Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

over the first public meeting of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform. I just couldn’t leave my parents. Normally I am able to handle a great many things at once, but I couldn’t pretend that this was a normal time. I knew that our family would soon face the decision to remove my dad from life support.

Perhaps to divert my feelings, in the long hours I spent in the hospital, I talked with doctors, nurses, pharmacists, hospital administrators and family members of other patients about the present health care system. One of the doctors told me how frustrating it was for him to write prescriptions for some of his Medicare patients, knowing that they could not afford to fill them. Other patients paid for their drugs but took smaller doses than prescribed, to make them last longer. Often, these patients ended up right back in the hospital. The health care policy problems we were tackling in Washington were now a part of my daily reality. These personal encounters reinforced my sense of both the difficulty of the assignment Bill had given me and the importance of improving our system.

Bill returned to Little Rock on Sunday, March 28, and we gathered our immediate family together and met with the doctors, who spelled out our options: Hugh Rodham was essentially brain-dead, kept alive by machines. None of us could imagine that the fiercely independent man we had known would want us to keep his body going under such circumstances. I remembered how angry and depressed he had been after his quadruple bypass surgery in 1983. He had enjoyed good health for most of his life and valued his self-reliance. He told me then that he would rather die than be sick and helpless. This was so much worse, although at least he seemed to be unaware of his condition. Each member of the family agreed that we should remove him from the respirator that night after our final goodbyes and let God take him home. Dr. Kumpuris told us he would probably die within twentyfour hours.

However, the soul of the former Nittany Lions football player and boxer wasn’t quite ready to leave. After the life support was removed, Dad began to breathe on his own, and his heart kept on beating. Bill stayed with us until Tuesday, when he had to resume his schedule. Chelsea and I decided to stay until the end.

While I had canceled every public appearance, including the chance to throw out the first pitch for the Cubs’ opening game at Wrigley Field in Chicago, there was one engagement I could not seem to break. Liz Carpenter had been Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary, and now, among her many activities, she hosted a lecture series at the University of Texas in Austin. Many months earlier, I had accepted her invitation to speak on April 6. With my father hovering between life and death, I called her to cancel or reschedule.

Liz is a spunky, outgoing woman, and in her inimitable manner, she wouldn’t take no for an answer. It would be only a few hours of my time, she told me, and it would take my mind off my father’s condition. She even had Lady Bird call to persuade me to come. Liz knew how much I admired Lady Bird Johnson, a gracious woman and one of our most effective and influential First Ladies. Finally it seemed easier to agree to make the speech than to keep saying no.

On Sunday, April 4, my father was still hanging on to life. He had survived a week without artificial support or food. The hospital had to move him out of intensive care to make room for another patient. He was now in a regular hospital room, lying on the bed, looking as if he had just fallen asleep and would soon wake up. He looked rested and younger than his eighty-two years. The hospital administration had told my mother and me that they would soon require that a feeding tube be surgically inserted so he could be moved to a nursing home. Both of us were praying that we could avoid that nightmare. I thought of how a feeding tube would horrify my father while―even worse in his value system―his life savings would be siphoned off for nursing care. But if his vegetative state persisted, there was no alternative.

Chelsea needed to get back to school, and we returned to the White House late on April 4. Two days later, I flew to Austin. Since I hadn’t planned on making that speech, I had to write one, and when I climbed aboard the plane I didn’t have a clue about what I would say.

I believe that when our hearts are raw with grief, we are more vulnerable to hurt, but also more open to new perceptions. I don’t know how much I was changed by my father’s imminent death, but many of the issues that I had been thrashing around for years came flooding into my mind. The speech I sketched out in longhand was not seamless, or even particularly articulate, but it was an unfiltered reflection of what I was thinking at the time.

Years before, I had begun carrying around a small book that I stuffed with notations, inspirational quotes, sayings and favorite Scripture. On the plane to Austin, I leafed through it and stopped at a magazine clipping of an article written by Lee Atwater before he died of brain cancer at age forty. Atwater was a political wunderkind on the campaigns of Presidents Reagan and George H. W Bush and a principal architect of the Republican ascendancy in the 1980s. He was a political street fighter and famous for his ruthless tactics.

Winning, Atwater proclaimed, was all that mattered―until he got sick. Shortly before he died, he wrote about a “spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society.” His message had moved me when I first read it, and it seemed even more important now, so I decided to