Musée de Beaux Arts

My father always envied trees. Not for any philosophical reason, and not because he enjoyed a tree’s stability or fortitude. Rather, he was jealous of trees because they were constantly growing, their roots always reaching out further and deeper into the earth. Dad would always try to introduce me to his admiration of trees, but the beauty he saw was lost on me. Indeed, my father was always trying to introduce me to things he loved. A Civil War buff, he bought me biographies of his historical hero, Abraham Lincoln; a Duke alum, he introduced me to Duke basketball long before I matriculated; but most significantly and most often, Dad introduced me to his friends. There was such great pleasure in him when planting the seed of friendship: “I’d like you to meet my son.” And so it was this past March after President Richard Brodhead received a standing ovation from the student body following a speech in Griffith Film Theater. I could feel Dad ushering me toward the stage as President Brodhead stepped down into a mass of grateful undergraduates. I approached him slowly, extended my hand and introduced myself. “My name is Michael Corey, and I’m a senior here. My mother and I recently received a letter from you, offering your condolences after my father’s death. “I just wanted to let you know how much we appreciated you going out of your way to do that.” President Brodhead gently placed his right hand over my heart. “This is part of your education. Learn from it.”  **** I’ve always had a penchant for crying. My last day of kindergarten, I sobbed as my teacher engulfed me with her arms. The sadness must have been contagious because I made all the parents around me weep as well. The same thing happened in first, second and third grades. I was never very good at saying goodbye, I suppose. But there was plenty reason to cry on the morning of August 31 as I opened an ominous e-mail from my mother entitled “Reports came back late last night.” Dad had been treated since April for everything from angina to ulcers to acid reflux. He had been having a difficult time swallowing due to a consistent pain in his stomach that came on strong in the evenings. All of the medications his doctor had prescribed had failed to alleviate anything, and a lack of aggressive testing had left Dad in the dark as to what storm was brewing in his body. But days after I left for my final year of college, the pain became intolerable, and Dad went in for a CAT scan and biopsy. “Mike, this is what we know for now,” my mother wrote. “The scope showed esophageal cancer. The type is adenocarcinoma. We are scheduled for a PET scan tomorrow morning at nine. This will tell us more about the cancer and the treatment we need to get for Dad.” What we would learn about the cancer was less than encouraging. Esophageal cancer, which arises where the stomach and the esophagus connect, is being diagnosed at a faster rate than almost any other cancer. The survival rates are terrifying. My father’s cancer was already at stage three—it had yet to spread to major organs, but a few lymph nodes had already been infected. His chance of survival, according to the numbers, was just 10 to 15 percent. Yet optimism still abounded. “I am in a fighting war mode and that’s how we are going to tackle Dad’s cancer,” my mother wrote September 7. “And we will win.” The e-mails came from Mom interspersed with determined words and tales of home: My parents found a surgeon who would take on Dad’s case (two had declined, saying the prognosis was too grim); bats had once again taken up residence behind the backboard of my basketball hoop above the garage. Aggressive chemotherapy and radiation treatments would come concurrently for six weeks, but Dad’s hair was not expected to fall out; Dad loved “Chicago,” and thanks for getting us those tickets for our 32nd Anniversary. When the radiation and chemo are finished, Dad will have his surgery. And, Michael, how’s school? School was a tremendous distraction. It was therapeutic, arming me with the ability to forget the trials of home while simultaneously providing me the perfect venue to grapple with the present and the past. And though I am not a believer in fate, there is little other way to explain what brought me to Professor Deborah Pope’s “The Healing Power of Poetry” seminar. Content aside, Pope herself was a personal blessing and, perhaps more significantly, a model of how to cope with great sadness. Cancer had befallen her own father just weeks into the course, and though she missed the occasional class, her determination to honor her father through her profession, through her love of teaching and of writing, was empowering for me. As a class, our goal was to engage and discover poetry that had the effect of providing comfort, particularly for those who were ailing and for their caretakers. As such, we met with a surgeon and his med students in the Intensive Care Unit of Duke’s hospital. The doctor walked us through the ICU, passing one patient after another, each of whom was exposed to this curious horde of benevolent undergraduates. I felt as if we were in a museum, led by a docent whose job was only to guide us through these people on display for all to see. Yet we saw nothing, for as we filed past each room, my peers and I turned away.  **** “I feel like I am the general in the war getting ready for battle,” Mom wrote the day before Dad’s treatment began. “Remember, the Coreys are survivors and fighters and we will win.” Indeed, my parents have been fighting for survival all their lives. Both grew up with next to nothing, and with a pair of obstacles to boot: My father’s home had been ravished by the cancer that took my grandfather’s life; my mother’s torn apart by a bitter divorce. Education was their only way out. And so it was that my father was valedictorian at Stonewall Jackson High School in Charleston, W. Va., a National Merit finalist and recipient of a full academic scholarship to Duke University. My mother worked and paid her way through the University of Toledo, the first in her family to graduate from college. My parents, both the children of Lebanese immigrants, had met each other at cultural get-togethers that were so common in the 1950s among Lebanese. They had kept in touch through romantic missives dispatched back and forth between Durham and Toledo, and so it was no coincidence that Mom landed a job at Massachusetts General Hospital while Dad studied at Harvard Law. They settled in Columbus, Ohio, Dad having earned a position at the largest law firm in the state. They had intended on having a cadre of children, each to be trained on how to be good and how to live well. Complications ensued, however, and my parents had to rely on medical assistance in order to build their family. In the meantime, they scraped up the money they had and purchased a house in a cozy suburb. Four years later, their only child would be born. From that point on, life was lived in contentment. Such blessings would continue until 1995, when chest pains led to two angioplasties and an open heart surgery for my father, and a year later when breast cancer plagued my mother. The struggles were long and painful and trying, but the Coreys are survivors and fighters, and they won.  **** “Dad looks great, but the fatigue is setting in which means the chemo and radiation are working,” read the e-mail from Mom September 15. “I have been crawling into the hospital bed with him to cuddle him to sleep at night.” Two days later, I flew home to see my father for the first time since he was diagnosed. It was a surprise visit, one week before my birthday. I walked into the hospital room, and Dad burst into tears (like father, like son). A hug and a handful of tissues later, I was talking about my classes, about the magazine I was in charge of, about the upcoming basketball season. We would open my birthday presents later in the evening, a sliver of joy and normalcy amid a place where suffering was never wrong. The day of surgery was set for November 22. I had arrived in Columbus on the 19th, terrified but hopeful that Dad’s victory was at hand. I was fortunate, too, in that my professors had agreed to let me take my final exams from home, via e-mail and fax. That way I could remain in Columbus to help my father recuperate, and to help my mother. We expected Dad home by Christmas. Prior to the surgery, our priest came in to pray over my father. We all crossed ourselves, hoping that God would be able to protect and heal Dad better than He had prevented cancer from entering Dad’s body in the first place, better than He had guided his doctor in April. My mother and I each placed a hand on Dad’s forehead, and we asked God to help the doctors and nurses save my father’s life. The priest anointed my father with oil and holy water. The oil trickled over Dad’s left temple; the water fell over his right. Both fluids collided with a stream of tears on his cheeks, where Mom wiped them away with the palm of her hand. A waiting room is a terrible place to be when you’re waiting to hear if your father has lived or died. They are packed with strung-out families, everyone anxious and sad and belligerent: leave me alone, you bastard, my husband is fighting for his life; what could you be laughing at in this place, my father may be dying; can’t you see that we are immersed in sadness? I passed the time by sending text messages to friends, by trying to write a paper for my political science course, by listening to Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala assail each other on CNN. Mom spent much of the time talking with Tom Szykowny, Dad’s closest friend, and his wife Lee. They had been my parents’ rock since Dad was diagnosed—they’d helped them find doctors, they’d bring Mom dinner every night, and they’d come and visit Dad on a daily basis. I was too nervous to talk, so I stuck with what calmed me. And then Dr. Price, Dad’s surgeon, appeared with a broad smile. Dad had made it through the surgery, an esophagectomy, just fine. No complications during the procedure. Whew. The chemo and radiation had prevented the spread of cancer, and the tumor came out nicely. We then entered the Surgical Intensive Care Unit and came upon my father, decorated like a Christmas tree with tubes and wires and machinery, all to allow him to survive. Until the anesthesia wore off, he would rest, and Mom and I would wait for his miraculous rebirth. Dad’s healing was slow, but progress was being made. Mom passed the time by giving her whole self, through words and silence, through foot rubs, through reading the hundreds of cards Dad received, through holding hands, through telling stories. Mom dressed as if she were going to the most important business meeting of her life, dousing herself with Obsession perfume, all in an attempt to maximize her beauty for her dear husband who could only look at his wife. **** As a young man growing up in the Corey household, serious disputes were few and far between. The most significant one arose every morning: Who would read the sports section first? Dad would wake every morning at 6 a.m., pick up the paper from the front porch, have his breakfast and then come upstairs to nestle me out of bed. The challenge, then, was to distract his attention long enough to pilfer the paper from his hands, and then to run like hell. I would win on scant few occasions, and even when I did, he would manage to convince me to let him read sports first. It was impossible to say no to my father. So with Dad confined to bed, he relinquished his role to me. As soon as I arrived every morning, I’d sit and read him the sports section. I’d read him box scores, game stories and editorials—anything and everything he wanted to hear. Then we’d do crossword puzzles. I was a novice and Dad was a pro, but it was all we could do together, now that playing golf or watching basketball weren’t options. I missed the days when he was healthy. He used to take only an hour every Sunday afternoon to complete the New York Times Magazine’s crossword, sprint down the stairs and show off his triumph to