On January 22, 1959, the Knox Mine Disaster occurred in northeastern Pennsylvania at the River Slope Mine. The Susquehanna River broke through the ceiling, flooded the mine, and twelve miners were killed. Within months of the accident, coal companies began to withdraw from the deep mining business in that part of the world.

          On May 27, 1962, after the Borough Council of Centralia, Pennsylvania, arranged for the cleanup of a landfill in a strip mine pit near the borough, members of the volunteer firefighter company set it on fire, as they had done in the past. This time, however, the fire spread through an opening and into a 3,700-acre labyrinth of abandoned underground mines in the Buck Mountain coal bed, and started a massive subterranean fire, in which temperatures easily exceeded 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and lethal clouds of carbon monoxide and other gases filled the chambers and tunnels. Initial efforts to contain the fire – involving excavation, and drilling bore holes through which a combination of water and crushed rock were flushed – were ineffective. Local and state politicians consulted experts on the runaway fire and concluded that the costs of continuing to try to extinguish it were simply too great. They acknowledged that the fire could continue to burn for another two hundred and fifty years, like many other underground coal fires in the state that had already been burning for a very long time, and began to focus their efforts on obtaining state and federal funds to be used as buyout offers for Centralia’s residents, who saw steam and smoke being emitted through cracks and fissures in the ground, which were also releasing carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and methane. 

          One of the towns in the region that people from Centralia moved to was Garvey. 

          Dr. James Thayer was the town doctor in Garvey. In 1962 he was a 66-year-old widower who had lost his only child, a son, in the Battle of the Bulge, in December 1944. He was six feet tall, thin, had chiseled, handsome facial features, short white hair, always wore a dress shirt and tie under his white doctor’s coat, and was revered by his patients. His medical practice took up the first floor of a two-story building he owned, on Main Street. When he opened his practice in 1924 he took out a mortgage on the building and rented out two of the three apartments on the upper floor, to take in a little extra money while he and his wife, Julia, who worked as his receptionist, lived in the third apartment. Four years later they bought a Victorian a few blocks away. 

          After Julia died from cervical cancer, in 1931, at the age of thirty-five, he decided he didn’t want to be a landlord anymore. He wanted to focus only on taking care of his ten-year-old son, Andrew, and on practicing medicine. The apartments would only be used when Black patients came to his clinic from far away. They knew he’d offer them the use of one of the apartments, and they almost always took him up on his offer, because the only hotel in town would not permit Blacks to stay in it. Even though the townspeople knew that Dr. Thayer did that, they were shocked, after Julia died, when he hired a Black housekeeper, named Alicia, and gave her a first-floor bedroom in the Victorian. Alicia moved out, but continued to do Dr. Thayer’s housekeeping, when Andrew went off to college, in Philadelphia, where he got a degree in History and went to work as a high school teacher in the city until he enlisted in the U.S. Army in January 1942.

          In the waiting room of Dr. Thayer’s clinic, to the right of the receptionist’s sliding glass window, on the narrow wall between it and the door that opened into the hallway that led to the exam rooms, a sign inside a glass-covered thin black frame said:

If you are having trouble paying your bill, 

I would be happy to discuss bartering 

goods or services.

- Dr. James Thayer

          Dr. Thayer accepted cords of firewood, eggs, meat, fruit, vegetables, and pies. Patients paid him by painting rooms in his house, performing repairs, trimming his trees, and mowing his lawn. They serviced his car.

          “I take a lot of the food we get down the street to the Salvation Army shelter,” his receptionist told her husband, but no one else. “The Lutheran and the Catholic churches up the hill take some of it too, for their receptions after funerals.”

          He performed lots of bronchoscopies on miners. He set broken bones and cast them. He splinted injuries to tendons, ligaments, and joints. He drained abscesses and boils. He cleaned and sutured all kinds of wounds. He treated patients with heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and chronic pain. He vaccinated children and treated their ear and throat infections. He delivered babies, and performed C-sections, tonsillectomies, and appendectomies at the county hospital. He got called to the mines every now and then, when there was an accident, like the one that happened in June, 1962.

          A section of roof collapsed inside a shaft. When he arrived, one man was already dead.  Dr. Thayer applied a tourniquet to the left thigh of the second man, got him to the hospital, and performed the amputation below the knee.

