Donna and Barry Lynn. Courtesy of Donna Coates
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”
—G. K. CHESTERTON
“This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.”
—ELMER DAVIS
That fateful moment had arrived—the one that forty-six-year-old Barry Lynn Coates faithfully called “his burden to carry.” The 30-degree chill that filled McBee, South Carolina, on that winter morning was unavoidable; but the departure of an angel on earth to his heavenly home was not. And that is what Donna Coates, Barry Lynn’s wife, says is the hardest part: it was needless and preventable, if not for the callous indifference of a few.
In the months before her husband was bedridden, Donna would wake up each morning to find Barry Lynn roaming around the backyard, “praying the word,” in Donna’s words. “Lord, if this burden is meant for me to carry, you let me carry it,” he would say, “but you set my feet on the path in which you’ve chosen for me to walk, and don’t you let me stray from that path.” It was reminiscent of the exquisite and pained prayer of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
The week leading up to Saturday, January 23, 2016, was a difficult one. Barry Lynn had been very ill. He was in extreme pain, and the end seemed near. The preacher anointed Barry Lynn’s head with oils, and on Tuesday, Barry Lynn—who went by Barry and Lynn as well as the combined Barry Lynn—asked the hospice nurse, “Can the doctor just put me to sleep and let me go on?”
“No doctor will order that for you,” the nurse replied.
“It’s not fair for me to know in my mind what’s going on with my body,” he said in languish.
Although the nurse had nothing to offer him, God apparently did. When Donna woke up Wednesday morning and looked over at Lynn, he was unconscious—not by medicine but by the grace of God. “It was like the lights were on but no one was home,” she recalled.
Over the next few days, Lynn would be lucid one moment and gone in the next. At night Donna slept on a blow-up mattress at the foot of Lynn’s hospital bed. “I would hear him talk all night long,” she remembered. One night, Barry Lynn rode trucks with his brother, Randall. Another night he was selling mobile homes in a job he had previously worked. All the episodes from Lynn’s life were playing out once more.
But he was conscious as could be on Friday morning when Donna looked over at him and said, “You know what today is?”
Donna and Barry Lynn. Courtesy of Donna Coates
Lynn answered, “Poo’s birthday.” Shaney Poo or just plain old Shane was one of Lynn’s five children and father to one of Barry Lynn’s seven grandbabies. Lynn stayed alert enough to have breakfast with Donna and wish Shane a happy birthday before pointing to a piece of paper on the floor that he hallucinated and then falling right to sleep.
Although the week was undoubtedly a painful one for Donna, it was nevertheless proof of “how God answers prayers,” she told me. God heard Barry Lynn’s worrisome plea to his nurse and helped his faithful child rest in peaceful slumber as the end drew near.
Donna awoke on that Saturday, dutifully curled up at the end of Lynn’s bed. As was her practice, she always got Lynn dressed before herself.
She gently walked to the edge of his bed and whispered, “We got to go take a bath. You know why?”
“No,” Lynn replied.
“Because you’re stinky,” she said jokingly, tapping him softly on the nose.
“I don’t stink!” Lynn retorted.
“Yes, you do!” She tapped his nose again, one last time.
“I love you, Pooky Butt,” Lynn said, just as he always did.
“I love you too, Lynn.”
Donna got Lynn off the bed by sitting with her back to his and joining arms. Shuffling along the floors of the warm home they had built, Donna and Barry Lynn danced back-to-back all the way to the bathroom, a last manifestation of Barry Lynn’s infectious sense of humor. Then Donna gently guided her soul mate into the bathtub. As Donna turned to say, “Move your feet, honey, so I can shut the door,” she gazed into Barry Lynn Coates’s big green eyes one final time.
“If you ever experience that in life, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that I literally seen his soul leave his body,” she told me. “He was eye to eye with me the entire time until he drew his last breath on the face of this earth . . . and that’s something you’ll never, ever remove from your mind.” As Donna always did, she held Barry Lynn’s hands and loved him until the very last moment he left this earth for the inviting pearly gates of heaven.
Perhaps Barry Lynn Coates had a wide variety of names—Daddy and Papaw in addition to Barry, Lynn, and Barry Lynn—because he meant so much to so many. Donna’s mom, Diane, told me if she had to rank Barry Lynn’s priorities, it would be “love for his savior, love for his family, and love for his country.”
“And in that order,” Donna added.
“He called me Mama,” Diane said, beaming. She explained that Lynn’s grandparents had raised him. His granddaddy was “tough as a lighter knot,” Donna recalled, referring to the hard resinous core of a pine tree. Remembering his childhood, Lynn would say, “Papa didn’t call me but one time. If he had to call me twice, I knew what was waiting on me when I got to the house.”
“They instilled in him strong faith. And he had it,” Mama told me. “He loved witnessing to other people. That was Lynn’s goal.”
Mama said she would go into Donna’s salon, Salon 828, and ask, “Where’s Lynn?”
“He’s at the post office,” Donna would reply. “He and Mrs. Ruby’s having church this morning.”
“That’s right. He would be in one place or another praying with people and witnessing,” Mama reminisced. Lynn’s grandparents raised him in the church. Sunday morning. Sunday night. Wednesday night. “Church was not an option. It was a requirement. Then, when it became an option for him as an adult, it was still a requirement. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Donna asked me.
With Donna and Mama at Sam Kendall’s in Hartsville, South Carolina. Courtesy of author’s collection
“Absolutely,” I replied as I explained to Donna and Mama that my mom was raised in a strict but loving Southern Baptist home in a tiny back-road town called Green Cove Springs, Florida. I described how my mom had to sit in the bleachers during her high school dance, since dancing was strictly prohibited in the old-time Southern Baptist way.
