A Fighting Chance (9 page)

Late that evening, she sat up in bed and said, “Don, there’s that gas pain again.” Then she fell back dead.

The doctors arrived in less than a minute and tried to revive her, but she’d had a massive heart attack. The autopsy showed that she had advanced coronary disease—never diagnosed, never treated. And now she was gone.

John’s wife, Barbara, called. “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry.” I didn’t cry—I just didn’t believe her. I couldn’t believe her. My mother was eighty-three, maybe old by some standards, but Aunt Bee was ninety-three and spry as ever. And my grandmother had been energetic and active until she died at ninety-four. I knew Mother was fading a little, but I thought she was strong and healthy.

That was the hardest part for me: my mother was always strong—and in the blink of an eye she was gone.

Family poured in from everywhere for her funeral. I felt dazed.

A few days later, I was back in the spare bedroom at my parents’ house. I was lying on the twin bed on my back, crying. My daddy came in, and I got up and held out my arms. I thought he would hold me and tell me that we were very sad but we still had each other.

But he just stood there and said, “I want to die.”

I held him while he cried. I rubbed his shoulders, but he kept on crying. I told him what I’d hoped he would say to me: that our hearts were broken but we still had each other and everything would be all right. But I wasn’t sure it was true.

Stacking Sandbags

Two months after Mike Synar died, President Clinton appointed a lawyer from Madison, Wisconsin, to head the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. Brady Williamson was a quietly remarkable guy. He maintained an active law practice, but he had represented Bill Clinton in negotiations involving the presidential debates and in setting up various trips to meet with foreign leaders. In legal circles, he was known for his work on the First Amendment and for a bankruptcy case he had won in the United States Supreme Court. He’d done great work on the case, but I didn’t know him. Now the commission was his problem.

Officially, I was still the senior advisor for the commission, although we hadn’t done much work since Mike’s death. When Brady called, I was blunt: Mike and I had a deal, but that was then. Mike is gone, and I’m out of here.

Brady asked me to wait to resign until he could come to meet me and talk with me about his plans. I said okay.

Brady is cute. Not movie-star handsome—just cute. He’s short, with glasses, a mustache, bright eyes, and a quick sense of humor. When he came to the house a few days later, we sat on the enclosed porch, enjoying an unexpectedly warm day. I offered him iced tea, and Faith put her head in his lap. Unlike most goldens, Faith was a little picky about people, so I took this as a sign that maybe Brady was a good guy. More than anything, though, I felt a little sorry for him. By now I knew that most of the other commissioners didn’t share Mike’s vision, and leading this group was going to be tough. But this wasn’t my problem. I was going back to my books and my classes.

Like the superb lawyer he is, Brady had done his homework and knew what the commission was up against. Once he got past the preliminaries, he didn’t sugarcoat the situation. President Clinton was facing a Republican-controlled Congress bent on fighting him at every turn, and Washington was still reeling from two government shutdowns. Besides, the big banks were pushing harder than ever to change the bankruptcy laws. Brady didn’t think President Clinton would pick a fight with the big banks right now. And if the president didn’t want to push back, who would?

I was starting to understand. Despite the huge numbers of people in bankruptcy, it’s almost impossible to form a political coalition around them. They come into the bankruptcy system and exit as soon as they can, a big, fast-moving river of people who lose a job or face some terrible health crisis. Our research had shown that they aren’t especially old or young, northern or southern, black or white, male or female. Instead, they’re a cross section of pretty much everyone who has reached the end of their rope. They spend most of their waking hours scrambling to sell off a car or hold down a second job. They barely have time to fend off calls from angry creditors, let alone write letters to Congress. And most are profoundly, desperately ashamed of their situation. For many, the decision to file for bankruptcy proves to be the darkest secret of their entire lives.

Politically speaking, they are almost invisible. And yet these families were up against what was already one of the best-organized, best-funded lobbies in America. (It would get even better organized and better funded in the years to come.)