          Dr. Thayer figured that between ten and fifteen percent of his patients were men who worked in the mines, or used to, and had one stage or another of pneumoconiosis – black lung disease – from breathing coal dust. He told those men, early on, that he couldn’t do anything for their lungs, but he’d treat the heart conditions and other problems that were caused by their bad lungs. Widows made up a very high percentage of the people he treated, because pneumoconiosis killed so many of their husbands, along with alcoholism and suicide. When the men killed themselves they usually did it with drugs that couldn’t be detected in their blood, so their families could collect their life insurance.

          Dr. Thayer was not naïve about the aura he had. He knew he projected an aura of inscrutability to all of his patients, and even to his nurse and receptionist, who looked at him, and thought of him, as if he were a kind of god. He knew he was perceived to be a man who kept secrets – thousands of them – and indeed he did – and that is why they trusted him. He listened carefully when his patients confided in him their troubles, and cried, and he never hurried them.

          When Andrew died in the war, Dr. Thayer was not surprised that many of his patients didn’t know whether, or how, to say anything about Andrew’s death, because he had always maintained a certain amount of social distance in his doctor-patient relationships, so that he could make difficult medical decisions with complete objectivity, and because by remaining clinically detached he would be better able to avoid becoming emotionally overwhelmed by their suffering, their deaths, and the inevitability of having to deal with his own mistakes.

          In the summer of 1962 it had been thirty-one years since his Julia died, eighteen years since Andrew died, and Dr. Thayer knew – especially when he lay awake at night, stared at the ceiling, and laid his arm across the space his wife had once occupied, next to him – that he had never let himself fully mourn their deaths.

          He had kept himself detached because that’s what he had had to do to keep working, and by keeping himself detached from the tragedies that had befallen him he knew that he had made himself one of the loneliest people in the world. He acknowledged that he had done that to himself. He had considered killing himself many times, and felt confident that he could do it in a detached way, but what kept him from following through with it was knowing that his patients needed him so much.

          The appointments that were the hardest for him were the ones with the veterans who had come back from the war broken, mentally. They were the patients who were not afraid of trying to break through the doctor-patient wall, and would say “I know you lost your son,” with the expectation that that loss had conferred to Dr. Thayer a special ability to understand the stories of the horrors they had experienced. Each morning at the clinic, when he looked at the appointment calendar, he’d experience a sinking feeling when he saw the names of such veterans on it, and during his time with them in the examination rooms he would steel himself for the confessional moments that might or might not occur.

          He knew what his own life story was: ‘Small town doc loses everything that ever mattered to him, and the two people he loved most in the world, and is left with only his medical practice’. 

          As he lay awake at night he often asked himself whether he had lost the ability to feel, or, after so many years of suppressing his grief, had simply refused to confront it, out of fear that it would overwhelm him, and change him. ‘So what if I’ve become a husk of the man Julia and Andrew once knew?’ he thought. “No one knows that but me. And I’m a good doctor. That’s what matters most.”

 

*   *   *

 

          At 9:35 a.m. on a Tuesday in early September, 1962, Dr. Thayer entered the room of the second of four patients he had come to see at the hospital.

          The head of the bed was raised to a thirty-degree angle, and the old man, who had worked in the coal mines his entire adult life, was asleep with his mouth open. A clear oxygen tube ran across his upper lip, with the prongs of the cannula in his nostrils. An IV tube was taped to his right forearm. His cheeks, forehead, and the top of his bald head were mottled with brown, tan, and pink spots, and there were large purple splotches on his thin forearms and the backs of his hands, which lay at his sides on top of the sheet.

          Dr. Thayer stepped to the right side of the bed, put his hand on the man’s left shoulder, and waited.

          After a few seconds the man closed his mouth, opened it, snorted, closed his mouth again, opened his eyes into a squint, and slowly turned his head a few inches to his left. He coughed a few times, without opening his mouth. “Hi Doc,” he said.

          “Hello Mr. Wisniewski,” Dr. Thayer said.

          “I’m glad you came,” the man said in a raspy voice. “Can you hand me that?” He pointed at the surface of the wheeled over-the-bed table, which had been pushed to the side. On the table was a rectangular, copper-colored aluminum box, a little larger than a Zippo lighter, with ZENITH in gold letters against a brown background at one end. A braided string-like cord, attached to the aluminum box, had been looped a few times, and the part of it that extended from the small pile of loops split into two extensions that ran into two clear-plastic earpieces.

