter. The final act was now under way. The evening before, Kit made herself available in the music room for what turned out to be something like a last briefing. She was now in a wheelchair herself, having weakened considerably. She spoke slowly but precisely. Rick was confined to his bed, she said, at that very moment lying fully clothed on his back, atop the covers, with his legs crossed at the ankles and his head propped up. They’d moved their beds to the living room, where big windows allowed them a view of woods, a distant meadow and, in recent days, an evening moonrise. Soon, Rick would be permanently changed into his bedclothes, and so would she. They were listening to Mozart and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and looking at old family movies and photographs. From time to time, she said, one of the caregivers read to them from a book, but it was mostly for Rick’s benefit and she was embarrassed to admit she couldn’t recall the author’s name. Finally, she said, “When we close our door tomorrow, that will be it. We’ll be on our own.”

When she was done, she looked around briefly as if to entertain questions, but no one in the small group, which included Carl Nevers, felt like asking anything. Instead, they said their goodbyes and watched as Kit was wheeled back down the corridor. As she neared the corner, she didn’t turn around to face them—she couldn’t—but she weakly raised her right hand in a sort of final salute.

Carl relayed the details to the others the next day at lunch.

“Shutting the door like that,” said Gene. “It reminds me of when the astronauts used to climb into the capsule and close the hatch behind them.”

 “I just went by their apartment on the way down here,” said Gigi. “Their door was definitely closed. I mean, all the doors are closed, but there was a finality to theirs, with us knowing. It had almost an aura to it.”

The others nodded. They’d all walked past it at some point.

“Kit described the scene so well,” said Evie. “You could picture Rick lying there in bed.”

“The scary thing is, that could be me she was describing,” said Gene. He held up half of his BLT. “I’m not starving myself to death—far from it—but I’ll admit I do spend a lot of the day lying on my back in bed, fully clothed, just like Rick.”

“That’s too much information, Gene,” said Evie with a laugh.

“He’s right, though,” said Gigi. “How different are we from the Washburns? Just a little further back in the line.”

It was clear that by now, nearly a week after the Washburns’ announcement, the initial agitation had subsided, and a general understanding and acceptance had crept into its place. If there was one thing this group—the whole Hearth population—was good at, it was taking upsetting news or the day-to-day calamities of life and burying it under a thick blanket of happier thoughts, well wishing, prayer and forgetfulness. But even as they began to move on a bit, they could still quietly admire Kit and Rick for being trailblazers. What they were doing, and how they were doing it, would make it easier for others to contemplate doing the same if and when the time came. Not everyone would want to, of course. Most never would. But the ones who did would realize that they could chart their own course, make their goodbyes, and then just go.

On the eighth day, an ambulance came and took Rick Washburn’s body away. According to a couple of the Hearth’s night owls who’d noticed activity around the front entrance during the 3 a.m. hour, the stretcher had come in and then gone back out again without ceremony. An aide had walked it down to the entrance and seen it off, and on her way back upstairs told them that it had been “Mister” who’d been taken away. Now it would be only Kit behind the door at 207B. How conscious had she been of Rick’s departure? How different would it be now without him beside her? How much longer could she possibly go on nothing but water and ice chips?

These were the questions that bounced back and forth among the Lost Spouse Club early that afternoon.

“She’s a stubborn old Yankee,” said Betty. “She never ate much to begin with.”

“Broccoli raw at lunch and cooked at dinner,” said Evie.

“And gin martinis,” added Betty. “She could still have a ways to go.”

“But now her husband’s not with her anymore,” said Gigi.

“Well, it’s not like you can speed up the process when you’re already starving yourself to death,” said Carl.

“You can always stop taking the water,” offered Gene. “But it’s useless to speculate.”

“I guess we just wait until the ambulance comes again,” said Carl.

As it happened, when the next ambulance did come, it came for Carl. Later that same afternoon, in the mood to purchase a windbreaker,  he was walking up a short flight of shallow stone steps by the golf clubhouse when he somehow lost his way and pitched forward, hitting his knee and elbow against the stone, and the side of his head against a water spigot protruding from the clubhouse’s foundation. The ambulance arrived promptly and departed without delay, but Carl didn’t survive the ride to the hospital.

An accidental death such as Carl’s was a little unusual for the Hearth. There were loss-of-balance accidents all the time, of course, with so many residents being in their 80s and 90s, but a fatality had to be deemed just very unlucky. Gene took a special interest in his friend’s arrangements, knowing Carl was estranged from his only child, a son, and had no other family to speak of. He wrote up a brief obituary and sent it to the newspaper in Carl’s hometown of Troy, NY, and also to the Fairfield University alumni office. In it, he noted Carl’s service in Korea, his long career in advertising and his special interest in the UConn women’s basketball team and wading shore birds, which had drawn him to Cape Cod.