“Aha,” Mama said. “My parents were Pentecostals,” otherwise known as the Church of God, a strict, conservative Protestant denomination. “We weren’t allowed to carry purses, wear pants, wear shorts.” She remembered when Papa came to her ball game. “Daddy came and got me off the ball court. He had never been to one of my games, and he came in and saw me in a pair of shorts . . . He made my coach promise he would let me wear longer shorts. And I did at home games.” A mischievous smile crossed Mama’s face. “But I didn’t at away games!” Mama let out a warm chuckle. “You never knew when Daddy was going to show up.”
In line with the family tradition, Donna was raised in a strict home full of faith. “I had a Marine Corps daddy and a Church of God mommy,” Donna shared. “Mama carried me to church before I could carry myself.”
When our food arrived at Sam Kendall’s in the cozy town of Hartsville, South Carolina, Donna turned to Diane and said, “Mama, you want to say the blessing?” Diane, a sweet woman with an inviting spirit, bowed her head and began to pray over our beautiful lunch and accompanying sweet teas: “God, gracious heavenly father, we’re so thankful to be able to come out today.” Her prayer’s focus quickly turned to me, her welcome guest. “Bless Kayleigh’s hands, her mind, her thoughts, as she bears witness to Lynn and so many other peoples’ lives. Lord, may she be able to help another person along the way. Lynn would love that with all of his heart.” Over the next three hours, it became very clear to me, Lynn had been more than just a valiant veteran; he had been a father, a son, and an angel who took joy in helping others.
Donna met Lynn when she was only fifteen and he was eighteen. He had grown up just five miles down the road. What drew Donna to Barry Lynn? “He had the prettiest green eyes that God laid on any man in this entire world,” she said. Mama was worried about the budding adolescent romance: they were just too young. She separated the couple, a move she now regrets, since Donna and Barry Lynn did not reconnect until later in life. They got married as adults in 2011 and merged their two existing families to become a modern version of the Brady Bunch.
Like Donna’s dad, Barry Lynn’s grandfather was a veteran too—a prisoner of war in World War II. Because of his grandfather, “Lynn was very, very patriotic,” Mama noted, which prompted him to join ROTC in high school and eventually the United States Army. After his military service, Barry had a wide array of jobs: in the mill, in pawnshops, selling used cars and mobile homes.1 But the worst was yet to come. The Coateses and Donna’s family, the Catoes, both pledged their lives and their loyalty to their country—a country that would ultimately betray them.
The writing was on the wall for an entire year: rectal bleeding, excruciating pain, oddly shaped stools—all highly unusual symptoms for a man in his forties. Citing severe abdominal pain, Barry Lynn went to his local VA medical center in Hartsville, South Carolina, in November of 2010.2 Although his lungs and liver looked normal, the ER doctor noticed blood in Lynn’s stool and recommended he get a colonoscopy. At the follow-up appointment two months later with a different doctor at a different clinic, Lynn was not given a colonoscopy or even a simple rectal exam. “Just keep taking the medication,” the doctor told him.
But the pain got worse and worse, causing Barry Lynn to pick up the phone in late February and request to see a GI specialist. Instead, he received a March 3 appointment with the same doctor who had told him to just take the medication. Barry Lynn reminded this doctor that the initial ER doctor had recommended a colonoscopy. Rather than taking Lynn’s request seriously, she said a colonoscopy “might be needed” and sent him on his way with hemorrhoid suppositories. A colonoscopy consultation was never set up, and as the symptoms got worse, Lynn kept calling and calling and calling, pleading with the VA to give him the recommended colonoscopy.
In June of that year, Lynn took it upon himself to go to a different clinic. The third doctor immediately gave him narcotics and stool softener, a remedy that the doctor was surprised had not been given already. The third doctor concurred that a colonoscopy was necessary and scheduled a GI consult that did not take place until August—a full ten months after Lynn’s pain began. At the consult, Barry Lynn told his fourth doctor about his yearlong pain, rectal bleeding, and constipation. She gave no colonoscopy referral and merely advised him to return in two months. The reasons for not making a colonoscopy referral were completely unknown to him at the time. “If you were in as much pain as I am, you would not wait another two months to see what’s going on. You would probably do it this week,” he told the doctor after experiencing increasing pain for six months.3
“You know, this may sound crude, and I don’t mean it to be,” Mama told me. “Barry would say, ‘Mama, my stool is flat when it comes out’ . . . [T]he only relief that he could get was to sit in a tub of hot water, almost hot enough to burn him.” In September, Lynn wrote all of his symptoms in a message to one of his many doctors. The doctor simply replied with the familiar “You may need to be considered for a colonoscopy” and now “may need to see a surgeon” too. In October Lynn described to his fourth doctor that his stools were bright red in color. She finally agreed to a colonoscopy consultation in April—a full six months away and a year and a half after his struggles began. Mama grew concerned and told Donna, “I think Barry Lynn may have cancer.”
“Mama, don’t you say that,” Donna snapped.
Lynn continued to call the VA incessantly, pleading to have a consultation scheduled, and on November 30, 2011, he received one, followed by a December 9, 2011, colonoscopy. Lynn was sedated for fewer than five minutes at Fort Jackson Hospital when the doctor immediately came out and said he had discovered a tumor the size of a baseball in Lynn’s rectum. Lynn was swiftly diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and faced less than a 5 percent chance of living another five years. “I don’t understand how in the world they missed this,” Lynn’s oncologist later told him. “I can feel the palpitation of the tumor on my fingertip.”