Mom and me. The triumphs for my father, over the next three months, grew further and further apart. A bastard complication lingered in the weeks after Dad’s November surgery—a lymph leak, a tremendously rare side effect from an esophagectomy—that required a second surgery to rectify. That procedure proved unsuccessful, but everything else improved for Dad. Cancer was no longer the issue. And in the process, Dad’s strength began to improve, and our confidence soared that he could outperform the trauma that was trying to steal his life. After 14 days on an oral ventilator, doctors switched him to a tracheotomy—a ventilator that is surgically inserted through the neck. Dad was finally able to speak, thanks to a voice magnifier that attached to the trach. A bevy of doctors and nurses, now our second family, crowded into the room to bear witness to my father’s first words in a month. Dad only paid attention to my mother, however, and with a longing but hopeful gaze, exclaimed, “I love you.” **** Christmas had always been a day of polarity for my father. In 1965, my grandfather’s long battle against lung cancer came to an end on Christmas morning. And every December 25, my parents and I would return to Charleston to the same home where his father died, and Dad would try to enjoy the holiday with his wife and child while being haunted by the demons of a tragedy he could never bear to face. Indeed, my father had only visited his father’s grave twice in his life—the day of the funeral, and once with me in 1999. Dad was always horrified of death, and therefore it was never mentioned. But it was clear that this Christmas, my father had a considerable mental hurdle to overcome: He did not want to die the same day as his father. But Dad lived and lived well that day, with tremendous spirits and everything but his lymph leak showing signs of improvement. Mom and I had been relegated to sleeping at the hospital because a winter storm had taken the power from our home and left it frigid, so Dad had company at all hours of the evening. We decorated Dad’s room with lights, a mini-tree, a nutcracker and a signed basketball that Coach K had sent to my father. Two days before the holiday, when my mother was in the waiting room making a phone call, Dad asked me what we were going to get Mom for Christmas. Though my father was a tremendous lawyer and an unmatched friend and parent, he was perhaps an even better giver. He loved to dole out presents and receive smiles in return, and my mother was his favorite recipient. I told Dad I could run to the local mall and pick up a few catalogues, bring them back and then I would purchase whatever he wanted. But this would take time, and the streets were still overflowing with snow and ice and salt trucks. One of Dad’s nurses overheard our predicament. She called in a few of her colleagues, and they turned Dad’s bed around to face the computer the nurses normally used to keep track of all the medications being pumped into a patient. Instead, the nurse loaded an Internet browser and let Dad and me shop for Mom. My father’s room filled with awestruck nurses. We spent 30 minutes on the Lazarus and Nordstrom websites until Dad was satisfied with a pink sweater and sapphire necklace—Mom’s favorite color and stone. It was the best Christmas I can remember. Death may be proud, but it showed humility in giving us those days of cheer. Soon after, though, Death began to overcome goodness and good news with pneumonia, with septic shock, with arrhythmia, with gastrointestinal bleeding. A third surgery on January 25, with the goal of remedying the still-leaking lymph fluid resulted in complications with his lungs. On January 31, it appeared as if my father’s lungs were irreversibly failing. The planning for his funeral began, but through the wisdom and aggressive treatment of his doctors, his lungs recovered. The entire medical staff was shocked, and so were we. I had been back and forth between home and school all year long, but there had been no darker time then those 15 days of peril. I returned to school February 6, in a joyful daze—Dad had lived. It was miraculous, and any doubts I had ever had about my faith were erased. A few weeks later, faith is all I would have. I received the phone call from Mom the morning of February 22. Dad’s kidney and liver had begun to fail.  **** Mr. Szykowny picked me up at the airport, and we quietly cried during the 10-minute drive to Mt. Carmel West Hospital. I arrived, met with Mom and a cadre of doctors, and we collectively decided that Dad would be moved to hospice care that evening. Leaving SICU was like surrendering to an unthinkably cruel foe. This had been our battle station, where the Coreys had fought so valiantly for so long. But the barrage of complications had taken too great a toll. My father would soon be soaring into heaven, having spent so much of his life flying beneath the sun. And I could not help but crash into despondency. And so it was that on the morning of February 25, around the time my father would have left his downtown office to head to the gym with his friends, he left this world for the next. The room emptied, and Mom and I were left alone with my father. I climbed into bed with him, my head resting on his heart, just as I had done as a young child. This was my Dad. Mom wrapped Dad’s arms around me, one final embrace. I rose, and Mom took my place. One last cuddle to send my father to sleep.   **** There is no such thing as a beautiful funeral. There is only beauty in the life lived, and honor in the celebration therein. My arm around my mother, we sat witness as our priest and three of Dad’s closest friends showered my father with copious praise. An impeccable attorney, an incomparable human being, an irreplaceable friend and an unrivaled husband and father—this was George Corey. And at his committal, I rose and read to my father one last time, a poem written in honor of Abraham Lincoln: And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs, Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.