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11. A Broken Heart
Kathy was not the first grandchild of my parents; that honor had already been claimed by Lynda, the daughter of my sister Diane and her husband Jack. But Kathy had a special place in my family’s history from the start.
Mom enjoyed baby-sitting her grandchildren. I suppose all grandmothers do. Now that I am a grandfather, I understand these things better than I did when I was simply an uncle. Kathy spent a lot of time at our house.
She was small, but lively. She had curly hair, and she laughed a lot as she played at our house when Mom was baby-sitting her. Before too long, Kathy was joined by a baby brother, Ronald, named after my brother who had died in a tragic car accident when he was just twenty-one years old.
My interest in photography was developing (no pun intended), and I often took pictures for mother’s family album. There are a couple of black and white pictures I took of Kathy with my simple box camera. In one she is standing on the couch in our living room, one hand holding her shirt up to reveal her belly, an impish grin on her face. In the other she is lying on the floor. I put the camera down on the floor near her to take the picture.
I should be able to write now about how Kathy grew up to become a beautiful woman, a wife and a mother and even a grandmother. I should be able to write about the things she has done, and the things she yet plans to do. She would be, she should be forty-something as I write these words. But she is not forty-something, and I cannot write about her accomplishments.
Kathy began to grow listless and sleepy. She didn’t laugh, or play, or run around anymore. Bill and Pat took her to the doctor.
At first the doctors were not certain what the problem was. They did what doctors always do. They ordered a battery of tests, tests the not yet two-year old Kathy did not understand nor appreciate.
Eventually the doctors determined that Kathy was born with a hole in her heart that allowed blood to flow back and forth between the chambers, mixing oxygenated blood with spent blood. This made her tired, listless and sickly.
But she was too little, the doctors felt, for surgery. They wanted to wait until she was older, and her heart was larger, and she stronger before they went in to repair the heart.
For several months, Kathy continued to be listless and sleepy. It was not easy to see this little girl not doing the things a little girl is expected to do. It was not easy for my parents and my sisters and I to see Bill and Pat as they faced the possibility that their little girl, their firstborn, might die before she had a chance to live.
By the time she was approaching her second birthday, her condition was worsening. Even though she was still very small and delicate, the doctors decided that it was urgent they do surgery right away, in spite of the risk that Kathy was still too small to survive.
Kathy was taken to Henry Ford Community Hospital in Detroit, a leading hospital in cardiac care at the time. I believe it was a Wednesday in April of 1962 on which the surgery was scheduled.
I remember the day. It was a long day. I did not go to classes at WSU. We all convened in a lounge at HFCH early in the morning while Kathy was taken into surgery.
Hours passed. Worried looks and idle conversation dominated the room. We were not the only family there. Others waited for loved ones also, for news, either good news or bad news. The pain was reflected in my mother’s face especially. The hospital was not unlike the one in which Ron had been just fifteen years earlier. That hospital still lay just a couple of miles across the swiftly-flowing Detroit River. And not a little ways from that hospital lay the grave in which Ron’s body lay. All painful memories which I am certain barged their way into all of our thoughts that dark day.
About mid-afternoon a doctor came to speak to Bill and Pat and the rest of us. Kathy was not doing well. The operation was over, but the doctor was afraid she was not strong enough to make the necessary recovery. He did not give us much hope. If she made it through the next twenty-four hours, she might have a chance. But those twenty-four difficult hours lay ahead of us.
I was not sure what to do. There really wasn’t anything I could do, or say, that would change anything. I went to a phone and called Dr. Mac. I asked him if he would come out and pray with my family.
The hospital was about a forty-five minute drive from Lincoln Park. I prayed Kathy would still be alive when he arrived. I don’t know why. What difference would Dr. Mac’s presence make? Could he change anything that was happening?
He arrived and spoke with my family. He said he understood what the doctors were saying, but that there was always hope as long as there was life. He told how he had seen people recover even when the doctors had given up hope. But he also said to be prepared for whatever might happen, and to remember that God’s ways are always best. He prayed with us, and then he had to leave. It was Wednesday, and he had to be ready for prayer meeting in a couple of hours. I decided to go with him, so that I could attend prayer meeting and pray for Kathy.
Dr. Mac was an inspiration to me. He was the model I unconsciously held up to myself hoping I could one day be like him. I knew I couldn’t.
What do people do who do not have a church family to turn to in time of need? How do they face the challenges thrown at them by life without the encouragement and loving support of God’s people? I don’t know how they do it now. I did not know how I would have done it then.