Days later, Lynn had a chance to confront one of the doctors who dithered over giving him a colonoscopy. He showed her Fort Jackson’s findings of a gigantic tumor and explained that she should listen to her patients.4
“I listen to my patients,” she curtly replied.
“No, ma’am, you do not listen to your patients,” Lynn told the doctor. “If you did, I would have been checked a long time ago.”
“It was the only time I’ve ever seen him get really upset,” Mama said.
Because the tumor was so large, Lynn had an inverted colostomy on December 16, returning home just two days before Christmas. The upcoming year would be a hard one for Barry Lynn: chemotherapy and twenty-six radiation treatments followed by a fourteen-hour surgery in July. “They cut me at my belly button, stopped at my woody woodpecker . . . and then split me up my backside,” Lynn used to say in his characteristically good spirit.
Lynn was given a permanent colostomy, in which a contraption is installed to divert excrement through the abdomen and into a bag that hangs outside the body. Lynn had to change bags multiple times a day, a daunting task that he managed to turn into a comical one. Barry Lynn named his colostomy bag “Fred.” Mama was lying on a couch, relaxing during a beachside vacation, when Lynn said he had to go to the bathroom and change Fred. Lynn decided in his usual good humor to play one of his jokes on Mama. He came back with a bag full of brown goo that he laid on Mama’s chest. She screamed and jumped up as the mushy substance flew everywhere, completely unaware that it was just a bag full of peanut butter. Ever since that day, Lynn would joke, “Mama, you want some peanut butter with that?” “No!” she would shout.
“He played right up to the end,” Mama said, laughing. Lynn walked out sporting Donna’s dress before his son’s wedding, and he paraded around wearing Donna’s nightcap during their trip to the mountains. When Mama’s bed collapsed in the middle of the night, Lynn thought that it was a hoot. “That tickled Lynn good,” Mama remembered. “It made his day.”
His personality was infectious. “You couldn’t be around Lynn without him making you his friend,” Donna said. One of Lynn’s VA oncologists had a very formal demeanor, maintaining a professional distance from her patients. “Not with Lynn Coates you didn’t,” said Donna. “You’re going to be my friend,” he told the oncologist. After Lynn passed, the hospital reached out to tell Donna that Lynn had been one of their favorite patients.
Lynn kept his sense of humor despite his waning quality of life. In addition to the chemo and radiation, he had to insert a catheter into his urinary tract several times daily to relieve himself. He became both impotent and incontinent. The chemo caused neuropathy damage to his hands and feet, causing extreme pain.5 But there were at least a few silver linings. When he first started chemo, he didn’t lose all of his hair. People would comment, “Lynn, you don’t even look like you’re sick.” “That’s how good God is,” Lynn would reply. And despite how bad it got, “Lynn Coates never once threw up. He would get tired and he would get weak, but he never once threw up,” Donna noted. “Strongest man I ever knew.”
Battling cancer was hard not only for Lynn but for Donna as well. In the beginning she was working twelve hours days before leaving her salon in the hands of her cousin. The what-ifs were difficult to accept. “Sometimes I can just kick myself,” she told Lynn. “If I took five minutes and just googled, I would have known.” In Lynn’s sweet, calm demeanor, he replied with words of wisdom, “Don’t you ever, ever do that to yourself. It’s the plan that God had for my life. It worked out his way, not your way, and you can’t blame yourself for that.”
Barry Lynn. Courtesy of Donna Coates
As Lynn continued to struggle, McBee, South Carolina—“a small little country town where love still abounds,” as Donna describes it—rallied around the Coates family. Barry Lynn’s cancer-ridden lungs had a hard time breathing when smoke coming off the family’s woodstove filled the room. Recognizing this, the Coateses’ tiny little Southern Baptist church stepped up, organizing a fund-raiser so that Lynn and Donna could buy a heating and air-conditioning unit.
“It’s a good little town,” Mama affirmed.
“Just good country folk people that just love each other,” Donna chimed in. “When somebody’s heart hurts, everybody’s heart hurts . . . We rejoice together. We cry together. We mourn together. We do all those things together.”
That’s how it’s done in the South, no matter the tragedy, no matter the circumstance. Donna pointed out that when the Charleston church shooting happened, leaving nine dead at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the whole state of South Carolina stepped up. “We will be Charleston strong,” she said.
Donna and Mama resent how some northerners caricature the South, including their sweet little town of McBee, which wrapped its arms around Lynn. “A lot of northerners think southerners are stupid,” Mama said. “We are laid-back, but we know a lot more than northern people give us credit for.” That laid-back culture manifests itself in big ways and in small. I told Mama and Donna how I was shocked that I never once got beeped at during my two-hour drive from Charlotte to Hartsville, even though I blocked two lanes of traffic at one point when I struggled to get into the far right lane at a stoplight in an effort to make my turn.
“In New York City, they are beeping at you before the light ever turns green,” I said, laughing.
“It’s southern hospitality,” Donna explained. “It’s not a difference of the Mason-Dixon Line but a difference of culture. It’s still ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ‘No, ma’am,’ ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir.’ Manners and respect. You put someone first before yourself. Put Jesus first, then others, then yourself.”
And that is exactly what Barry Lynn did right up until the very end. His daunting circumstances never managed to change his selfless attitude, always putting others first. His grandbaby, Karlie Ann, was turning one, and nothing—not even chemotherapy—would stop Lynn from making it to her birthday party. “If it had something to do with those babies, he was there,” Mama said. He would go to events for his grandchildren even if he knew that he wasn’t supposed to, due to his health. Donna showed me a picture of Lynn evidently in misery but proudly wearing a pink feathery crown for his sweet granddaughter. “No greater love hath Papaw than to show up at grandbaby’s birthday just a few days after chemo,” she wrote beneath the picture.