The situation looked pretty hopeless. Mike had died, and the committee’s work had stalled. Now the banking industry would get what it wanted, and the families who needed some relief would get rolled. If ever a game was rigged, this was it.

Brady’s pitch was different from the one Mike had made a year earlier. The way Brady saw it, millions of middle-class families were sinking, and the banks were moving fast to make a bad situation worse. He admitted that the commission might not be able to make much progress and that we probably couldn’t achieve Mike’s ambition of improving the bankruptcy laws. But Brady thought we had a good chance of holding off the banks—at least for a while. If we stood our ground and started fighting right now, we might be able to deny them the opportunity to use the commission as a rubber stamp for everything they wanted. And if we could do that, maybe we could do more.

My three wishes were gone. Now it was about hanging on to whatever we could salvage from the existing law. Besides, as Brady pointed out, every day the current bankruptcy protections stayed strong was a day that another five thousand families would get the fresh start they so desperately needed.

Lord, this was discouraging. But I signed on, and we started stacking sandbags as fast as we could. Maybe we’d lose in the end, but every day we held on was a better day for struggling families.

The Slow Kind of Cancer

There was nothing fun about the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. Nothing.

Our job was to produce a report for Congress that would recommend changes to the bankruptcy code. The battle lines were drawn early. Thanks to my books and speeches, my views about families in trouble were pretty well known by then, and they sharply contradicted the views of the commission’s most outspoken member: Judge Edith Jones.

Jones, a federal judge from Texas, was a very big deal in conservative circles. Her name had been on the short list for the Supreme Court under both George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and one of my Texas buddies once told me that George W. Bush called her “Auntie Edith.” I think Judge Jones saw bankruptcy as a world of opportunists, one in which many people would take advantage whenever they could. As she once wrote, “Nobody is holding a gun to consumers’ heads and forcing them to send in credit card applications.” She worried about “widespread gaming of the system,” and she said she thought it was a “matter of personal integrity and honor not to take on obligations beyond one’s means.” Judge Jones talked of economic failure as akin to moral failure.

I thought the research showed something very different. Medical problems, job losses, and family breakups had laid these families low. Most had hung on and tried to repay long past any reasonable chance of doing so. As I saw it, the families in bankruptcy were mostly good people caught in a bad situation—a point of view that did not put me high on Judge Jones’s list of favorite people.

Neither Judge Jones nor I had any money at stake in this debate. Neither of us was being paid by bankers to advance our positions. We simply saw the world very differently. She probably thought I was too optimistic about human nature, and I was sure she was too cynical. (Or maybe she thought I was too cynical about the nature of giant banks, and I thought she was too optimistic.) Judge Jones consistently sided with industry-friendly changes in the law—and I fought her at every turn.

The back-and-forth with Judge Jones was relentless and wearing. Not long after starting my work on the commission, I bought a fax machine, which I put in my office at Harvard. When anyone sent me a fax, the machine made a funny warming-up noise. Judge Jones faxed me so many painful memos that at one point I realized that I felt like one of Pavlov’s dogs: whenever I heard the machine revving up, my stomach clenched and I felt sick.

I was also fighting hard to hang on to my daddy. After Mother died, he seemed lost. I called him every night. I told him about things that had happened during the day: about Alex, who loved his computer classes but seemed bored by his other course work at college; about Amelia, who had moved to California after getting her MBA and seemed to be seriously involved with her boyfriend; about the pansies that were starting to bloom or the leaves that were changing color. Most weekends we watched sports together, with Daddy in Oklahoma and me in Massachusetts, and we called back and forth on the phone after a really good (or bad) play. I tried everything I could think of to help fill the gaping, dark loneliness that seemed to be swallowing him whole.

I begged him to come live with us. He made a couple of short trips to Boston but said he felt my mother back in their house, and that’s where he wanted to be. Every few days he drove to Wetumka to visit her grave.

I could tell that I was losing him. He had always been thin, but now he looked translucent and his pale blue eyes were watery. His doctors did some tests and told him he had prostate cancer, although Daddy assured me it was “the slow kind.” He admitted that he couldn’t sleep.

