In Life . . . and in Death

He was ready to take his son to school, but on that spring morning, Gene Mansfield couldn’t remember what time first grade started.

Puzzled, he looked around for a clue. The kitchen counter was covered with doctors’ notes, cancer literature and a container to dispose of used needles. The refrigerator was decorated with prescription slips and treatment reminders, special menus and chemotherapy checklists--the clutter of a man whose wife was dying upstairs.

“What time does Cody’s school start?” he asked his sister-in-law, who had been watching him all morning. He had spilled coffee on himself but didn’t seem to notice--even as it dripped down his arm. He searched for his keys, found them, lost them again. He’d gone upstairs to kiss his wife goodbye three times already.

And now, he was asking Karen Dugan for the sixth--maybe seventh time in 30 minutes--when school started. When he finally left the house, Dugan sat with her dying sister. The cancer, which had made a brief retreat, was back now, rooting itself in Kathy Mansfield’s kidneys, liver, lungs and brain. The 41-year-old patient sat in bed with a flowered scarf tied around her scalp, watching as her younger sister fluffed her pillows.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with Gene,” Dugan said. “He just asked me six times what time Cody’s school started.”

Kathy froze. He’d asked her the same thing all morning. It was odd behavior for a conscientious dad who kept track of his son’s sports schedules and never forgot a birthday. He ate right and ran marathons at age 42, took 100-mile-long bike rides just for fun. He didn’t drink, never smoked. People called him “Clean Gene.”

To this family--which had for years been watching a relative try bravely to beat the cancer--a little absent-mindedness hadn’t alarmed anyone. But he kept acting strangely all night, banging into walls when he walked and dragging his foot.

When Kathy’s dad took him to the emergency room the next day, no one--least of all Gene--was prepared for what the doctors would say: There was a “giant aneurysm,” a blood-filled vessel expanding like a sac on his brain stem. He’d been living with the warning signs for weeks, popping up to 14 aspirins a day to mask the pain so he could take care of his wife and their two boys.

He was the family’s crutch--and now medical experts were saying he might not make it through the night. Suddenly, a family that had so tightly wrapped itself around one dying relative was having to make room for another.

“It was Kathy who was supposed to be sick, not Gene,” recalled her father, Win Fingerson. “I mean, how cruel would that be?”

Yet, there it was: The caregiver himself was facing death, and the future of their two young sons hung in the balance. The decisions he would make from that day--about how to live, even with loss, how to help the dying and care for those who survived--would become the outline of a new family portrait, colored with vivid memories and tinged with the blessing of a second chance.

“You always hear how it takes a tragedy to make people realize the importance of life and love and how it changes them forever,” Gene would say later. “I already knew the importance of life and love with Kathy. We didn’t need this tragedy, this lesson. But there it was, and it was up to me what to do with it.”

*

Gene Mansfield and Kathy Fingerson were married in the backyard of his childhood home in Utah four months after they met. It was 1973. They went to the movies the night he proposed, and she held her hand in the air for most of the show, admiring how the small diamond ring sparkled in the light.

He was 20, playing drums in a band and stocking grocery store shelves. She was also 20, studying business administration at Brigham Young University. He adored her so unabashedly that his affection became a running joke, with her mom and sisters teasing him for kissing her so much. He was the sort of guy who said “thank you” when it wasn’t necessary, apologized when he didn’t have to, and meant it when he said either one. “Gene has always put everyone else first,” said Kathy’s youngest sister, Hope Alcone.

Her family was thrilled when Kathy wanted to move back to Huntington Beach. Gene and Kathy later bought a new house, one of the first built in Irvine’s Northwood neighborhood.

A bright student with her father’s knack for numbers, Kathy found a job at Hughes Aircraft and soon became a finance and accounting manager. Gene earned his cosmetology license at Golden West College and started cutting hair at an upscale salon in Hollywood. A few years later, he started cutting lawns too.

Kathy ran the household finances and saved diligently for retirement. When they had their first son, Aaron, she was the disciplinarian. He coached Aaron’s soccer and baseball teams and helped with homework. Aaron respected the way his family worked together and preferred their peacefulness over the often combative households of his friends’. “Things were always calm at our house,” said Aaron, now 21. “[My parents] had a way about them.”