Lynn showed the same devotion to Donna even when he was in pain. Two days before he died, Donna had a broken tooth fixed. The very last text she has from her husband reads, Are you OK? “The man’s dying,” Donna said with emphasis. “And he’s asking me if I’m OK—over a tooth. It was the sweetest thing in this world. He cared about my tooth.” And when Donna had a hysterectomy, Lynn visited her each day even though it took everything in him to make it to her hospital bed. He would stay as long as he could and then say, “I can’t stay any longer, but I want to let you know I love you.”
In the aftermath of that operation, Donna’s wise father said to his daughter, “I need you to understand something, baby. Sometimes healing comes on the other side, not this side. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, sir,” Donna answered.
As Lynn’s battle against cancer continued, another battle was brewing on the horizon: a battle against the federal government. Donna’s local news station, News Channel 10, reported that $1.02 million in funding for colonoscopies to the William Jennings Bryan Dorn VA Center had been mismanaged.6 With ten thousand men in line for colonoscopies, the money was intended to reduce backlogs but instead was used for other purposes. Only one-third of the $1.02 million was used for improving access to care. That money could have saved Barry Lynn’s life had the money been properly utilized; instead, he languished on a VA waiting list. Infuriated, Donna wrote a letter to the news station, which picked up Lynn’s story.
Shortly after, CNN called Lynn, asking him to share his story with a wider audience. In a January 30, 2014, story titled “Veterans Dying Because of Health Care Delays,” CNN told the world about Barry Lynn Coates.7 A growing sense of wrongdoing at the VA prompted a broader, six-month-long CNN investigation, culminating in the April 2014 revelation that “at least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.”8 The rightfully outraged headlines quickly followed:
“Arizona VA Boss Accused of Covering Up Veterans’ Deaths . . .”9
“ ‘Don’t Let Me Die’: Veteran’s Tearful Plea Before He Succumbed to Cancer . . .”10
“VA Director at Phoenix Hospital Got $9K Bonus.”11
The VA waiting list scandal was upon us, and Barry Lynn Coates was at the very center of it, in the national spotlight.
Barry Lynn always used to say, “God gave me cancer for a reason. It was my burden to bear and my story to tell. And I thank God that he did that for me.” Donna found that strange at the time: here was her husband essentially thanking God for cancer. In hindsight, she understands exactly what he meant.
Just as the VA scandal gained traction, Barry Lynn’s cancer got worse. With Lynn’s CT scan results in her hand, Donna nervously glanced down and saw the words “metastasized to the liver and lungs.” Stunned, she dropped the paper on the floor and began to cry. “I knew it,” she told me. She knew that meant that her husband was going to die. “Donna, what does it say?” Barry Lynn asked. In lieu of a doctor delivering the news, Donna explained to her husband that his days were numbered. Donna went back to the oncology department—agitated at the lack of attentiveness—and said to the chief, “We don’t have a diagnosis or a prognosis. I’m not here to be anyone’s friend. I am here for my husband to get well.”
Lynn was given a different oncologist, one of the only doctors at the VA he grew to know and love. When Lynn approached one of his original negligent doctors to show her that the cancer had metastasized, the dismissive doctor finally dropped her callousness for compassion. “I’m so sorry,” she lamented, far too late. “I have a new policy where I send everyone over for a colonoscopy immediately.”
Donna said, “That should have been her policy from day one . . . Barry Lynn shouldn’t have had to sacrifice his life to get it.” Lynn’s new doctor ordered an MRI to see if Lynn’s cancer had spread to his brain, in addition to a new round of chemotherapy. But before Barry Lynn could take these next steps, he was given a surprising opportunity: a chance to testify before the United States Congress.
Faced with a choice of continuing his time-sensitive and badly needed treatment or sharing his story, Lynn chose the latter, putting chemo off for a full two weeks. “It may not help me, but it will help someone coming behind me,” he told Donna. So Barry Lynn and Donna set aside Lynn’s health for the moment and drove to our nation’s capital. Sitting before a panel of our elected leaders in April of 2014, Lynn shared his story.
“My name is Barry Lynn Coates and due to the inadequate and lack of follow-up care I received through the VA system, I stand before you terminally ill today.”12 Lynn then proceeded to lay out the VA’s inexcusable incompetence in excruciating detail: the neglected pain, the missed symptoms, the misdiagnoses, and the horrible mismanagement. “Men and women across this country volunteer every day to serve in the armed forces . . . Other nations have to force service in order to maintain a strong military,” Lynn pointed out to the lawmakers looking down at him from their comfortable perches.13 “The very least this country should do is to ensure that those volunteers are taken care of after they have made sacrifices to take care of our country.” He left the elected officials before him with a pointed question. “So I ask you today, how many more vets will be allowed to suffer and die before someone is held accountable?”14
Following hours of congressional testimony, Lynn and his family met their South Carolina representatives face-to-face. Though some politicians seemed uninterested in hearing Lynn’s story, at least a few showed that they cared. Remembering that day, Donna said, “Jeff Miller—I think the world of him. Tom Rice—love him. Tim Scott—love him . . .” Congressman Miller sent Lynn home with a daily devotional book of prayers that he signed with the message “God bless you.” Congressman Rice sat down with Lynn for a very long time and just fell in love with the cheery veteran. When Lynn passed, Miller mailed Donna a heartfelt letter, and Rice sent Donna “this big old huge beautiful flower from his office,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss, on behalf of my wife and my staff,” the message read.
