All the Colors Came Out

My grandson, Henry, with his impish grin and gorgeous blue-gray eyes, has just morphed into a heartbroken banshee. I’m not even sure what’s happened. Sounds like his younger sister Frankie might have taken a bite of his granola bar. Or maybe she stole a Pokémon card out of his deck. There is no identifying what’s caused this precipitous tumble to the depths of despair. A wailing, drawn-out “Nana, it’s not fair” punctuates his sobs. “Oh, Henry.” I lock eyes with my son-in-law, Mike. “About this fair thing. One lesson you need to learn at an early age is that life’s not fair.” He continues crying, ignoring this relevant and well-timed pearl of wisdom offered from grandmother to seven-year-old.

My real thought in the moment: What’s not fair, Henry, is that your grandfather isn’t here to chuckle at your meltdown, tell you it’s not worth crying about, and then distract you with a game of HORSE.

That thought lives alongside others that pop up at random moments. It’s not fair that Chris doesn’t get to enjoy the house at Lake George that we finally splurged on. That Chris doesn’t get to be there as we celebrate Frankie’s fourth birthday, and he can’t rib her for changing into three different outfits just because that’s what she does every day. That Chris didn’t get to see Henry make those baskets during first-grade rec nights and then look over at his mom and dad with gap-toothed smile and unabashed pride. That it’s me who takes him aside and tells him to always remember rule No. 1: Don’t tell people how good you are. Show them.

But those are the thoughts I have when the anger surfaces, along with the cold, stark knowledge of how Chris suffered with ALS. That rage lives alongside my awe at the dignity and humor with which he endured it.

The other thoughts I have focus on fairness’s first cousin (or is it a sibling?): luck. While you could say we got a heavy dose of bad luck, and that is undeniable, my heart tends toward celebrating the abundance of luck in our lives, as a couple and as a family. Chris might frown on this, because like many athletes he wasn’t a big believer in luck, but he’ll have to deal with it.

He loved lists, so I’ll come up with one here (there will be more):

1. Luck
2. Fate
3. Kismet
4. Serendipity
5. Destiny
6. Fortune
7. Karma

Isn’t it mind-boggling how much beauty and havoc these right time/right place situations, in tandem with our free will, can produce in all our lives? I’m not sure which was at play when I went to a mixer at Theta Chi my third night as a freshman at Colgate University, but it led to being asked to dance by a big, scary-looking guy with a Fu Manchu mustache and a clearly amateur bowl haircut. I guess he found my Rhode Island accent and Ann & Hope blouse alluring. I do remember that I got off the dance floor as soon as I could. We just didn’t seem destined for much of anything, this big lug and me. I felt intimidated and uncomfortable, and we barely managed to make eye contact or even dance through the entirety of “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).” A year and a half later I began to realize that we were destined. It was a sharp turn: from seeing him as a big, scary-looking stranger to appreciating the gentle but powerful forward on the basketball team. (My financial aid job was as a twelve-hour-per-week assistant to the basketball coach, and one of Chris’s jobs was to help the team win.) I started always keeping an eye out for him, even while we dated other people.

I don’t remember the exact moment that translated to “Do you wanna go on a date?” in January of 1976. I do remember the fun we had on that first date, the easiness of the drive from Hamilton, New York, to Auburn along Route 20 to go visit an admired assistant coach who had moved on. It was as we were approaching a major hill that he delivered a bombshell I recall to this day. “Guess what they’re saying is bad for you?” “No idea, what?” “Sugar.” “No way!” Yup, the life-altering moments that stick with you.

There was never a proposal in the classic sense. As a matter of fact, I was pretty much the one who proposed, in a letter written on purple stationery with pink and white flowers at the top. I must have been choosing my words carefully if I looked at the letter long enough to have the design seared into my memory. The pertinent paragraph started along the lines of “So, do you think we should get married?” It was the summer before my senior year. I was doing my summer term and he was a counselor at a camp in the Berkshires before coming back to be a graduate assistant coach for the basketball team. We were both twenty-one. In other words, the old days.

Skipping a lot of our dating experience and scooting right back to our friend luck, I offer the reasons why, at such a tender age, I thought we could make a good couple for the long haul.

1. I liked him.
2. I liked his big family. We had similar Catholic, lower-middle-class backgrounds.
3. He was an athlete (a huge factor, since my entire childhood was marinated in Boston Red Sox baseball and Providence College Friars basketball fandom).
4. He treated his mother with respect.
5. He was funny.
6. He was smart.
7. He had straight hair, so if we had girls, maybe they wouldn’t struggle with curly, frizzy hair like I did (yes, this was an actual thought in my head, and we did have girls, who should thank me to this day for my foresight).

I think I loved Chris when I was twenty-one. What exactly is love at that untested, early age? Did I really know? Probably not. I know I did as we aged and struggled together. And yet, still, that’s a pretty good list.

Our life as a couple was a solid one. We cruised along and hit a variety of speed bumps. Some we approached with caution so that the impact was minimal. Some we careened over at the wrong angle, and it felt like we might just fall apart. But we didn’t. We never let it spiral out of control and always came back to each other and to the long view. When it was all over, didn’t we want to look back on what we’d created and not what we’d let go?

