A Father's Race to Reach the Hospital Where His Daughter Lay Dying

Part of the reason for the slow progress of the fatherhood movement is the fact that society often doesn't take fathers' love for their children very seriously. Part of our movement's problem is that some people don't seem to take fathers' love for their children very seriously. This is a result of several factors, including: the small minority of fathers who really don't care about their children; the claims of vindictive mothers who try to push fathers out of their children's lives; societal disregard for men's sentiments on such issues; and misguided feminists' misportrayals of fathers as uncaring and irresponsible.

I recently read a telling commentary on this issue--a father's heart-wrenching account of the hours after his daughter was fatally injured in an auto accident. It was written by Jim Bouton, a star pitcher for the New York Yankees during the 1960s who wrote the controversial mega-best seller Ball Four. I've always admired Bouton, and I interviewed him for a business magazine I was working for when I was in my early 20s.

Ball Four was written in 1969 but every decade Bouton has added a new epilogue--Ball Five, Ball Six and then, in 1999, Ball Four: The Final Pitch. Bouton's 31 year-old daughter Laurie was killed in a car crash in 1997--below  is Bouton's account of his desperate attempt to reach the hospital where his daughter laid dying. If you can read it without a tear welling up in your eye, you're a better man than I.

My father always said the worst part of seeing your kids grow up was the thought of them driving cars around God knows where. Bouton's story is every parent's worst nightmare, and it reminded me of something my father told me when I was 18 and had gone away for my freshman year of college. My mother and father received a call at 3 in the morning telling them that my uncle died. My father later told me "When the phone rang at that hour and I found out your uncle had died I was happy--I thought it was you."

Excerpted from Ball Four: The Final Pitch by Jim Bouton:

We had met some friends for dinner and gone to an outdoor performance at Shakespeare & Company. It was a warm summer night with a full moon. It had been a lovely day. When we came home, we had just stepped outside the door, hadn’t even taken the messages off the blinking machine, when the phone rang. Paula picked up and it was Lee.

“Oh, no” I heard her say. “Oh, my God! Oh my God!”

A jolt or terror shot through my body. I had never Paula sound like that before. I had just hoped it wasn’t one of the kids.

“What is it?” I said, my heart hammering. “Who?”

“Laurie’s been in a terrible accident,” said Paula, who was shaking now and gasping for breath.

“How bad?” I moaned, terrified of the answer.

“Very bad,” said Paula, still on the phone, trying to learn more.

“Is she dead?” I heard myself say, not believing I was saying it.

“No… but it’s very bad….”

I fell on my knees.

“ No, no, no, no…” I wailed. “Not my Laurie… not my Laurie.”

I pounded the floor in my helplessness. Laurie was in danger and there was nothing I could do to fix it. And she was so far away.

“We have to go to the hospital right now…” said Paula.

I couldn’t think straight. How could we get to the hospital in Newark? That’s four hours away. Neither one of us could possibly drive in this condition.

Now David was on the car phone with Paula. He and Lee and Lee’s fiancée, Elaine Wood, were driving to the hospital from Manhattan and would be there in twenty minutes. Bobbie and her husband, Phil Goldberg, were already at the hospital. Michael and his then fiancée, Melanie Knapper, were being driven from Brooklyn by a friend, Tom Lanier.

“I have to take care of your dad,” said Paula. In minutes she was on the phone to the driver service that takes me to and from airports when I have to fly. It was now after eleven, but a driver showed up in twenty minutes. Just enough time for us to throw some things in a suitcase if we needed to stay over.

It was the longest ride of our lives. We held each other and cried and talked. David had said Laurie was in a coma and would probably never walk again. This was inconceivable for someone like Laurie, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” girl daredevil. We knew they were doing everything possible to save her. Evidently, a helicopter had flown her to the hospital from the crash scene.

We called the hospital during a pit stop. The news was not any better. Just get there as quickly as possible. The accident had occurred about seven-thirty that night. We wouldn’t be there until three in the morning. I didn’t want her to go without me being there. If she was still alive, I’d want to hold her hand and try to comfort her. But I didn’t want that to be my last memory of her either. We numbered ourselves against the possibilities. The full moon followed us all the way. It’s only been recently that I can even look at the full moon.

University Hospital has about a dozen entrances. David had said we should go around back, but we didn’t know where that was, and we didn’t have time to drive all around. So close and yet so far. Then we saw Michael in the distance, waving at our sedan. Probably waving at any black cars that came along.

The three of us hugged on the run, and Michael led the way through a series of hallways, walking fast, toward the Intensive Care Unit. Laurie was still alive, Michael said, but in a coma, hooked up to monitors. He and David and Bobbie had been taking turns holding her hand. Michael said he’d been singing songs to Laurie­--nonsense songs with funny rhymes--that they’d sung together as children. He said the only reaction was a few blips on one of the machines, but he believed she could hear him. Michael had told her I was coming and would be there soon.

I pictured Laurie lying there. I wanted to see her, yet I couldn’t stand the thought...The double doors of the Intensive Care Unit were just ahead. Through the glass windows I could see the distraught faces of Lee and Elaine. Someone from the hospital pushed open the doors and we entered the main room.

“He’s here!” I heard someone say.

The room was crowded with mixed-family members, and friends. The last time I’d seen this group together, ironically, was at Laurie’s graduation from college. It was eerily silent except for the beeping of machines. Half of the faces turned to us, the rest stayed riveted on a smaller room off to our right. But before I could even glance in that direction, I heard the words that ripped my heart out.

“She’s gone.”

It was Bobbie, face streaked with tears, emerging from the small room. The group of family and friends exploded in a deluge of cries and wails. I rushed over to hug Bobbie and hold her close. This was our little girl and only we could share that particular pain. Then Paula and Phil moved in quickly to hold us both, and the others followed suit, forming a huddle of devastated souls.

“She waited for you, Jim,” everyone said. “She waited for you.” And I believe she did. Her incredible spirit lived nearly eight hours in a body with no viable organs, according to the surgeons who later declined our offer to donate them. What’s more, Laurie chose the precise moment--the very split second--that would make it easiest on me.

I never went in to see her. I relied on what others said later. That she looked so beautiful without her makeup. That she looked peaceful.