“It was personal to him,” Donna noted.
Senator Tim Scott rose before Congress and honored Barry Lynn. “We will never forget his sacrifice,” Scott vowed.15
“Sometimes that makes a world of difference, and the politicians don’t realize that,” Mama pointed out. While so many of our politicians know how to put on a good face for the cameras, you really grow to know them through the eyes of their constituents who know them personally.
After sharing his story and confronting his leaders, Lynn returned home to his regrettable reality. Chemotherapy and radiation were accompanied by hope-filled trials. The Coates couple used football as a distraction. Donna was a Clemson fan, proudly wearing her purple and orange for Saturday games. Lynn, however, rooted for rival South Carolina.
“That was the only division in that house. He was Carolina,” Mama recalled.
“But it made for some fun Saturdays,” Donna reminisced. “He was very competitive. ‘You’ve gotta root for the home team,’ he would say.” Donna would retort, “I am. It just happens to be the upstate home team.”
“That was our break,” Donna said. “That’s what college football became for us. It was a day we didn’t have to study chemo and radiation. It was about Carolina and Clemson . . . our escape time from this world.” Their little grandson, Trenton Samuel, would run around the house, through the kitchen, and into the living room, yelling, “Run, Deshaun, run!” It didn’t matter who was playing: “Run, Deshaun, run!” would ring through the house as Trenton shouted encouragement to Clemson Tigers quarterback Deshaun Watson. Lynn would say, “No, Sam-u-el,” with a heavy emphasis on the u, “it’s ‘Go, Gamecocks!’ ”
Trenton was “Papaw’s boy.” Donna’s daughter, Brianna, didn’t think she could have a child, so she prayed, “Lord, if you give me a child, I will give him back to you all the days of his life.” She did just that when she named her firstborn Trenton Samuel. Samuel was the long-awaited child of Hannah, and the name means “heart of the Lord.” While the rest of the family called Trenton Samuel “Trenton,” Barry Lynn insisted on “Sam-u-el.” “Boy, I see many spankings in your future. You as rotten as you can be,” Barry Lynn would joke.
Eventually, Donna and Lynn moved permanently to their condo in Myrtle Beach to be closer to their doctors in Charleston. “It’s funny how God makes provisions, because when we got the condo, we had no idea we would need it for Charleston,” Donna said. Barry Lynn just loved being at the beach. He would go through chemotherapy and then head straight outside and float atop the water, trying to forget about his cancer. One day, as Lynn and Donna swam in the pool, Donna said, “Lynn, what we going to do if this trial doesn’t work?”
“Why are you worried about things you cannot change?” he asked. “You cannot change this. This is God’s path which he’s laid for me. Honey, nothing stays the same. Everything changes from day to day.”
“Well, Lynn, I can’t do this.”
“You’re stronger than you’ve ever given yourself credit for being. I know you can do it.”
In those last few months, a potential source of hope turned to despair. A brand-new drug called Lonsurf had hit the market. Donna pleaded with the VA to get Lynn the new medicine. Lonsurf was FDA-approved and available in the private market, but the VA was dragging its feet in negotiating the price. Sixty minuscule white-and-pink tablets for a whopping $10,000—it seemed crazy. “[But] it doesn’t make any difference to you when it’s your husband that needs the medicine and they need it now,” Donna said.
Donna remembers the day those four expensive little packets arrived on her doorstep. Lynn was the first to get it from the VA after they finally stopped haggling over the price. When the pills arrived, Barry Lynn was at an appointment—only the second one Donna had missed in five years. She texted Lynn: Honey, your medicine is here. She still remembers that it was December 2 when she got her hands on that medicine. “The day I put my hand on this medicine was the day that the doctor looked at Lynn and said, ‘There is nothing we can do for you.’ If they had given him this medicine one month ago, two months ago . . . he would have had a chance.”
“It was a chance,” Mama chimed in.
At this point, though, Barry Lynn was too far gone. His bilirubin count was too high, indicating liver problems and signaling that he was no longer strong enough to take the medicine. The end was nearing.
Lynn wanted to go home to McBee for his last days on earth, so he and Donna left Myrtle Beach for the last time. In Lynn’s final days the tumors growing in his body began to form blood clots. One of the clots would break free, ultimately taking his life almost a year from the day that Lynn’s grandmother died of lung cancer. Donna reminds herself of Lynn’s confidence in her strength every time an anniversary or Christmas or Easter rolls around. “He believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself,” Donna said. He wanted her to keep fighting for the veterans, as she has done.
After Lynn’s death, CNN called Donna and asked if she would participate in a town hall meeting where she would have the opportunity to confront President Barack Obama. Although Donna’s attorneys did not want her to go, she remembered what Lynn had always told her: “If you can help anyone, help them.” And so that’s what Donna did. At a town hall in Fort Lee, Virginia, Donna stood tall, clutching her husband’s folded flag, and looked the world’s most powerful man directly in the eye.