          Mr. Wisniewski held out his shaking hands, palms upward. Dr. Thayer put the box in Mr. Wisniewski’s right hand, and the cord with its extensions in his left hand.

          “I can help you with that,” Dr. Thayer said, and picked up one of the earpieces. He put an earpiece into Mr. Wisniewski’s left ear while Mr. Wisniewski tried, and failed, to put in the right earpiece, which fell from his shaking hand. Dr. Thayer walked around the bed, put the earpiece in, and returned to the left side of the bed. Mr. Wisniewski used a shaking forefinger, and thumb, to adjust two small circular white-plastic dials inside the top corners of the copper-colored aluminum box.

          “Can you hear me now?” Dr. Thayer said.

          “Yes,” Mr. Wisniewski said in a raspy voice.

          “You said you were glad I came,” Dr. Thayer said.

          “Yes,” Mr. Wisniewski said. “Can you understand me, or should I put in my teeth?”

          “I can understand you just fine,” Dr. Thayer said.

          “I wanna stop all this,” Mr. Wisniewski said. “I decided. It’s time.”

          “Stop all what?” Dr. Thayer said.

          “Everything,” Mr. Wisniewski said. He lifted his left hand and made a small throwing motion. “The kidney machine. The oxygen.” He pointed to his upper lip. “Everything. I want to die.”

          “Why?” Dr. Thayer said.

          “Cuz everything hurts terrible,” Mr. Wisniewski said. He coughed, with his mouth closed, and his nostrils flared. “Pain and boredom is all I got. The drugs make me sick to my stomach and then I see things that aren’t there, that scare me real bad. I want done with it, Doc.”

          Dr. Thayer put his hand on Mr. Wisniewski’s shoulder.

          “When you came to my place you saw...” Mr. Wisniewski said, and coughed with his mouth closed. “...I’m alone. I got no family. I can’t get around on one leg. You done everything you could. I thank you for that.”

          “There’s no need to thank me,” Dr. Thayer said.

          “Yeah there is,” Mr. Wisniewski said. “You comin’ to see me was about all I had to look forward to. But there’s no goin home now. I can’t do it.”

          “What would you like me to do?” Dr. Thayer said.

          “Give me somethin to end it,” Mr. Wisniewski said.

          “I can’t do that,” Dr. Thayer said. “I took an oath not to harm anyone. I live by that.”

          “It’s illegal too, I suppose,” Mr. Wisniewski said.

          “Yes,” Dr. Thayer said.

          “What can I do?” Mr. Wisniewski said. “I wish I could get pneumonia. I thought guys with lungs like mine got that.”

          “Not always,” Dr. Thayer said.

          Mr. Wisniewski shook his head.

          “You can stop the kidney machine,” Dr. Thayer said.

          “I can?” Mr. Wisniewski said.

          “Yes,” Dr. Thayer said. “No one can make you do dialysis if you don’t want to.”

          “Will it hurt, to stop it?” Mr. Wisniewski said.

          “I can’t promise that,” Dr. Thayer said.

          “How long would it take?” Mr. Wisniewski said.

          “A week, maybe more,” Dr. Thayer said. “Two weeks at the most.”

          “Would you still come see me here?” Mr. Wisniewski said. “And give me stuff for the pain?”

          “Of course,” Dr. Thayer said.

          “How often?” Mr. Wisniewski said.

          “I’ll try to come here every day,” Dr. Thayer said. “I can promise you I’ll be here on most days.”

          “It’s a deal,” Mr. Wisniewski said.

          Three days later, after two more visits by Dr. Thayer, Mr. Wisniewski was very lethargic. Three days after that, after two more visits by Dr. Thayer, a nurse found Mr. Wisniewski dead. There were no signs of struggle.

 

*   *   *

 

          On October 28, 1962, Nikita Khruschev, the Premier of the Soviet Union, publicly stated that its nuclear missile bases in Cuba would be dismantled and removed, in exchange for President Kennedy’s non-publicized promise to remove the US’s nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy. That same month, the USSR launched a spacecraft toward Mars, with the intention that it would fly within 7,000 miles of the planet’s surface and send back pictures of the planet’s surface, along with data on the cosmic radiation in that part of space. Prince Faisal announced the abolishment of slavery in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. President Kennedy signed an executive order that banned racial or religious discrimination in federally funded housing.

