Home News

Death be not proud

110833821

Pete had been a brave cop. He had stared down death many times. The Philadelphia Police Department doesn’t award someone with 35 commendations for bravery without reason.

Pete hated hospitals, didn’t even like to visit and used to tell the story that one time as a teenager, he went to the hospital with a pain in his side. During the examination, he heard the words “possible appendicitis” and startled the doctor by immediately running out of the hospital never to return. He vowed never to die in a hospital bed and thought he could select how he would die. He believed that as a policeman, he would one day bang down a door and meet his fate quickly in a hail of bullets. He kept in shape by lifting weights at a local gym, disdained being called “Pop” later in life, drank protein shakes and read Bob Hoffman’s health magazines faithfully. And then one day, he found out that mortality was gaining on him.

Pete was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in June 1983. He was 66 years old. He tried to figure out how he could have gotten the disease. It was as if he were personally offended by getting sick. He had always viewed illness as a sign of weakness. When his kids sometimes came down with childhood ailments, he would exclaim to his wife, “These kids are made of (excrement)!” He racked his brain for a reason he, of all people, should have come down with what he called “blood cancer.” He blamed the time long ago, when as a detective on assignment, he had been required to handle some radioactive material at the airport. Pete had often talked about the incident, how he had been required to shower and change his clothes after handling the substance. The story had become legend in his mind, and now he was sure that years later, the result was this crappy disease.

Pete’s life had not gotten any easier in the last couple of decades. His wife suffered from manic depression, an illness that had finally forced him to quit his beloved police department a good ten years before time to take care of her. It had been tough to adjust to life without a badge. He became a runner in a Center City law firm, made his own hours and went in early to open the office and sort the mail so he could be at home with Eleanor during the afternoon. Now that he himself was sick, life was about to become even more difficult.

As she was suffering from bipolar illness, Eleanor had emotional reactions that were not directly tied to events happening at the moment in her life. Her mood swings were based on her illness, not her husband’s. There were times when she could seem almost cruel in dismissing the seriousness of Pete’s disease. She couldn’t understand why this once brave husband of hers would unaccountably break down crying. Once she told her son, “I can’t stand to see a man cry.”

At first, Pete responded well to his treatments at Albert Einstein Hospital. He looked the picture of health; his outlook upbeat. He continued to clean the house and cook food for his wife when she went into one of her extended depressed states. His son visited him before going to the Jersey Shore for Labor Day Weekend and found him huddled over a frying pan preparing breakfast for himself and his wife. But in only three short days, the outlook changed.

Pete’s decline was rapid. He no longer was chatty when his son took him to the hospital for treatments. Soon his son hardly recognized the frail, stoop-shouldered man whom he had to help walk. There was nothing that medicine could do anymore for Pete.

At home, he lay huddled on the old blue couch rarely moving except to be helped upstairs to go to the bathroom. “He cries whenever he looks in the mirror,” his wife said. The last time his son saw him at home was in the middle of the ’84 World Series between the San Diego Padres and the Detroit Tigers. Pete was not normally a big baseball fan, but he loved to watch the Fall Classic with his wife and son.

The living room was dimly lit, and the television set was off. His father hardly ate these days, but he mentioned to his son that he had a “woolie” ( a slang term used for what westerners would call a “hankering”). He wanted orange soda and a hamburger. His son was quickly out the door and back with a large bottle of Frank’s Orange Soda (made with real juice, it said on the label) and a hamburger with fried onions. His father took one bite of the sandwich and couldn’t eat it. “Put on the World Series,” Pete said in a barely audible voice. And for the remaining hour, his father feigned interest in the game, easily fooling his son looking for any reason for optimism. His mother later told him that he wanted the TV turned off as soon as his son left.

It is true Pete died in a hospital bed just like most do. But “Death be not proud”; not even you could diminish the heroic life you ended. The one World Series his son doesn’t remember at all is the ’84 edition. ■

110833831

Exit mobile version