“Mr. President, I stand before you today with my husband’s flag,” she said.16 “Two years ago, Barry Lynn testified in front of Congress, and we heard a lot of promises about reform and accountability, but still nothing’s changed. In fact, the contracted doctor that misdiagnosed my husband is still treating our veterans at the same VA clinic.”17 Remembering Mama’s sage advice, Donna decided to provide some to the president. “My mama’s always told me that if you stop talking about stuff and do it, then you don’t have to talk about it any longer. So when are we going to actually start holding these contracted doctors and the VA employees accountable? For it’s the difference between life and death. And families like mine, they’re tired of waiting.”18 As President Obama looked at Donna with a disaffected stare, slightly nodding, Donna stated with a shaky voice, “And the only true change that’s come since we began talking was that I am now a widow. And my family, we won’t ever be the same.”19
As Donna described this confrontation, she told me that President Obama promised to find out why Lynn’s doctor was never fired or even reprimanded. To her knowledge, the president never did that. “It’s on camera,” she told me, pulling up the video on her phone. Sure enough, after providing an excuse for inaction at the VA, Obama looked at Donna and said, “I don’t know the particular case of this individual doctor, but you can bet I’ll find out after this meeting.”20 And off camera, Donna remembers Obama telling her, “I want you to know that your husband’s story will not go unheard.” Obama never did follow up, Donna told me, and the incompetent doctor is still treating our veterans today.
“She gets up every morning. She still goes to her jobs. She lives in her multimillion-dollar home. How’s her life changed?” Donna asked, frustrated. “She doesn’t know what it’s like to start over. She doesn’t know what it’s like to have lost half of who you are . . . She don’t understand that pain and that hurt.” Donna, on the other hand, will deal with the life-changing consequences of that VA doctor’s actions. “My grandchildren lost their Papaw. My children have lost their daddy. I’ve lost my husband. We’ve lost the person who held our family together. What’s she lost?” Donna asked.
“Nothing,” we both said in unison.
At that Fort Lee, Virginia, town hall meeting, Donna shared a little slice of her reality with President Obama. But the magnitude of Donna’s pain and the gravity of the betrayal was something Barack Obama could never fully understand. “The love of her life died that day,” Mama said, and Donna was left alone to pick up the pieces.
One of the hardest moments was 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 27, 2016. Donna wearily got out of the car with the help of her six-foot-two-inch brother Darren, nicknamed “Bubba,” and walked with his assistance to the tiny redbrick Baptist church with its tall white steeple—the church Mama had raised her in, the church she had attended with her husband, and the church where Barry Lynn would be laid to rest. Donna dragged her body up the steps, through the four columns, and up to the white double doors with her head buried in her brother’s chest the whole way. Donna had called her brother the morning Barry Lynn passed away. Darren picked up the phone, and Donna said, “Bubba.” Immediately recognizing that something was wrong, he replied, “I’m on my way.” He rushed to his car and drove twenty hours from Corpus Christi, Texas, to get home. “We used to fight like cats and dogs when we were little,” Donna recalled. Darren would jokingly tease her with names like “Ms. Piggy,” “Ms. Hoggy,” and “Fluffy,” but now here was Darren, her tall source of strength.
As Donna tried to walk through the church door that day to stand before her husband’s body for the last time, she looked over at her brother and said, “I can’t do it, Bubba.”
“You’ve got to,” he said.
“I can’t do it,” she insisted, standing motionless.
“You’ve got to,” Bubba repeated.
“The hardest steps I’ve ever had to take was putting my foot on the steps of that church,” Donna told me. Bubba sat beside her the entire time as Donna kept her head firmly nestled in his chest. When they left the building and walked to the church cemetery, Bubba kept saying to his sister, “Breathe, Donna. Just breathe. Breathe.”
Barry Lynn was buried in the church graveyard, just behind the worship building. His body rests in eternal peace beneath a marker that reads “True Love Never Dies.” “I want to be buried next to you,” Lynn told his wife. Just behind Timrod Baptist Church, the plots are all lined up: “My granddaddy, my grandmother, Kennedy, me, Barry Lynn, Mama, and then Daddy,” Donna told me.
Kennedy Paige, buried right beside Donna’s plot, was the beautiful granddaughter whom Donna lost when her daughter Amber’s cervix opened up just after Barry Lynn got diagnosed with cancer. “That was one of the worst periods in my entire life,” Donna remembered. But Donna made it through, just like she would make it through the dark year that followed Barry Lynn’s death, in large part thanks to the support of those around her.
The day Lynn passed away, wise old Aunt Betty came over. Aunt Betty had overcome more suffering than most humans could take, losing her husband and two children in a house fire. “He was my leaning post,” Aunt Betty would say of her husband. “He was the one who held me up. We fought this life together.” Aunt Betty wrapped her niece in a warm motherly hug and looked her straight in the eyes.
“Donna,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Today’s hard,” she said. “There’s days that are going to be harder to come.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But I know one thing.”
“What’s that?” Donna asked.
“You can get through this,” she assured her broken loved one.
“Why?” Donna asked in disbelief.
“Because you my niece,” Aunt Betty said. “And if I can live through what I’ve lived through, you can get through this too.”
Aunt Betty has since passed, but her guidance lives on in Donna’s heart as she tries to make it through each painful day. “It’s still horrible,” Donna said about a year and a half later. “Some days are better than other days. Some days are worse than other days.”
Donna’s grandmother lost a husband and two children, one to cancer and one in an accident. People would always offer Granny that age-old saying “Time heals all wounds.” But Granny told Donna, “I’m here to tell you, that’s a lie.” Donna then shared with me a truth that Granny had passed along to her: time doesn’t heal all wounds; it puts a scab on top of them. Every once in a while, something will come along and knock the scab right off. “It will hurt just as bad as the day it happened, and it will heal over again,” Donna told me. And the cycle would continue until the very end of one’s life. “And Granny never lied,” Donna added. “That’s the truth.”