And this is where luck and its variations come in again. Not from the perspective of our marriage per se, but from a more far-reaching vantage point. When we were dating and then newly married, we were so focused on us: the newness, the compatibility, the travel, the fun, the navigating of arguments. And then the diapers. Did I ever consciously factor in what kind of a father I thought he’d be? I don’t think I did. My “Why I should marry him” list augured well for this, but you never really know.

Lucky us…our daughters hit the jackpot.

You’ll read lots of stories from Kate. They’re told in a far better way than I could ever muster, but here are a few snippets from my point of view.

1. Chris wasn’t the biggest diaper changer and infant caregiver: “I’ll do better when they can talk.”
2. Ryan or Kate often rode on his shoulders until it became impossible. What you don’t see from the gorgeous, stylized cover of this book is that the actual photo was taken on the rocky coast of Brittany, France, and that he carried a daughter in each arm. I know that those eyes and that smile are saying “my girls.”
3. Drive time had to be filled with games he’d make up—a standard one during the holiday season had the girls taking the left or right side of the car and counting the Christmas lights on their side, the winner declared only once we’d pulled into the driveway. They would probably argue with me, but I swear this lasted into middle school. Another game that worked amazingly for a while when they were little was seeing who could keep quiet for the longest. Diabolical.
4. He sat quietly in the stands at Kate’s basketball games. No yelling at the coach, no yelling at the refs, no yelling to or at her. Stoic. (I was a basket case.)
5. He was so much louder at Ryan’s meets. The joy he felt at her high school and college events was palpable. He loved watching cross-country—its colorful flags and tents, crisp air, and, above all, individual grit—more than basketball.
6. Our Friday nights were always fun because he devised a way to give everyone a stake in the outcome. We gathered four pens and four pieces of paper, and each of us pondered our ideal night’s entertainment. A favorite restaurant, eating at home, movie, bowling, game night, it was all up for grabs. Once we went around the horn and the itineraries were announced, they were all written down (and to the tune of a bit of lobbying). Then came the secret ballot—a simple 1 through 4 ranking. The choice with the lowest score would be the Fagan clan’s evening entertainment. Sometimes this part was more fun than the evening out.
7. He suffered more from empty nest syndrome than I did.

We were allowed one last stroke of luck. Chris died on December 4, 2019, three months before the pandemic began to wreak havoc on all of us. We got the gift that none of us will ever take for granted again—the opportunity to say goodbye and hold hands and sit in companionable silence. To cry a bit more and laugh a bit more together. Friends and family came from all over to hug him and tell him what was in their hearts.

Before Kate and her wife, Kathryn, had flown back up to our area in late November for what we thought would be Chris’s life-extending tracheostomy procedure, they purchased colorful bracelets for all of us and proclaimed us “Team Trach” to help Chris through the procedure and its consequences. You’ll learn about how that goal fell apart. But Team Trach didn’t. Once we had moved Chris through the double doors and over to the hospital room where he would die, our purpose was to make sure he felt calm and loved and had enough morphine in his system by the time we took him off life support. The doctors said that given the weakness of his lungs it would take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours until he was gone. But then there’s that indomitable human spirit, especially Chris Fagan’s. We took him off life support at about 8 p.m. on Monday, December 2, still talking to him and telling our stories and holding his hands. A few hours came and went and we tired a bit and took turns sleeping in hospital chairs scattered around his bed.

When Chris was still holding on by the evening of the third we decided Mike and Ryan should head home to be with Henry and Frankie, and Kate and Kathryn needed a few hours of rest in an actual bed. I would call them as soon as anything changed.

That change came a few minutes before 1 a.m. on Wednesday morning with the first warning bell on the monitor. I texted the girls. They didn’t make it in time, but I will forever be grateful for the next minutes. It was just Chris and me, this time the exact opposite of that first dance at Theta Chi. We weren’t an uncomfortable five feet apart, but shared a kaleidoscopic connection, my lips to his ear. The bookends on our life together. “Hey, what an awesome time we had, didn’t we?” Then the snippets that I pray somehow filled his consciousness until 1:11 a.m. and beyond. Corsica…Ryan’s birth and ants on the bottle…the Breton farmhouse…Indy for Super Bowl XLVI…Cape Cod and missing the ferry to Nantucket…Fougères…the party for his fiftieth…Sweet Sixteen in Knoxville…LSU—she was an All-American!…Piana…tear gas…flyin’ Baby Ryan…beating North Carolina during March Madness at Boulder…I love you…11:11…AAU trips…Giants games and soup on the stove…Dartmouth meets…we love you…thank you.

Tears are streaming down my face right now reliving this and at the same time mourning for all the families who’ve been denied it.

What is it we want in the end? Is it to have been deeply loved? By many? By one? I think the ultimate gift, the proof that we were loved and profoundly, is that we’re vividly remembered. Remembered the way Kate does here. Chris’s drive, his devotion, and above all his attention to his daughters’ dreams made our girls who they are.

I hope you enjoy Kate’s love letter to her dad.