Gene also spoke briefly at the memorial gathering that took place two days later. Carl hadn’t been a religious man, so the Hearth’s well-practiced vanilla service would be all he’d require. Gigi, Betty and Evie also spoke. They mentioned Carl’s good nature and his fondness for the Hearth kitchen’s macaroons. Betty very unexpectedly sang an unaccompanied version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

At the reception that followed, the surviving members of the Lost Spouse Club stood in a cluster and took in a steady stream of condolences. If the words of comfort at times seemed a little pro forma, it’s because these gatherings were so commonplace at the Hearth. In a big room, with so many voices going at once, no one could hear anything anyway. The exact words didn’t matter as much as the look in the eyes.

After forty minutes or so, Gene, Evie, Gigi and Betty took their macaroons and coffee to a table and sat down. They marveled at the turnout and the affection for Carl, who had always been so unassuming. Betty called him “a dark horse.” The level of conversation swelled when Sharon Delfino sat down at the piano, as she so often did, and began playing her medley of popular show tunes. What could have been a solemn, sad event to see off one of their own had turned into a mid-afternoon celebration, not only of Carl’s life, but of each other. All would have agreed, if asked, that this was the Hearth at its very best.

It was also why no one noticed when an ambulance pulled up once again to the main entrance and a stretcher was wheeled inside. Only the staff at the front desk was on hand to witness the removal of Kit Washburn’s body from the building, and to remark on her passing.

“Isn’t she the lady who wanted everyone to know that she and her husband were starving themselves?” one asked the other. “Should we go tell them?”

“They’ll find out soon enough,” the other said. “Let them have their fun.”

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Easter Confession

by Charles Monagan

Giveaway ends September 22, 2020.

Enter this GoodReads giveaway to pick up a free ebook copy of “The Easter Confession” to read on your Kindle or other device. Nothing to lose, right? Enter today!

See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter Giveaway

I just wanted to pass along the excellent story on my new novel “The Easter Confession” that appeared in this morning’s Sunday Republican under the byline of Alan Bisbort. I’m not sure how or why the paper had on hand a 1958 photo of the Monagan family – and really not sure why they chose to use it – but it does show how nicely parents dressed up their kids back in those days. Anyway, here’s the story. You can find the book for purchase – ebook and paperback – at Amazon.com.

https://www.rep-am.com/life-arts/2020/08/15/before-the-flood-waterbury-author-uses-historic-event-as-backdrop/

MAD was the magazine most kids like me loved as they grew up. But Help! . . . let’s not forget Help!

https://pleasekillme.com/harvey-kurtzman/

Here’s something new posted today, 1/15/20, at pleasekillme.com: https://pleasekillme.com/telstar/

Everything has a story, even things so silly that they have “silly” right in their name. Such is the case with Silly Putty. In 1949, a jazz-loving cool cat from New Haven invested $147 he didn’t have to buy the rights to a weird, bouncy substance – and he ended up 25 years later with a fortune of $140 million. That’s just how things bounce sometimes.  

In 1949, when he was 18 and a freshman at the Yale School of Music, the future jazz legend Willie Ruff wandered into a house on Temple Street in New Haven, looking for his friend and fellow horn student, Bob Cecil. He later recalled the moment in his autobiography, A Call to Assembly:

There on the first floor, I saw Cecil and a busy group of undergraduates, looking like kids in nursery school. They all seemed to be wrestling large blobs of soft but very stubborn plastic material from 50-gallon drums. What was this all about? I watched, more than bemused. They were flattening the stuff out on a table, forming it into long rolls like cookie dough. Still others were cutting the rolls into little chunks and weighing them on postal scales. The chunks then went to the next man in the crude assembly line, who put them into plastic packages that looked like two halves of an egg.

“What the hell is it?” I asked Bob.

“Silly Putty.”

“Come again?”

Bob Cecil had called Ruff over that day to see if he wanted a job on the assembly line (he didn’t; he was already regularly playing his horn for pay) but also to meet Peter Hodgson, a jazz lover and one of New Haven’s coolest cats. Hodgson was 20 years older than Ruff and Cecil. He one day would be described admiringly by The New York Times as “a tall, robust man with a close-cropped, full, gray explorer’s beard.” But at the time, in 1949, after an up-and-down 15-year career in marketing and advertising, he was $12,000 in debt and badly in need of a new idea. That’s when, by chance, a glob of silicone by-product bounced into his life.

The puttylike substance was nothing new. It had been around since 1943, when James Wright, laboring in a General Electric laboratory to come up with a cheap synthetic rubber substitute, happened to drop boric acid into silicone oil, and up sprang a substance that bounced higher and stretched even further than rubber – too high and too far, perhaps, for any practical use. Although GE shared the new discovery with scientists around the world, none showed any interest in developing it. The “nutty putty,” as it was called, remained a curiosity.

When it eventually found its way into Hodgson’s hands, by way of New Haven toy-store owner Ruth Fallgatter, whose catalog he produced, he saw its potential right away. He liked the way it could bounce and stretch, ooze and puddle, break into pieces with a hammer blow, and even pick up images from newspapers and magazines. He scraped together $147 to order a batch from GE and secure the production rights. Then he got together with Fallgatter to sell some to the public at $2 a pop. By all accounts, it did well, but not well enough to keep Fallgatter interested. She dropped out of the development scheme and left it all in the hands of Hodgson. And it was here that his innate creativity and marketing chops conjured up the brilliant egg-shaped container, the crude assembly line of Yalies on Temple Street and the product’s immortal name, Silly Putty.