Granny was right. “I have moments where I cry all day after a year and a half out,” Donna said. On those days she clings tightly to Lynn’s boot camp jacket. Lynn got that jacket in 1991. He would wear it in the yard, all tattered from age. “It’s precious to me,” Donna explained. “It was the one thing I absolutely refused to give away . . . I’ll pick it up and wear it sometimes. You know, to keep him near to me. I love that thing. It’s just raggedy and worn and in pieces, but it’s his.”
In addition to emotional pain, Donna has incurred financial pain as well. There were telephone and utility bills, groceries, and the costs of day-to-day life. “There’s a limit to what Mommy and Daddy could do when you’re country people and retired,” Mama injected. “You live on a fixed income.” During Lynn’s sickness, Donna had to quit managing her salon. OK, God, I have a choice, she thought. My salon will be here when I come back, but Barry Lynn may not be. “So I chose him,” she said. She had worked really hard to build Salon 828, giving a lot of her life to that business. It was her baby, and she loved it. Because Donna stepped away from the salon, she lost most of the clientele she had spent her life building. “I’ve had to start completely over,” she said.
But Salon 828 was appropriately named. “My salon name is Salon 828. You know why?” Donna said. “I always say I’ve been through things that are designed to kill folks, and I’m still here . . . I’ve buried a lot of people in my life.” And during those times, Donna always looked to Romans 8:28, the same verse that has given Kim Copeland so much hope after losing her husband and son: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” That simple but salient verse is embroidered and hung in Donna’s salon. “I know you’re still working everything to my good,” she says to her savior.
And Donna’s financial hardship has indeed been alleviated. Lynn had the foresight to sell the Myrtle Beach condo just before he passed. “That’s what kept her going. She couldn’t have made it financially,” Mama said. And Donna is rebuilding her customer base at the salon. “I always say, there isn’t a day when I haven’t had a biscuit to my lips. The good Lord’s been good to me. He’s been good to me,” Donna emphasized.
In the aftermath of Barry Lynn’s death, Donna’s faith was challenged. “Donna got angry,” Mama told me. “But I got angry.” Mama would ask, “Why, God? We did everything that you asked us to do. We prayed for healings. We know you can heal. Why didn’t you heal him? Why did you let him die?” One day, Mama was driving along the road asking those very questions. “You could’ve healed him,” she told God. “You didn’t answer my prayer.” Like a clear voice from heaven, God responded, “But I answered his.”
“Wow, and you felt God saying that to you?” I asked Mama. “Oh, yeah,” she said confidently. God had answered Barry Lynn’s persistent prayer of conforming his life to God’s will: “Lord, put my feet on the path you have chosen for me, and don’t let me stray from that.”
I was sitting on a CNN set in Washington, DC, when a story broke that made the consequences of the 2016 election painfully clear. “A new report [came] out moments ago with a rather scathing indictment of the scandal-plagued VA hospital in Phoenix,” the anchor said.21 “This coming two years after a massive overhaul.”22 Thirty-eight thousand delayed appointments—in just one hospital. The sixth report by the inspector general showing persistent mismanagement at the VA. According to one of those reports, as many as 307,000 veterans might have been waiting for care when they died, although the exact number is impossible to know due to “data limitations.”23 And yet, for two years nothing meaningful had been done. Our veterans still suffered at the hands of inexcusable incompetence.
“Nothing’s changed,” Donna said regretfully as we talked over a plate of cheesecake. When Donna and her boyfriend, Mike, searched for a new home in May of 2016, Donna took notice of the “100% Veterans” tag on her real estate agent’s car. Donna shared Barry Lynn’s story with the agent, who countered with her own sad story. The agent’s husband went to the VA with a big knot on his neck. “If I send you over for tests, I’m going to look silly,” the doctor replied, seeming to suggest that the knot was nothing serious. After an entire year of inaction, the man finally consulted an outside physician, who immediately sent him for tests. Lymphoma had been growing in the neglected veteran for an entire year. One VA oncologist was honest enough to tell the patient, “The best thing you can do is use outside insurance. If you wait to get a referral here, you will be dead.” And when the veteran sought out a patient advocate at the VA to share his story, the so-called advocate was useless, telling him, “If you don’t like what we have to say, I would suggest you find an attorney.”
Donna says that many veterans did not discuss the problems with the VA publicly because they feared that their compensation would be taken away. “It’s literally taking on the federal government when you take on the VA. It’s taking on the whole huge monstrosity of the federal government, and that’s daunting to a lot of people,” she said. She feels more distrust than fear based on a history of verifiable government betrayal. In addition to losing her husband due to government mismanagement, Donna’s father was subjected to poisonous water when he served at Marine Corp Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina.24 He now suffers from fibromyalgia and carpal tunnel syndrome. Although the government provides disability benefits, Donna said, “No one’s seen a penny. Daddy hasn’t seen a dime in compensation.”
Donna distrusts government for good reason, but she did place her trust in President Donald Trump during the 2016 election. “I have more trust in him than I do [Hillary Clinton], and I’m going to tell you why,” Donna explained. “Benghazi—that, to me, was a deal breaker.”
“He’s more of a man of action, he really is,” Mama added. “Sometimes he needs to watch his tongue, but at least he’s honest . . . and she definitely wasn’t for the vets. You could tell by the way she talked that she wasn’t interested in them.”