 

*   *   *

 

          On Tuesday, January 29, 1963, three coal miners were killed in an underground gas and coal-dust explosion near Garvey. The timing of the deaths was evident from one of the men’s stopped watch. After their bodies were removed from the mine, Dr. Thayer signed their death certificates. Later that same day he signed the death certificates for two miners who had died after suffering from black lung disease for several years.

          He went to bed that night at 10:15.

          At 3:30 a.m., the phone on the nightstand next to his bed rang. He answered it on the fourth ring.

          “It’s Florence Simonovic, Doctor Thayer,” a woman said. “I’m so sorry to be calling you at this hour.”

          “What’s the problem?” Dr. Thayer said.

          “Harold is crazy with pain,” Mrs. Simonovic said. “We ran out of his medicine last night. I thought he had enough to last him through the night. I’m so sorry.”

          “I’ll come,” Dr. Thayer said. “I have to stop by the office first, to get more medicine. I may decide to give him an injection.”

          “Oh thank you,” she said. “I think him knowing you’re on the way might help with the pain.” 

          Dr. Thayer rubbed his eyes and looked toward the two bedroom windows, on the front of the house. Moonlight shone on falling snow, which had accumulated in L-shaped piles on the bottoms of the windowpanes.

          “With all the snow on the roads,” Dr. Thayer said, “I can’t promise how fast I can get there. I’m sure I’ll need to put the chains on my tires.”

          “I’m afraid so,” Mrs. Simonovic said. “You know how steep our road is.”

          “You’re completely out of medicine?” Dr. Thayer said.

          “Yes,” she said. “I really am so sorry.”

          “These things happen,” Dr. Thayer said.

          Under a full moon, Dr. Thayer shoveled snow away from the front of his garage, backed his beige, four-year-old Chevrolet Impala out, and took two sets of ladder-shaped tire chains, and round elastic tension cords out of the trunk. He draped the chains over the tops of the rear wheels, drove forward a couple of feet, and attached the hooks on the ends of the chains that held them against the inner and outer walls of the tires. He took the round elastic tension cords, which had several S-hooks on them, and attached their hooks to different places on the outer edges of the tire chains, to hold them tight against the outsides of the wheels. He backed the car into the street, got out, looked at the chains, tightened the tension cords some more, got back in the car, and headed to his office.

          It took him just under an hour to reach the country road the Simonovics lived on, and when he tried to turn left at the corner, to head up the hill, the front of the car slid clockwise, back onto the road he was on. He drove forward, pulled the car over to the right side of the road, grabbed his black bag, and walked a tenth of a mile, up the unplowed road, to the driveway of the mobile home.

          When he got to the front porch he stomped his feet, to knock the snow off his boots, and Mrs. Simonovic opened the door. She was wearing a knee-length black wool coat. “Thank God,” she said.

          Dr. Thayer pulled off his boots, left them on the outside mat, stepped past Mrs. Simonovic, who took his coat and hat, and went to the bathroom, where he washed his hands. He returned to the front room, where Mr. Simonovic lay on the sofa, under three layers of quilts. He got down on his knees, put his black bag on the floor, and opened it.

          “I can’t take it, Doc,” Mr. Simonovic said in a raspy voice.

          Dr. Thayer looked up at Mrs. Simonovic. “Has he been drinking any alcohol?” he said.

          “He was,” Mrs. Simonovic said, “but it’s all gone now. He drank the last of it yesterday afternoon.”

          “You’re sure?” Dr. Thayer said.

          “Yes,” Mrs. Simonovic said.

          “He can’t have anymore,” Dr. Thayer said. “Ever.”

          “I understand,” Mrs. Simonovic said.

          “I’m going to give you morphine,” Dr. Thayer said to Mr. Simonovic. “I think the tumors may have gotten bigger, and you may be bleeding internally. I want to see you at the hospital tomorrow.”

          “Knock me out,” Mr. Simonovic said. “Please knock me out.” A small stream of tears ran from the outer corner of his eye down to the hairline on the left side of his head.

