Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Agony of a loved one’s death: In life and print

Friday, April 28, 2000 | 9:16 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

The hospice TV played "Superman" as my father-in-law lay dying of cancer. As James Johnson lay there last week, the disease having already withered and reshaped him nearly beyond recognition, the TV in the lobby outside his room at Nathan Adelson Hospice was tuned to a retro cable channel airing a "Superman" marathon. Episode after episode, bullets and everything else ricocheted from George Reeves' chest, the cruel irony of his imperviousness not lost on me as I sat watching a good man dying, cell by haywire cell.

My beloved grandmother died a few years ago, but she lived in Colorado and I saw her a few times a year. Jim was the first person from my daily life to die, and while I knew something like that was bound to happen, I've always secretly believed I'd be spared.

"This story is about not being spared," T.M. Shine writes in his new memoir, "Fathers Aren't Supposed to Die: Five Brothers Reunite to Say Goodbye" (Simon and Schuster, $20). It begins with the author, a Florida writer, waiting for his beeper to go off. His father has been hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage, and Shine is waiting for The Call -- your father has died.

Until he does, he lingers in a Florida hospital bed. Around him gather his sons, five disparate men who, while mostly living within a short radius of each other, seem to have miles of distance between them.

"It happened really fast," people would say later, and it did, Jim's prognosis shortening every few days until the end. But there in the hospice room, he seemed to be dying in slow motion. He was like a runner who'd stopped with his foot poised above the finish line. "What is he waiting for?" we all wondered aloud, but I'm not so sure it was unfinished business as much as sheer biological vigor -- if Mr. Darwin is right, then our long evolution from single-celled amoeba to eventual humanity must have endowed us with an awesome cellular tenacity. Maybe his uncorrupted cells were simply unwilling to succumb.

In a straightforward yet subtly lyrical prose that admits genuine sentiment without becoming thickly maudlin, Shine's small book describes the tensions and surrealities of hospital life: the frustration of dealing with distracted doctors who think their four years of god school entitle them to be aloof and condescending; nurses and orderlies numbed into insensitivity; the unthinkable details of living wills and whether the sons should simply let their father die; and the fragile dynamics of hope and despair that attend his father's every change in condition, as well as the exhaustion (physical, emotional, spiritual) that accompanies a long hospital siege.

Shine recounts tender and warmly comic scenes of the brothers talking to their father in the uncertain hope that they're getting through. They blurt memories, casting them in the sad past tense. He provides convincing character sketches of his quirky brothers (particularly Will, whose real name is Bill), enough to make you care about them. He is an excellent writer, and all his prowess with words can't save his father -- or, cruelly and surprisingly, Will, who dies in a freak household accident. Brothers aren't supposed to die, either. The family has two to bury now.

My wife was there when her father died, along with her mother and Jim's older brother. Jim had had the death rattle in his throat for a while, every third breath seeming to plunge toward oblivion, 25 seconds without a breath, 35, 45 ... then another ragged inhalation. But now the end was plainly near, although Jim struggled against it. "It's OK," my wife reassured him, and he finally let go. Instantly, she changed her mind: No! It isn't OK! I don't want you to go! But there was nothing she could do.

Midway through "Fathers Aren't Supposed to Die," Shine laments that he can't muster even a shot glass of spirituality to see him through the ordeal with his dad. By the end, when he's suffered double-barreled tragedy, that hasn't changed. He rejects the easy solace of piety. "Maybe because it's not out of my realm of possibility to think that his death has absolutely no meaning at all," he writes of Will. He bucks up nonetheless, trying to ward off the ultimate despair that must inevitably follow such an acknowledgment of meaninglessness. "It doesn't stop the laughter or cap the energy I need to get through the hours," he writes, and you're glad for him.

In college, as callow student-union comic philosophers, my friends and I excused our petty failures (missed deadlines, blown quizzes, romantic misadventures) by saying, "Nothing matters because we're all gonna die anyway." We meant it as black comedy, and I still might find it funny if I weren't wondering whether it might, in fact, be true.

That gets into the realm of faith, squishy ground for an I'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it guy like me. Shine, too. "I am extremely envious of the true believer," he admits. "Bypassing God," he can't avoid closing his book with the two most heartbreaking words I can think of: "Life ends."

Maybe. Probably. I mean, I haven't seen any hard evidence to the contrary. But in case there are indeed points beyond, let me just say this: Have a safe trip, Jim. Up, up and away ...

Reading matters

Over the years former Nevada governor and senator Paul Laxalt, a Ronald Reagan intimate, had been approached several times to write a tell-all memoir about that peculiar and significant presidency. Unwilling to stoop that low, he'd always refused.

That hasn't changed, although he has written a memoir, "Nevada's Paul Laxalt" (Jack Bacon and Company, $27.50), a big chunk of which covers the Reagan years. Because he knew or met most of the main players in that administration and, before that, many key figures in Nevada's transition to its modern incarnation, the book should have some historical heft.

Not on the scale I weighed it on. Although he provides some amusing anecdotes from mid-century Nevada, the book loses considerable steam just when it should be heating up: when Tall Paul hooks up with Reagan.

Determined not to tell all, he ends up telling not nearly enough. We get a buddy-buddy, sanitized version of the Reagan White House. Laxalt is particularly lax when it comes to such downers as the Iran-Contra scandal, dispatching it in a few friendly paragraphs that give the president too much benefit of the doubt. Coupled with Laxalt's weaknesses as a writer, that reticence -- which sounds so admirable in principle -- dooms his book.