That night at church, several people took Kathy before the Lord in prayer. They also prayed that this experience would be used of the Lord in my family member’s lives. I thanked them for praying and hitched a ride home with one of the young people from church.
NEXT CHAPTER
As I walked up to the door of the house, I could sense what had happened. I knew what the report would be even before I got inside. I don’t know how I knew, or what clues there may have been. But as I opened the door, even Charlie, our neurotic French poodle, looked sad. That is true. The dog looked sad, as if he could sense what was happening in his family of humans.
Mom gave me the news quickly and simply. “Kathy’s gone,” she said.
Bill was Catholic (he later became a Lutheran), and so the funeral was held in the same church in which he and Pat had been married, near the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit. The priest talked about how the family now had a saint in Heaven. A little saint not quite two years old. A little saint who on earth had a broken heart that could not be repaired.
Life is so fragile. So temporary. There is no one on this earth who has any assurance of tomorrow, or even of the rest of today. Life can end much more suddenly than it begins. Why does death sometimes take the young instead of the old? Why had Beth’s father died in middle age, but my father still lived? Why had death taken my grandfather so young, leaving my grandmother to raise my dad and his siblings alone? Why did not death only come for the old? Why did death also have to come for the young? These were lessons I had not yet learned in the spring of 1962 when my little niece was laid to rest in a grave in Detroit, any more than I had learned them in 1947 when my brother died.
Death was once again a visitor to our family. He came for my grandfather one June day in 1911, he came for my brother one March day in 1947, and he came for little Kathy in April of 1962. He would be back again. And again.
Something else took place during those WSU years that would help prepare me for the future God was calling me to. One day Dad came home from work early. He never did that. He was desperately ill. He had been throwing up all morning, and could not stop. He assumed it was the flu. It wasn't.
Mother insisted he go to the doctor. When he did, the doctor ordered him immediately into Henry Ford Community Hospital. The doctor discovered that dad was suffering from an aortal aneurism. Surgery, and the sooner the better, was the only solution to his condition.The aorta is the main blood vessel that carries blood from the heart to all the parts of the body. At the legs, it branches into two parts to carry blood down each leg. In the area where it divided, dad’s aorta had a weak spot that was bulging and throbbing each time his heart beat. It was also pressing against his stomach, causing the nausea. If the weak spot ballooned out too far, it could burst. Dad would bleed to death internally in a matter of seconds.
Once again we sat in the waiting room at HFCH in an all day ordeal of waiting and waiting some more. In a day-long operation that laid dad open from his shoulder to his groin, the doctors stopped his heart and hooked it up to a machine that cleansed and circulated his blood while they cut out the bad spot in the aorta. They replaced it with a dacron tube, started his heart once again, and closed him up. The operation was successful, and for several weeks dad had to stay at home while the massive wound healed and the dacron tube attached itself more permanently to the natural aorta above and below it. Dad did not like being inactive. But he did as he was told, and in time he was able to return to work.
The doctors had determined that dad’s aneurism was probably related to his long-time smoking habit. As I related in Windsor’s Child, dad started smoking when he was eleven years old, just four years after his dad died in the horse and wagon accident. The doctors advised dad to quit smoking.
He tried. He tried several times. He became an expert at quitting! But the habit was very deeply ingrained in him after nearly fifty years, and he went back to cigarettes several times. In spite of the doctor’s warnings, cigarettes remained a major part of his daily routine. But he seemed healthy again, and the dacron aorta seemed to be working fine.
We might have thought we had won a victory over death, that he had come calling and we had successfully stood our ground and said, “No, we are not giving Dad up to you!” It may have seemed to us that death had finally lost a round, that this mighty and dreadful enemy was conquered by the prayers of my Christian friends and my own prayers, that we had stood firm and not given our loved one to death.
How foolish we were if we felt that way. Death always wins. Always. He just waits until another time and tries again. Only one thing will conquer death once and for all. Death, thou shalt die. Oh, grave where is thy victory? The last enemy that will be destroyed is death. Some day the Lord Jesus Christ will put Death to death.
But until then, Death will continue his excursions into our families. Until then, Death will be proud, and mighty and dreadful.
And he will be back.
Photo: Dad, Whelan Parsons, in 1974. He passed away about four years later, in April of 1978. He was 74 years old. The cause of death was emphysema, a deterioration of his lungs brought on by his life-long habit of smoking.
On May 10, 1982, a baby girl was born to Linda and me in Peru, Illinois. We decided to name our third daughter Kathleen Marie, after my neice who literally died of a broken heart when she was just two. I am glad to report that our Kathy is now a healthy wife and mother of two, living a life that "Little Kathy," as she was known in my family, was denied.