          Dr. Thayer lifted the edges of the quilts and folded them back, onto Mr. Simonovic’s stomach and chest, so he could get at the left arm. He unbuttoned the cuff, undid the button on the forearm, and pushed the sleeve up above the elbow. He tied a tourniquet made of very thin red-rubber tubing around Mr. Simonovic’s upper arm and used an alcohol swab to wipe the area in the crease on the inside of his elbow.

          He took out of his black bag a syringe and a small glass vial with a circular rubberized area in its top. He pulled the cap off the needle on the syringe, held the vial upside down, at eye level, stuck the needle straight up, into the vial, and slowly withdrew the plunger on the syringe. He pulled the needle out of the vial, put the vial back in the black bag, flicked his forefinger twice against the upright syringe, while looking at its clear cylinder, to rid the liquid inside it of bubbles, and pressed on the plunger enough to bring a tiny bead of liquid to the tip of the needle. He injected the morphine into a vein on the inside of Mr. Simonovic’s elbow. He put the cap back on the needle, undid the tourniquet, put the syringe and the tourniquet in the black bag, pulled Mr. Simonovic’s sleeve down, buttoned the buttons, and pulled the edges of the quilts back over him. He took a pill bottle out of the black bag, closed the bag, grabbed its handles, and got to his feet.

          “You’ll get relief shortly, Mr. Simonovic,” Dr. Thayer said.

          Mr. Simonovic nodded

          Dr. Thayer turned to Mrs. Simonovic. “Here are some more pills you can give him if you need to,” he said. “I’m going to wait here a little while, until he dozes off, and listen to his heart, lungs, and abdomen.” He stepped toward the front window and sat down on a wooden rocking chair.

          “I’m sorry it’s so cold in here, Dr. Thayer,” Mrs. Simonovic said. “I didn’t want to leave him, to get more wood for the stove. Can I get you a quilt?”

          “I’ll get the wood,” Dr. Thayer said. He got up from the chair, took his coat off the coat rack inside the front door, put it on, went out the back door, lifted a canvas tarp, picked up an armful of split logs, returned to the front room, put the wood in the stove, and used the long matches and newspapers on the floor next to the stove to light the fire. He took off his coat and hung it back on the coat rack.

          Fifteen minutes later, the room was warmer, and Mr. Simonovic lay with his mouth open. His face was relaxed.

          Dr. Thayer picked up his black bag, got up from the rocking chair, went to the sofa, got down on his knees, folded back the quilts, and unbuttoned the front of Mr. Simonovic’s shirt. Mr. Simonovic snorted and moved his fingers.

          “He’s out of pain finally,” Mrs. Simonovic said. She got up from an overstuffed chair and took off her coat.

          Dr. Thayer opened his black bag, took out his stethoscope, and used it to listen to different areas on Mr. Simonovic’s chest and abdomen. He placed the disk at the end of the stethoscope’s tube against the vein on the left side of Mr. Simonovic’s neck, listened, and then listened to the vein on the other side of the neck.

          “I never thought it could get this bad,” Mrs. Simonovic said.

          Dr. Thayer took off the stethoscope, put it in the black bag, and placed his hands on the left and right sides of Mr. Simonovic’s abdomen, which was distended. He reversed the directions of his fingers and palms, and slipped his fingers under the front of Mr. Simonovic’s belted jeans. He rebuttoned the shirt, pulled the quilts back over Mr. Simonovic, grabbed the handles of the black bag, and got to his feet.

          “His belly is bigger on one side, and one lung is louder than the other,” Dr. Thayer said. “Like I said, I want to see him at the hospital tomorrow. I’ll call there when I get home and tell them he’ll need a bed.”

          “Oh my,” Mrs. Simonovic said.

          “I need special X-rays I can’t do at my clinic,” Dr. Thayer said. “I may also use a needle to remove some of the fluid in his abdomen, and have the nurses monitor him. Can you get him to the hospital, or should I send an ambulance?”

          Mrs. Simonovic started to cry. She brought her fingers to her eyes. “I can ask my brother-in-law to plow a path to the main road before he goes to his job, at six, but my car is broke down.”

          “I’ll have an ambulance come at seven,” Dr. Thayer said, “and I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

          “Thank you, Doctor,” Mrs. Simonovic said.

          Dr. Thayer looked down at Mr. Simonovic. “It’d be good if you kept his lips and mouth moist,” he said.

          “I’ll do that,” Mrs. Simonovic said.