The worst was when he cried. Daddy had always been quiet—quiet and proud. I had almost never seen him cry, but now it was different. We’d be on the phone, talking about gardening, and I’d cheerfully say something about roses and he’d say that Mother loved roses, and then he would get quiet. I could hear him making choking sounds, and occasionally he’d let out a strangled sob. I felt helpless. He wasn’t dying of cancer. He was dying of a broken heart.

The People No One Heard

For two years, I traveled. Back and forth to Washington, back and forth to Oklahoma. Then I’d fly off to various cities where the commission held hearings. Detroit. Seattle. San Antonio. Santa Fe.

The commission’s most visible work was to hold public hearings. The staff and I worked hard to create a balanced list of witnesses—some banking industry advocates and some consumer advocates, some conservative economists and some liberal ones—but that doesn’t capture how these hearings actually worked. When we started, I thought the real point of the hearings would be to let people from different parts of the country participate in a public conversation about our bankruptcy laws. Gradually, I came to realize that even though the commission’s staff tried to be evenhanded, the playing field was sharply tilted.

Many of the same people showed up at the hearings, no matter where we held them. After a while, Brady clued me in: A bunch of bank lobbyists were being paid to follow us from town to town.

By contrast, relatively few bankrupt families attended those hearings. The commission’s chief counsel, Melissa Jacoby, worked hard to seek them out, but most people didn’t want to draw attention to their own financial failure. Even if they wanted to come, most bankrupt families couldn’t take a day off work or afford any travel expenses—and they had no lobbying group to put them up in a nice hotel and foot the bill.

To most of the people who attended those hearings, the families in bankruptcy were little more than abstract numbers. There was hardly anyone to talk firsthand about what it was like to lose a job or face overwhelming medical bills and how the bankruptcy system had given them a chance to get back on their feet. Commissioners might talk about debtors “gaming the system,” but they almost never had to look at a real person and make that accusation.

The whole process made me gag.

By law, the National Bankruptcy Review Commission’s report was due in October 1997. The final vote on our list of recommendations was a nail-biter. Judge Jones pushed hard for a series of recommendations that Congress should make it harder for families to file for bankruptcy, but in the end, she mustered only four votes. Five commissioners, led by Brady, recommended keeping the safety net intact and making just a few modest adjustments to the law. It wasn’t the three wishes that Mike Synar had once promised me, but the official commission report stood with the families in trouble.

The day arrived to deliver the report to Congress, and ceremonies were planned in Washington. All the commissioners and the staff showed up. I didn’t go. The good guys had won, by a one-vote margin, but I was sick of politics. I’d had enough of Washington.

Another Death

A few days after the final commission report was delivered, I flew to Oklahoma. My daddy’s slow cancer, it turned out, wasn’t so slow.

Daddy was eighty-six, and he wanted to die at home. In my whole life, I couldn’t remember that he had ever asked me for anything, but he asked for this: Let me die at home.

My brothers and I pulled in closer. We called a hospice. We split up what needed to be done. John and David were there every day, and I came whenever I could.

In a catalogue I came across a video series about the airplanes of World War II. I bought all the videotapes and took them to Daddy. I was sure he would love seeing the old planes, that he would point out this or that plane he remembered from the war. But he had no interest in those memories anymore. The only thing he wanted to talk about was Mother.

Daddy never spoke about it, but I could see that he was in a lot of pain. His breathing was often jagged. When someone moved him to change a sheet or adjust his pillow, he would often cry out involuntarily. Then he would quickly reassure us: “It’s fine. It’s fine.”

In December, Don Reed and I were both back for the weekend. With all four children nearby, Daddy seemed to let go. He was suddenly much worse. He held my hand and told me how much he loved me and that I was strong and I was going to be fine. The last thing he said to me was, “It’s time for me to be with your mother.” He closed his eyes and he never opened them again. Within the hour, he died.