A Father Prays, as Days Dwindle to a Few for a Family

At night, when his two younger girls are snug in blankets they’ve spread at the foot of his bed, Richard Van Sloten cries and worries and talks to God.

A 48-year-old county prosecutor, he has an inoperable brain tumor. Doctors say he’ll be lucky to live a few more months.

His wife, Martha, a 40-year-old legal secretary, died Wednesday. She had breast cancer, and it had spread into her bones.

Their 4-year-old doesn’t understand that her mommy is gone and her daddy is dying. The 8-year-old asks, “Couldn’t this wait until I’m older?” Their 19-year-old daughter has dropped out of college to help.

Each day is another together. But the days, suddenly, are few. So at night in the family’s two-story Walnut home, Richard prays--some for himself but mostly for his wife and his sleeping daughters. And he dares to hope--that a 4-year-old girl will remember her father.

“Lauren, my 4-year-old, how much is she going to remember of me?” he said as tears spilled down his cheeks. “All she’s going to know is what people tell her and the pictures they show her.

“She’s only 4.” His voice trailed off. “Only 4.”

*

It is all happening so fast.

Martha Van Sloten seemed to have recovered from a 1994 lumpectomy. Then, in December, she told her doctor she didn’t feel well.

Doctors performed a biopsy of her bone marrow and found it teeming with cancer cells.

At the same time, her husband began experiencing a series of frightening and incapacitating seizures, mostly on the left side of his body.

“I’d start babbling,” Richard said. “I’d be shaking. I could see the looks on [the children’s] faces. They were scared. They said, ‘Stop, Daddy!’ I wanted to tell them I was OK. It was just the seizure making my body act funny.”

A first round of tests failed to turn up the tumor. A few weeks later, a second round found it--a mass called a glioblastoma multiforme on the right side of his brain, the most aggressive sort of brain tumor.

In late January, he underwent radiation. The tumor kept growing. Doctors are now trying chemotherapy. It may keep him alive a few months longer, said his oncologist, Dr. Christy Russell, chief of staff at USC’s Kenneth Norris Jr. Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Russell was also Martha’s oncologist. In January she tried chemotherapy for her, too. It did not help.

Shortly thereafter, one of the brittle bones in Martha’s back broke. It caused her intense pain. After that, when the younger girls--Lauren and 8-year-old Lindsey--wanted to hug their mother, to hold her tight, they sometimes held back or reached for her gingerly. Even slight pressure on her bones might hurt.

At such times, Martha would reach for her girls and caress them gently.

*

The little ones took to sleeping on the floor in the parents’ bedroom to be as close as possible for as long as possible. “The room got crowded,” Richard said. “But how wonderful.”

Meanwhile, the growing tumor crossed the mid-line of Richard’s brain, so that the other side of his body also began to be affected by seizures.

He began to feel keenly the passing of time: “You do something and you wonder: Is this the last time I do this? Is this the last time, for instance, that I eat Chinese food?”

He began to need help dressing, eating and bathing--even to be safe alone at home.

“There were times when my wife and I would be discussing this whole thing, our sicknesses, and I’d say, ‘This is all a dream. We’re going to wake up. How can this be real?’

His sick leave was running out and the bills were mounting. Their life insurance was only modest. And now they had to wrestle with the wrenching issue of guardianship.

They settled on a plan to place the younger girls with relatives in Washington state. Of course 19-year-old Lisa would go back to UC Riverside--but with no parents and her sisters far away.

“I’m terrified I’m losing my entire family,” Lisa said the day before her mother died.

*

Last Sunday, Martha checked back into the hospital. Her platelet count had dropped to 2,000; an ordinary count is 150,000 to 350,000. Without platelets, blood cannot clot, Russell explained. The body can begin bleeding spontaneously, and there is no way to stop it.

On Tuesday, Martha said from her hospital bed that she felt “mediocre” but “optimistic.”

“I just want to go home,” she said. “I want to be released in a healthy condition to go home.”

Her back, she admitted, “is really causing me a lot of pain and a lot of grief. I’m not able to do a lot of active things with my girls.”

She said she could not allow herself to think about dying. Merely considering the prospect would be admitting defeat.

“I honestly don’t feel I can slip at all,” she said. “If I do, I may lose the battle completely.”

Helpless, her husband said Tuesday afternoon: “If I could die and she could live, then she could take care of the kids and that would be fine. Where’s the devil when you need to make a deal?”

*

That night, Martha fell gravely ill. The next day, doctors took her off a respirator. A priest arrived, and in front of close relatives and a few friends, Richard and Martha renewed their wedding vows.

Then the priest administered last rites. Martha Van Sloten died a few minutes later, her husband holding one hand, her eldest daughter the other.

Lindsey was told later in the day that her mother had died. “A lot of tears,” her father said. “She wanted to say goodbye to her mommy.”

The funeral is set for today. Richard is trying to be strong. Only at night does he permit himself to wonder about fate.

“It’s obvious there’s no reason, no why or wherefore about this,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

As his co-workers assemble a trust fund for the children, the father thanks God for his blessings.

“I get to make arrangements for my wife and for me. I get to remind my little girls I love them.

“I’ve tried. I’ve tried, and if it hasn’t been good enough all I can say is that I’ve tried. I’ve tried to conduct myself in a way that will make my daughters proud of me.

“And I’m still trying.”

‘It’s obvious there’s no reason, no why or wherefore about this.’