          Dr. Thayer’s drive home took twenty minutes longer than the drive to the Simonovics had taken. He had to get out of the car twice, to use a snow shovel, which he got from his trunk, to dig paths in front of his car’s front tires.

          The second time he shoveled, he was far from any houses. The beams from the car’s headlights shone against his coat. After he had thrown several shovelfuls of snow onto the side of the road, he banged the edge of the shovel against the pavement, to knock off the layer of snow that had adhered to its square metal surface. He looked up at the full moon and stopped to catch his breath.

 

*   *   *

 

          In the first week of November 1963, Dr. Thayer entered the room of the fourth patient he’d come to see at the hospital that morning and saw that a priest he’d known for many years was at the bedside. The woman in the bed had been unconscious for two days. Breast cancer had metastasized to her liver, lungs, and brain.

          The priest, in his black cassock, held in one hand a small black book and a wooden Last Rites box.

          Dr. Thayer told the priest he’d come back later, and went to see another patient three rooms away.

          When the priest finished administering Last Rites to the woman he picked up his box and small black book, went out into the hall, patted Dr. Thayer on the shoulder as he passed behind him at the nurses’ station, and continued to the elevator.

          Dr. Thayer returned to the woman’s room. He took her chart from the holder attached to the foot of the bed, reviewed it, went to the bedside, placed the chart next to her knees, spoke to her, lifted her left forearm, and felt her pulse. He put his stethoscope’s earpieces in his ears, lifted the sheet and blanket, noticed a stain on the bedsheet near her hip, and listened to her heart. He placed his right hand on her forehead, used his thumb to gently raise her eyelids, and looked at her pupils. After he recorded his observations in the chart and returned it to its holder he went to the nurse’s station and asked a nurse to return with him to the woman’s room, where he lifted the side of the bedsheet near the woman’s left hip and showed the nurse where seepage from a bedsore had saturated the bandage and had made a pink and yellow stain on the sheet. He asked the nurse to clean the wound, change the dressing, and the sheet.

          When he left the hospital, to drive back to his clinic, he took a detour, out into an area of small farms. He came to a long-abandoned farmhouse, a quarter mile from any other house or barn in the area, and pulled into the gravel driveway a few feet, to where a rusty chain sagged between two waist-high rotted fence posts. He turned off the engine. The sun glinted off the remaining panes in the upstairs windows of the house, a hundred feet away, to the left of the driveway. He looked past the waist-high weeds that had taken over the driveway, to where the driveway ended, well past the house, and to its right, where a very large pile of charred, fallen timber and siding was all that remained from the fire that had destroyed the barn more than twenty years earlier. The fire had led to an insurance company’s claim that the farmer had burned down the barn to collect the insurance money.

          In 1930, a year before his wife died, Dr. Thayer met the farmer and his wife when he tried to save the life of their only child, a nineteen-year-old man who had been brought to the hospital from a collapsed mine shaft in the northern part of the county. The widow to whom the priest had administered last rites an hour earlier, and whom Dr. Thayer had visited a short while before was the mother of that young man.

          The woman died the next morning. Dr. Thayer was one of the seven people who attended her funeral. He knew all the other attendees.

 

*   *   *

 

          On Monday, November 25, 1963, Dr. Thayer went to the hospital early, so he could finish his rounds by 9:00 a.m. On his drive home he passed by the office and glanced at the sign on the door, which said ‘Closed In Honor Of President Kennedy’. He knew that if any emergencies occurred, people would call him at his home number.

          Dr. Thayer sat down in front of his TV, watched as President Kennedy’s flag-draped coffin was placed on the horse-drawn caisson at Capitol Plaza, and when the Coast Guard Academy Band played “O God of Loveliness” something inside of him felt like it broke. He began to cry, which was something he had not done since Andrew’s death, nineteen years earlier. He wanted to turn off the television, but something inside him told him not to. 

          It was raining when the funeral cortege left Capitol Plaza, on foot, and joined military units on Constitution Avenue. The band played “Our Fallen Heroes” and Beethoven’s Funeral March. He took his handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped away tears as he watched the mourners walk in the rain to The White House, where they listened to a choir sing at the north portico. When the cortege left to walk to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, almost a mile away, with Mrs. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy walking in front, Dr. Thayer wept upon hearing the music from the nine bagpipers and seeing the riderless horse, being led by a U.S. Army Private, with black cavalry boots reversed in the stirrups, as a symbol of a fallen leader. During the requiem mass and the funeral procession to Arlington National Cemetery, during which the only sounds were those from a single drummer, he felt he was in a kind of trance, which was broken at the burial site. The 21-gun salute was followed by “Taps,” during which a misplayed note by the bugler once again elicited tears from Dr. Thayer. 