Fueled mostly by desperation, Hodgson had to move very fast, and he did. Less than a year later, in August 1950, a reporter for the “Talk of the Town” section in The New Yorker would write, “We went into the Doubleday bookshop at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street the other day, intending, in our innocence, to buy a book, and found all the clerks busy selling Silly Putty, a gooey, pinkish, repellent-looking commodity that comes in plastic containers the size and shape of eggs.” A Doubleday official noted that the company’s several shops had sold 10,000 eggs in the preceding month at $1 each. And here was Hodgson himself, extolling the virtues of his product, which in the beginning he had aimed at adults.

“It means five minutes of escape from neurosis,” he told The New Yorker. “It means not having to worry about Korea or family difficulties. And it appeals to people of superior intellect; the inherent ridiculousness of the material acts as an emotional release to hard-pressed adults.” To which the huckster in him could not help adding, “We’ll sell a million eggs by Christmas.”

It’s not known whether he reached that lofty goal that year or not, but it’s certain that Silly Putty took off as the years went by. It soon found its rightful niche as a kids’ toy, ran some ads on the “Howdy Doody Show” and became a mid-1950s staple right alongside baseball cards and Davey Crockett coonskin caps.

As for Hodgson, he enjoyed the hell out of his unexpected new fortune. One thing that happened was that when he finally met Willie Ruff, the two became great friends, as Ruff later remembered:

Pete often drove me into New York in his new elegant maroon Hudson convertible to listen to Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats. We went to expensive dining spots on the Silly Putty expense account, places I’d never have been able to afford. Although I wasn’t on the Silly Putty payroll, Pete made me the firm’s unofficial music director and put me in charge of purchasing new jazz and classical recordings that I felt he and his kids should be listening to. Silly Putty was a boon to my already hot and broad exposure to good music, and thanks to Pete and that expense account, I learned my way around New York’s music emporiums while at Yale.

As his fortune grew, Hodgson moved his family out to an 80-acre estate in Madison, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, known simply as “The Hill.” Here, all were welcome, most notably the family of his longtime vice president for production, William Henry Haynes, a young African-American who’d joined Hodgson at the very beginning through a connection with Ruth Fallgatter’s toy store and stayed until his death, at age 49, in 1976. In her blog, Haynes’ daughter, Carol, recalls the days of going out to The Hill:

We spent a great deal of our childhood on The Hill. When Pete and [wife] Margaret were out of the country we would sometimes spend up to a week there. It was an idyllic, peaceful and storybook setting.

Pete and Margaret never locked their doors. They figured that if anyone really wanted anything they owned they would find a way to get in. Even when they left for long trip in Europe they would leave the doors open and the keys in their cars. When we would arrive at the house we would just walk through the poolside doors and settle in.

The property had a tennis court, a pool, a side of the house where you had breakfast and another side where you had lunch and dinner. My favorite room, the living room, was alike a small cathedral. It had French-style glass panes all around and it was two to three stories high. It seemed as big as a basketball court. Pete was a music buff and there were what seemed like a million albums lined all around the perimeter of the room. When we were there we heard mostly classical and jazz. But music was always bouncing off the walls.

Such was the life that Silly Putty afforded and that Pete Hodgson readily shared. When he died in 1976 at the age of 64, he left a fortune of $140 million – not a bad return on his initial $147 investment. By then, Silly Putty had become a hit in the Soviet Union and traveled around the moon with the Apollo 8 astronauts. In 25 years, it would be inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. All this from what once was an unwanted lump of goop.

Willie Ruff conducted the music for Hodgson’s memorial service, held at Yale Divinity School. Margaret Hodgson said it had been her husband’s wish that there be no speaking, no preaching, no religious references – only music. Ruff gathered the musicians and selected the music. Let’s just hope that one of the selections was something with a little bounce to it.

My best-selling collection of Connecticut treasures is back on bookstore shelves with Globe Pequot’s brand new edition of “Connecticut Icons.”

For this fourth printing, I’ve added eight new icons, updated the other 50, and fancied it up with a nice new cover.

“Connecticut Icons” proved to be a popular gift choice when it was first published in 2006. Lots of people bought it for their family and friends, and also those who are no longer in Connecticut but recall it fondly. The icons range from hot lobster rolls to Yale Bowl, from stone walls to steamed cheeseburgers, and from Sleeping Giant to Top-Sider deck shoes. Each gets its own write-up and colorful photo. The book is filled with lots of surprising, revealing info about Connecticut places and things you thought you already knew about.

It makes a very good corporate gift, premium or giveaway, too – or even a nice little holiday gift for your employees. Let me know at charlesmonagan@sbcglobal.net if you’re interested in a bulk purchase.

Meanwhile, thanks for your time and attention. You can find “Connecticut Icons” through me, at most Connecticut bookstores, or even here at Amazon.