I had spent days writing my eulogy. Then I realized I wouldn’t be able to get through it, so I asked my sister Emily to read it for me: “When I freeze-frame the happiest moments of our lives, they are when we are a family—all snuggled in bed together, watching cartoons on a Saturday morning. The smile that lit up Jay’s face, even on his darkest days, when Carrie toddled into the room or Ellie showed him a picture she had drawn.” I remember being irritated by her delivery. It didn’t sound like me—because it wasn’t.
Finally, Jay Ungar and his wife, Molly Mason, who had come from their home in New Hampshire, performed “Ashokan Farewell,” the melancholy melody they had composed for Ken Burns’s Civil War series. Jay loved the fiddle, guitar, and banjo piece so much, he often played it in the car to and from Millbrook on repeat.
In the series, the song serves as a backdrop for the reading of a letter written in 1861 by Sullivan Ballou, a Union army officer, to his wife, Sarah, as federal forces were about to move into Virginia. I’d asked Todd Kern to read Ballou’s beautiful words—in his Civil War finest—while Jay and Molly played:
Dear Sarah,
The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days, perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.
I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged. And my courage does not halt or falter. I know how American civilization now leans upon the triumph of the government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing, perfectly willing, to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government and to pay that debt.
Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence can break. And yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly with all those chains to the battlefield.
The memory of all the blissful moments I have enjoyed with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you that I’ve enjoyed them for so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes, the future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together and see our boys grown up to honorable manhood around us. If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name. Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless, how foolish I have sometimes been.
But oh, Sarah! If the dead can come back to this Earth and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be with you in the brightest day and the darkest night always, always. And if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for me, for we shall meet again.
Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later at the First Battle of Bull Run. Now I was Sarah. But it was 1998, not 1861.
THE SOMBER CONVOY wended its way to the Cemetery of the Holy Rood in Westbury, Long Island. On that bitterly cold day, we lowered Jay’s casket into a plot near his grandparents John and Mina Tully. I felt like I was watching myself in a movie.
39
From Hope to Hope
TWENTY YEARS AFTER Jay died, I walk into Cognac, a bistro on the Upper East Side, and greet two ghosts of cancer past: Joe Ruggiero, Jay’s oncologist, slightly stooped now, his close-cropped beard peppered with gray, and Mark Pochapin, the gastroenterologist who was on call that terrible first night we spent at New York Hospital, still boyish-looking in his late fifties. We say hello with the warmth of comrades who’ve been through a war, because in many ways, we had.
We tuck into a banquette toward the back. Joe orders a Sancerre and Mark a chardonnay. I ask the waiter for a cup of tea. Black tea is fine.
I invited them here to talk about what happened with Jay; even two decades later, it feels so unresolved. As I look into their expectant, sympathetic faces, my voice starts to tremble, which takes me by surprise.
“I wanted to ask you about your relationship with Jay during his illness. Did he tell you he was frightened? Did he know he was dying?”
Joe gives me the kind smile that thousands of patients have seen and no doubt tried to read in his office.
“There was just so little time,” he says. “We just never settled into a treatment routine. The cancer was like a tornado that ripped through Jay’s body.”