ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606170012
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL HENDRICK
MY FATHER equated poker with life and was philosophical about both.
``You play the hand you're dealt,'' he'd often say at our twice-yearly poker games in his home in South Boston. ``You win some, you lose some, and you get no second chances.''
He called his last bluff on May 12 - Mother's Day - putting up a brave front for his doctors and nurses, my mom and sister, but he knew there'd be no second chance.
Today will be my first Father's Day without him. I could tell when I called him last year he knew that it would be his last Father's Day.
Eighteen months ago, oncologists at the Duke University Medical Center told him he had, at best, 24 months to live; that, as he put it, he'd ``drawn a pair of ducks,'' his name for deuces - and not a good hand in poker.
My father, William T. Hendrick, was a good poker player, a great bluffer, and funny. Once I drew one card, hoping to fill an inside straight flush in a game of five-card draw. Miraculously, I got the one I needed. Not only was it a straight flush, but a royal flush - the best hand in poker.
He had a good poker face that I didn't inherit. I burst out in guffaws, tears of laughter streaming down my face. The thought of drawing to an inside royal flush, when I'd have been happy with a pair of Queens or even 10s, was hilarious - the odds astronomically against it. Naturally, everyone folded, and my dad mockingly scolded me that I'd have won more had I maintained a poker face.
His doctors had found a huge tumor on his liver and diagnosed his condition as leiomyosarcoma. They told me then what they had apparently told him. It was a rare tumor, but an ``extremely aggressive'' type of cancer, which meant he'd undergo a round or two of chemotherapy, but his odds of living more than two years were about the same as my drawing that royal flush.
``This isn't a good hand,'' he said, ``but I'm going to play it out.''
Born in Roanoke in 1921 and graduated from Jefferson High School in 1939, my father always had hoped to move back, as he said, "closer to home."
He had fond memories of growing up on Moorman Road and of working for a time for the Norfolk & Western Railway. He loved to tell tales about raising pigeons in a downtown area, riding streetcars, shopping at an outdoor market.
But except for periodic visits to his brothers and sisters, he never made it back to Roanoke until the end, when he arrived in hearse in the dead of night after being transported from the morgue at Duke.
The chemotherapy at first seemed to work. He lived a year relatively well, though his hair fell out and he was very weak at times. In April 1995, I flew up to Virginia and took him on a driving tour from Petersburg, where his grandfather - my great-grandfather - had fought in the trenches as a young soldier, all the way to Appomattox, where the 17-year-old rebel had surrendered.
My father, himself a World War II and Korean vet, enjoyed the trip, and was overjoyed to have a chance to touch the flag of the 25th Battalion Virginia Infantry at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, a cloth his grandfather fought under.
The trip was grueling, and I wondered then whether I'd done the right thing: He looked like he was going to die any time. But his hair grew back, thick and black instead of wispy and gray. It was only a few weeks ago that he began to deteriorate.
On Mother's Day, I was in Texas, chasing a tornado chaser for an assignment and, for the first time in 25 years, didn't get back to my hotel in time to call my mother. I did the next morning, and she told me my father had been taken by ambulance to Duke, and that the prognosis was iffy.
She didn't know how bad, so I went ahead with my storm chasing. On my return to my hotel, I started calling home, got no answers, and realized the time we never really thought would come had arrived like an unexpected blast of cold air. I returned to Atlanta as soon as I could and booked a ValuJet to Raleigh.
Soon I was in his tiny room on the ninth floor of the massive hospital. Almost immediately, a doctor who looked younger than Doogie Houser told me the situation was hopeless. Then a slightly older one said the same thing. And finally, the chief oncologist rendered the final verdict.
``No hope,'' he said. ``Zero.''
My father had gone to Duke on that Mother's Day Sunday, his systems had started failing on Monday, and by the time I arrived on Tuesday he was on a respirator, being kept alive by a hideous pump. The doctors hadn't let him die, as he would have, but had hooked him up to this grotesque machine in order to leave the decision to us, even though my father had written out a ``living will'' in January 1995 stating clearly he didn't want to be kept alive artificially when hope was gone.
It was. Yet here he was, lying in his bed, doped up on morphine, the loud clicking of the respiratory heaving his chest up and down. My brother, sister and I were summoned to a consulting room and told again there was no hope and asked what we wanted to do - leave him on the respirator or unplug it.
``Pull the plug,'' I said. ``It's time.''
My brother and sister concurred. But ever since, we've wondered in long-distance phone calls whether we made the right decision.
``Did we kill him?'' my brother asked the other day, calling from his office in Washington. ``Could he have lived longer?''
``Of course not,'' I answered, half- convinced, all the while asking myself the same questions. ``We did the only thing we could.''
What I wonder now, though, isn't whether he could have survived, but why we were left to make the decision to pull the plug, to wonder forever whether there's really anything to all those best-selling books about remarkable and spontaneous and miraculous recoveries.
My brother and I went back into his room, and a young intensive-care nurse - a rookie in life but a pro in death - soon entered, unhooked a tangle of wires that were dripping antibiotics, morphine and other chemicals into my dad's chemotherapy-zapped body, and turned off his respirator, which some wag had named ``Sparky,'' the moniker attached in bright red tape. Within minutes, he was gone, my brother and I on either side of his bed, holding an arm.
Death is as strange as life. My father and I had not been bosom buddies for years. I wonder how many fathers and sons are, late in life. We didn't agree on much of anything, but disagreed amicably and talked weekly. Now on Sunday mornings, our talking time, I dial his number almost by rote, knowing my mom will be there, but he won't. It's weird.
There are 80.5 million baby boomers like myself, born between 1946 and 1964. The older among us are losing our parents; looking around at his funeral in Roanoke, I was struck by the thought that the whole World War II generation is dropping like autumn leaves. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 23.6 million Americans over the age of 70. My dad was 74.
I feel qualified to offer a little advice to my fellow aging boomers. Try a little harder. My father and I got along better after he was diagnosed with cancer than we had since I finished college 26 years ago. No matter how far apart you feel, you are part of them, and they of you. I remember the many good and funny things he taught me, like the "three principles" of plumbing.
"It's easy," he deadpanned once as I struggled with a broken pipe. "Just remember, hot's on the left, cold's on the right, and (expletive) don't flow up hill."
I've thought about that with a smile every time I've gotten in the shower at a strange hotel before turning on the hot water. I always will. As he said to me before he folded for the last time, "Only rocks live forever."
But memories do, too.
Bill Hendrick, a science writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, lived in Roanoke as a child in the 1950s.
LENGTH: Long : 136 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: William T. Hendrick at the end of World War II.by CNB