          He stood up, went to the kitchen, filled a drinking glass with water, and drank from it as he looked out the window, over the sink, at the snow-covered yard. His surprise at having become so emotional led him to wonder why he had refused, for so many years, to let himself cry.

          When Dr. Thayer sat down in front of the TV again he heard the announcer say that Mrs. Kennedy had decided that their stillborn daughter, who would have been named Arabella, and their son, Patrick, who had lived for only thirty-nine hours, and who had died just four months earlier, would be reburied next to their father.

          When Dr. Thayer heard that he put his face in his hands and wept.

          A year before Andrew was born, Julia had given birth to a stillborn daughter. She and Andrew were buried to Julia’s left – to the right of which he would someday be buried. He and Julia had agreed that he would be to her and their baby’s left, because he had always slept to the left of Julia.

 

*   *   *

 

          When Dr. Thayer felt the first significant chest pain he knew what it meant. His father, a brick mason, had died from a heart attack at the age of fifty-seven. 

          He chose not to see any doctors about it, and simply to keep nitroglycerin tablets with him at all times, to stop the pains when they came. He was very deliberate in his choice. When he was a boy his mother had said the key to life was accepting the fact that it was mostly about getting on to the next thing. It didn’t matter what the next thing was. You simply had to keep moving forward and not waste time thinking about the past. The present and the future would always create more and different things to get on to, and we don’t get to choose what those things are.

          When the chest pains came on when he was alone, he would permit himself to grimace, grab on to something, and visualize sending the pain out through his arm and hand, into the thing he grasped, while he pulled a nitroglycerin tablet from the chest pocket of his shirt and put it in his mouth. When a pain came on while he was seeing a patient, he would excuse himself, go to where he could not be seen taking the nitroglycerin tablet, and wait for the pain to subside before returning to whatever he had been doing. He had always been extremely private, about everything, and he decided that whether or not it had been right to be that way, it would be the way he’d continue to be until the end came.

          He wasn’t afraid of death.

          ‘I’m headed into something unknown, from which I’m not coming back’, he told himself. ‘How many times have I done that in my life? Too many to count. I left home. I went to college, medical school, and training in Philadelphia. I got married, came to Garvey, became a father, and those things were just the beginning. All the things that followed were unknowns. They were all unknown to me before I headed into them. How is death any different?’

          The chest pains sometimes came at night, after he got in bed.

          For some reason he himself could not come up with afterward, one night he decided, on an impulse, to sleep on Julia’s side of the bed – something he’d never done. Lying down there, after forty-four years of sleeping next to that space – which was hers for only thirteen of those years – made him cry.

          He thought about his life. He concluded that he was just an ordinary man, who probably knew as much or as little about himself as others knew about themselves, and deep down inside he was probably the same person he’d been as a little boy, when he listened to his mother’s comments about getting on to the next thing. He thought Julia would agree with that conclusion. He also concluded that he’d gotten from life the love of his father, his mother, Julia, and Andrew, and what more could a person want?

 

*    *    *

 

          Sometime between midnight and the sunrise on Wednesday, January 29, 1964, Dr. Thayer died in bed, while sleeping on the side Julia had always slept on. He was jolted awake for perhaps a second, maybe two, by what felt to him like a powerful electrical jolt. He saw a bright white flash, knew, exactly, what the jolt and the flash meant, and that was it. His life ended where he had hoped it would end.

          His nurse and receptionist were left in shock. Dr. Thayer had remained so vigorous, they said to everyone – so seemingly healthy, and he had showed no signs of slowing down.

          He was not a religious man, so no funeral took place.

          His will granted his nurse and receptionist a year’s salary in lump sums, and they received them, but within six weeks of Dr. Thayer’s death a new doctor came to Garvey, arranged with Dr. Thayer’s lawyer to take over the practice, retained the nurse and the receptionist, and took out a mortgage on the building. 

          Dr. Thayer left half of his estate to his housekeeper, Alicia, and the other half to his medical school.