Mama’s disdain for the way Hillary talked about the problems at the VA was understandable. In October of 2015, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked Clinton about the VA scandal noting, “You can’t find a person in politics who doesn’t say we shouldn’t do right by our veterans. But for some reason, this can’t get fixed fast enough.”25
“Yeah, I don’t understand that. You know, I don’t understand why we have such a problem, because there have been a number of surveys of veterans, and overall, veterans who do get treated are satisfied with their treatment . . .” Clinton replied, seeming to marginalize the VA scandal.26
Her out-of-touch response came just one month after that IG report revealed that as many as 307,000 veterans might have died waiting for care. But Clinton nevertheless complained about “the constant berating of the VA that comes from Republicans” during her interview, leading the liberal Maddow to retort, “But in part because there has been real scandal.”27
Clinton, not willing to acknowledge the true gravity of the VA scandal, replied, “There has been . . . [but] it’s not been as widespread as it has been made out to be.”28
Senator John McCain and several congressmen rebuked Clinton’s comments, with McCain saying, “I don’t know what Hillary Clinton’s view of what ‘widespread’ is but the facts are stubborn things. The VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson recently admitted that there are nearly 500,000 appointments with extended wait times . . . The VA Inspector General said there are 800,000 records stalled . . . If that’s not quote ‘widespread,’ I would like to know what Hillary Clinton’s definition of ‘widespread’ is.”29 Florida congressman David Jolly plainly stated that Clinton “trying to downplay this atrocity is inexcusable and outright insulting.”30
Clinton, who constantly spoke of the plight of the illegal immigrant, seemed to have little understanding of the plight of our own veterans, the men and women who risked their lives for our country’s safety. Pointing to this important truth, Trump said, “The media and my opponent discuss one thing and only one thing, the needs of people living here illegally. In many cases, by the way, they’re treated better than our vets.”31 Veterans, who voted for Trump by a 26-point margin, recognized Clinton’s disinterest and Trump’s repeated calls for a fix to the VA’s mismanagement.32
As for the solution, Donna says that throwing money at the VA will never solve the problem. During Obama’s Fort Lee town hall meeting, Donna remembers the president touting that “we have increased the VA budget by 85%. No president has increased the VA budget faster and more aggressively than I have . . .”33 However, this biggest-ever increase appears to have done little to solve the problem. According to Donna, the answers are “accountability and responsibility”—something we saw very little of in the wake of the waiting list scandal. Although Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki did resign in May of 2014, many of the doctors who displayed callous ineptitude are still in their positions. And in the wake of the scandal, the department rewarded its executives and employees with more than $142 million in bonuses.34 As our veterans suffered, the VA employees were well taken care of.
“They have to stop talking about it and be about it,” Donna said. Just a few days after our interview, Donna sent me a Facebook message: “A win for us on Capitol Hill today,” she wrote. President Trump had signed into law the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act, legislation that protected whistleblowers and made it easier to fire VA employees. “Hallelujah. Thank you, Jesus. It’s at least a start,” Donna said.
It was a big victory for our veterans, a victory that received little coverage from the mainstream media, which opts instead to obsess over salacious gossip and innuendo. “I wish right now they’d leave Trump alone and let him do his job,” Mama said. “All of them have done wrong in their life, every one of them. He was elected to the office by the people. They need to sit down and shut up.” The media engenders division and distraction at a time when Donna recognizes that we must come together to solve our nation’s problems. Although she was frustrated with Obama never following through on his promise, she said, “It doesn’t matter who’s in office. God instructs in his word that we are supposed to pray for those people . . . How stupid are we to pray that he falls? Because if he falls, we all fall.”
Just before I traveled to McBee, South Carolina, Donna sent me a message. She asked me to call Barry Lynn’s chapter of the book “Winner Either Way.” Winner either way? Barry Lynn was dealt what seems to most a very bad hand in life. The average person who was betrayed by the federal government, ravaged by cancer, and dead before the age of fifty would not label him- or herself a “winner” in this life. But Barry Lynn Coates was far from average.
“I’m a winner either way,” Barry Lynn would always say to Donna. “If I get to stay here and God heals my body on this side, I will be with y’all. And if I don’t, then I get to go home and be with the Lord.”
“But I don’t win, Lynn,” Donna would reply. “It’s not a win for me.”
“But we’ll get to be together,” Lynn would say without missing a beat.
A year and a half later Donna Coates can say “We’ll be together” with all the confidence that Barry Lynn did, because God has given her little signs amid her pain.
For almost a year after Lynn passed away, Trenton Samuel would continue to traverse the house screaming “Papaw!” But this time he was met with silence instead of Lynn’s typical jovial response of “Sam-u-el!” After Papaw passed, God brought Mike, a new boyfriend and soon-to-be husband, into Donna’s life. Mike hadn’t been to church in fifteen years, but with Donna’s prodding he went. Now he won’t miss a Sunday and even brings his sister along with him. One day Mike was Facetiming with Trenton, and Trenton said, “Hey, Papaw.” It shocked Mike, and it shocked Donna too. No one had told Trenton to call Mike by that name, a name solely reserved for Barry Lynn. Sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, Trenton’s mom said to him, “Who told you that was Papaw Mike?” Trenton looked up at her and said, “Papaw.” Trenton had received permission from his grandpa in heaven to pass along the name.
Karlie Ann, Donna’s other grandchild, had a Papaw encounter too. Standing at the door of the house, Karlie eagerly said to her mom, “Mama, Mama, there’s Papaw! Papaw!” With a beaming smile, the blond-haired girl repeatedly asked her mother, “Mama, do you see Papaw?” Curious, her mom walked to the door and looked outside but saw no one. Karlie, meanwhile, still stood there with that huge smile on her face. As Donna recounted the story, she cried so hard that she could barely get the words out, “So, yeah, I do. I think that Barry Lynn’s still around, and he watches us.”
“You’re definitely going to see him again, and you know he’s in heaven,” I assured her.
“Oh, yeah, and that makes heaven that much sweeter,” Donna said with satisfaction.
