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My Dad died on June 10th, 1997, just four days shy of his and Mom’s 49th anniversary, but he was born 95 years ago today. It is strange to talk of his death on his birthday, and a guilty voice in my head asks why I would dredge this up, but I need to and that’s just the way it is. My Dad’s last minutes on this Earth were stolen from us, from me, by a man I still hate to this day.
It doesn’t really matter now who my Dad was except to flesh out the details of his last hours--he is gone and I am the daughter of someone most people who might have known him have forgotten. But he was someone who will come up from time to time in a Wyoming history book maybe, especially one concerning law and lawyers of the state or the varying figures who populated the appellate court in Cheyenne. Although my Dad was a retainer for the Burlington Northern Railroad, eventually he gave up corporate lawyering in favor of his passion and he became a world-class personal injury attorney. I don’t know how many times he represented clerks or oilfield workers or miners or their survivors against companies like Safeway or Amoco or Peter Kiewit whose wilfull inattention to worker safety caused harm and death, or doctors whose conduct in surgery left behind grieving widows or parents, or even major insurance companies like Aetna who wielded their retainers like swords against people who dared to simply ask for their due; but barring his decade on the bench and almost to the day he died, he was still winning for the likes of us little people against the automatons of the corporatocracy.
Early in his career, he took on an eccentric but only locally notorious partner whose name might be familiar to some of you. Dad had recently quit drinking and he challenged this man known more for his libidinous bacchanalias than his lawyering to dry up, join the firm and make something of his life. To everyone’s surprise, Gerry Spence took Dad up on the challenge, and together these two uncommon men turned the world of courtroom technique on its ear. After attending and teaching at many trial lawyers’ seminars, Dad instigated the Western Trial Advocacy Institute in which Dad, Spence and other like attorneys came from all over the country to teach trial tactics to lawyers who had little or no experience representing their clients with any skill. Years later Dad and Gerry opened the Trial Lawyers’ College outside of Dubois Wyoming. While TLC seems to have lost its way due to Gerry’s pomposity, the Institute (now piloted by my brother) is a tribute to Dad’s hard work, drawing students from all over the country.
Now, just about everything you’ve ever read about Gerry Spence is pretty much true. He has an enormous ego. He is as famous for his courtroom antics as he is for his legitimate legal expertise, and he is extraordinarily misogynistic. There are probably not a few of us—daughters of partners, associates and friends—who have experienced a cruel side of him from childhood (anybody out there with a story to tell?) and to this day he doesn’t give credit to my Dad for pulling him up from a morally sordid world he might never have escaped otherwise. Dad was probably one of only a few people around with whom Spence would act like a human being instead of a gun-slinging celebrity from a wild west show. It was Dad who got Spence interested in photography, and his talent in that medium is apparent.
Dad suffered severe allergies as a young man that over the years scarred his eyes and later his lungs. It didn’t help that he was a two pack-a-day smoker, but he gave up the cigarettes when he could not pursue his other passion—photography—with any breath. Years later the diagnosis of COPD was not completely unexpected, but Dad did everything he could to hold the disease at bay. Eventually the struggle for oxygen caused heart failure, and on June 4th 1997 Dad went into ICU knowing he would never come home. The cardiac doctors told him they could fix him. Along with a triple bypass, they could replace the worst valve of his heart with a pig valve. The only problem was that his COPD was of the type that filled his lungs with thick mucus that he had to cough out using the medicated mist of a nebulizer. The necessary coughing would be next to impossible after such major surgery. He was on a ventilator and couldn’t speak, but he wrote notes in his large, copperplate hand on a yellow legal pad. The afternoon before the proposed procedure, he wrote these words:
"Kay (my Mom), Cindy, Gerry, Karen (his assistant), Terry (a dear friend and fellow attorney), Margaret (his former Supreme Court assistant), Road (my brother’s long-time nickname)—All Decide." Courageously, touchingly, this lifetime Democrat wanted his family to vote on his fate.
But by the next morning, June 10th, it was apparent that Dad would be making this decision himself after all, and the event I had most dreaded all of my living days was allowed to transpire. As the minutes ticked by, nurses came and removed the IVs and the ventilator, and all of us stood by him saying our goodbyes. My Mom repeated what she and dad had always promised each other—that when this time came they would be strong and let go of each other with dignity and love. She stood on his left side, stroking his arm and forehead. My brother stood across from Mom, holding Dad’s hand. The others on The List stood watch. Except for Gerry Spence. No humble background shadows for him, no, not him. No standing back to allow the family their time. He stood at the right side of my Daddy’s head while I was relegated to holding onto his right knee and calf as his life was chased from his body with repeated injections of morphine. This supercilious dickhead stood there, an immoveable bull, like he and not the family was the most important thing at the end of this man’s life and I hate his guts for it so badly I scream when I remember.
After we left Dad’s body to be collected by the funeral home, Gerry Spence the bully once again invaded my space, throttling me with his arm and crushing me to him in an embrace of suffocation instead of a hug of reassuring love during which I nearly lost consciousness.
One last time did this over-inflated bag of ego have the gall to impose himself into the privacy and sanctity of our family, and that was to give an account of Dad’s death in his book "Give Me Liberty." His account is a lie, a florid actor’s gilding of my family’s last moments with the man I called "Pop", whom my mother called "Doll," and whom mostly everyone else just called "Judge." As far as I know, Spence never asked anyone’s permission to write about Dad’s death. Instead, he inflicted himself onto one of my family’s most painful events like an additional wound and crowed about his presence as if it was some sort of favor bestowed upon him by Providence.
When Dad would wake me up of a Saturday morning so we could drink coffee and have a talk, we would sometimes discuss Spence. He would often say that Spence was the kind of asshole you would want on your side when things were bad, but also that he had a softer inner person that never surfaced except in rare moments. Even after Dad came to know the reason I (and a few others, I have no doubt) despised the bastard, he could seldom bring himself to say much that disparaged Spence. Mom often said that Dad was Spence’s original disciple, and I hated that idea. Spence owed everything to Dad—not the other way around.
So, here I am on the ninety-fifth anniversary of my father’s birthday wondering, like many victims do, if I have reason at all to harbor disgust and hatred for this person who is no doubt watching his own end approaching. Sometimes the memories of those days in June seem made-up, as if my mind is remembering things that happened to someone else. That is what our minds do though, isn’t it? They soften the memories of painful times, cushioning them, smoothing them so the edges aren’t so sharp and hurtful. I miss my Dad. I miss him a lot, every day, and just when I think my mind’s pictures of his leaving this Earth are comfortably faded, that day’s images jump startlingly out and I see my last time with him robbed from me again. Dad is gone from me forever, and yet the robber lives. What he stole I can never get back, because there was only one of them—one last hour with my Dad.
Oh Daddy.
I wanted so hard
to go there with you,
just help you across
show you to a nice comfy chair
make sure you were
settled in like always.
Why didn’t They let me
come with you, just
for a minute or two,
just to see you Home?
3/10/98