Walt invited him to his home when John called the next day just past dawn.
John had not slept all night. There in the silent darkness, he picked up a kind of radio signal that he now knew his father had been sending from across town. He thought of the moments in his life for which his father had been absent and his mind convulsed to think that Larry had been nearby all along. Although he hadn’t; not really. Not in any way that could have engaged John and his family.
Nothing—not one damned thing—would have been any different if Larry had played a mute, meaningless role in his son’s life over the past thirty years. Or so John reasoned in those first mad hours of acceptance.
The ornate Bolger house smelled of coffee, eggs, and bacon as Walt led John back to the kitchen, still locked in a late 1970s fustiness.
Pleasantries were not attempted. Breakfast clotted on their plates. Walt picked up where he left off the day before.
“When I spoke to your mother that day so long ago about ending your father’s life, he should have died the next day. Or the next week,” he began. “We kept his feeding tube in; we would not starve him to death. But every day I came into the office, I knew with all my heart that it should be the day that he would finally let go. He had to let go.
“We had crossed some very bad lines, John. We knew that.”
“Who’s ‘we?’” John asked darkly.
“It was me, and three others. Friends of your father’s. They’re dead now. Your business now is just with me.”
John silently, sternly commanded the tale to continue.
“We had put our careers in jeopardy; we had exposed ourselves and the hospital to enormous legal risk. And the only way what I am about to tell you makes any sense—the only way—is if you believe that at a time of so much grief and uncertainty, we were trying to do right by both your mother and your father.”
The old man’s earnestness was compelling; John had to give him that. Walt, sensing John’s willingness to hear the whole tale before lashing out, cinched up and carried on.
“They think that before long, computers might make it possible to repair the brain,” Walt began. “Computer chips now restore hearing and eyesight, control pacemakers. It’s just a matter of time before maybe they can be used to regenerate cognitive function.”
John jolted at the news; Walt moved quickly to correct any misunderstanding.
“It’s too late for your father, John. Years and years too late,” he said tersely. “But I am telling you this because I need you to understand the conversations your father and I had right up until the day he had his stroke. Look…”
John had given serious notice to a meticulously stacked pile of thick manila folders on the kitchen table. Tabs were color coded, with piles of folders sorted accordingly. Walt opened the first one and slid a copy of the local newspaper toward John. The date in the headline was February 21, 1985. The day Larry had the stroke.
“See,” Walt urged. “This is the story I told you about, the newspaper article your father and I were discussing.”
John saw the short newspaper article about William Schroeder, one of the first artificial heart recipients who crashed an early barrier by spending a whopping fifteen minutes outside his Louisville hospital.
“Every day back then, it seemed there were stories like these,” Walt said eagerly. “They were miraculous times, and for young doctors like me and your father—so dedicated and so damned full of ourselves—we knew we were blessed to be there on the cutting edge. We wanted to lead the way on some of this.”
John flipped through one of the folders. It was full of articles from newspapers and densely written medical journals, dating back to the fifties. Jagged handwriting filled the margins.
“That was your father’s file. That’s his writing,” Walt marveled.
John absorbed the soft throb tickling his heart as he saw his father’s unfamiliar scrawl.
“Remember, this was the eighties. Computers hadn’t been available to us all that long. And they were nothing like what we have today.
“The medical journals, they knew what was coming,” Walt continued, fanning another stack of medical stories. “Everything was going to get smaller, computer chips were going to get faster. With what they were promising, anything seemed possible. And so much of it came true!
“In the mid-seventies, they refined a chemotherapy drug that took the cure rate in testicular cancer from ten percent to ninety-five percent. Saved tens of thousands of lives. But it came just a few years too late to save your grandfather. Larry’s dad. That haunted him.
“Seeing how technology was moving things forward so much faster, he became obsessed with losing control of his own care. He needed to know that if he could no longer make decisions for himself, the rest of us—the doctors he trusted with his life—would fight to keep him viable if there was any chance of recovery.”
Walt produced a lone manila envelope with just one document inside. He slid it to John. It was a legal agreement, with Larry’s signature at the bottom.
“He wanted all of us to sign one,” Walt sighed. “But none of us took it as seriously as he did. Bob Schurmer, his lawyer, drew that up. It’s giving us permission—it’s ordering us—to not let him go.”
John stared at the document, queasy at the degree to which his father had taken this. He wondered about the state of Larry’s mind. His faith in medicine and belief in his own powers bordered on the obsessive.
John jabbed his finger at the signed agreement with incomprehension. “Why would anyone even think to—”
Walt held up his finger to silence him, anticipating just this moment.
Five separate stacks of folders were set apart from the rest, each bulging with material. Walt slid the first of them into play, the name Schiavo etched neatly on the tab.
“You remember the Terri Schiavo case?” Walt began.
Of course John did; it had only been a few years before. A woman in Florida fell into a coma and she hung on for years. Eventually her husband wanted to let her die, but her family didn’t. John remembered being thoroughly disgusted by the family’s intervention. He thought it was ghoulish and profane to keep a hollowed-out shell of a human being alive simply because technology made it possible, and God commanded it.
“That case all came down to this,” Walt urged as he touched Larry’s signed order.
“The Schiavo thing was a few years ago!” John cried impatiently. “He signed this in … 1976!”
Per the script he had spent decades crafting for just this moment, Walt slid forward more stacks of evidence. It was almost as if he were constructing a barrier between himself and John.
“Karen Ann Quinlan was twenty-one years old in 1975 when she mixed alcohol with prescription drugs and fell into a coma that transitioned into a persistent vegetative state,” the old doctor recalled from memory. “Irreparable brain damage, just like your father. After a few months, her parents—good Catholics—wanted to let her die. But her doctors—and the courts—said no.
“Your father watched the Quinlan case closely. He was mad at this girl’s parents. After only four months they were giving up on her and trying to shut down her ventilator. Four months! Because Karen wasn’t able to tell them she wanted them to keep fighting for her.”
The old man laid his palm across Larry’s signed decree as a silence descended upon the kitchen. John recognized the need to meticulously read this document with the same care that his father had drafted it.
He read aloud his father’s command: “‘I order that all actions be taken to sustain my life, until it is the consensus of the doctors to whom I am entrusting my care that there is no current or pending medical measures that could provide a reasonable expectation of restoring me to a cognitive state of being as defined by me to be a state of mental and physical ability, notwithstanding grave and perhaps permanent diminishment of function that could result from my impairment.’”
John’s eyes bore a hole through the mournful old man. “He’s saying, ‘Once there’s no hope, you have to let me go.’”
Walt stared at his coffee cup. John angrily balled up Larry’s agreement and brandished it at the old man.
“He trusted you to let him go!” John shouted.