A decade after Aaron’s birth, the Mansfields had Cody. Gene always enjoyed the age difference between his sons because, he said, it gave him a chance to respect their childhoods separately. An athlete himself, he encouraged them in sports, but always hoped they’d go to college like their mom.

Everything started to unravel in 1993. Four days before Gene’s 40th birthday, Kathy was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a 95% chance of beating it for good, the doctors said. They caught it early. Gene wasn’t reassured.

He didn’t say anything about his thoughts to anyone, not ever. Kathy fought for three years--and he supported her the whole way, keeping his promise that she stay at home like she wanted, in their own bedroom. When she wanted to try shark cartilage or meditation or motivational tapes, he encouraged her without question. He brought her Butterfingers every day, and hand-fed her fresh pieces of fruit. He rubbed her feet and helped with manicures, because they made her feel good.

When Kathy’s hair started to fall out, he shaved it all off at her request. Then he covered her smooth head with kisses.

*

It was like someone turned off a switch in Gene’s head that day five years ago, when he went to the hospital and the doctors found a dark mass deep in his brain.

It was about the size of a Ping-Pong ball and blocked spinal fluid from circulating through his body. He’d been feeling intense pressure, like a sinus headache that wouldn’t go away. His jaw had been hurting, his face had been a little numb. He’d attributed most of it to a root canal he’d had a few weeks earlier, waving it off as temporary discomfort. Look at Kathy, he’d tell himself. My aches and pains are a walk in the park.

Even as they prepped him for emergency surgery to insert a shunt in his brain, somehow he knew he would live, just as surely as he knew his wife would not. “I don’t know why she was taken and I was spared,” Gene explained. “She was so much smarter than me. She was so good. But I just knew I had things to take care of. I have this house, these boys. . . . There was no time to die.”

After the shunt surgery, he was transferred to UCLA Medical Center to await yet another procedure--one that doctors labeled high-risk because it required drilling into his skull and pinching off the aneurysm with a tiny clamp to stop blood from flowing into it. They ran some tests and examined him one last time before surgery.

What they found was extraordinary: The aneurysm was already 100% clotted. “Your body is not supposed to be able to do this,” said Dr. William Dobkin, a neurologist from Newport Beach who treated Gene. “It’s quite incredible.”

But the aneurysm had taken a toll. Gene doesn’t remember being transferred that spring of 1995 to Saddleback Memorial Medical Center to learn to walk, eat and talk again. It also had devoured most of his short-term memory. He found himself shuffling with a walker down a strange hospital hallway, his head shaved and bandaged.

He was convinced, for weeks, that Ronald Reagan still was president. He couldn’t remember what doctors said to him minutes after the conversation was over. Yet he was only vaguely aware of his mental limitations.

Kathy visited as often as she could. He could see she had gotten worse. Chemotherapy was wearing her out, and he noticed the fatigue and worry on her face. Her visits were often cut short, sometimes down to five minutes.

Gene did what he could to prove to his doctor, Kenneth R. Lynn, that he was better. Sometimes he tried to trick him--like the time Lynn asked him to draw a picture of his house. For the life of him, Gene couldn’t remember. But he could see the condo they had lived in some 15 years earlier just as clearly as if he were standing in it. “Dr. Lynn doesn’t know what my house looks like,” he thought, and drew a picture of the condo.

Lynn had his own plans. Most patients recovering from aneurysms spend three or four weeks in rehabilitation before going home, where they usually have someone to support them through the rest of their recovery. Gene wouldn’t have that luxury. “He had to be able to do more, he had to be further along than most patients, before I was going to let him out of here,” Lynn said. “He couldn’t be the patient when he got home. He had to take care of one.”

Gene fought to get back to Kathy, to his kids. He didn’t bother questioning his fate, or the unfortunate timing of his illness. His in-laws and oldest son did some of that on their own, as they painfully watched his--and Kathy’s--separate fights for life.

“I did not understand why he and my mom were being challenged like this,” said eldest son Aaron, who blames his parents’ experiences for his loss of faith. “If God were here, I would probably kick him. . . . My dad is the most honest and caring person I know, and it is beyond me how a spiritual being or person could hurt him.”

Aaron buried his anger and attached himself to Gene’s side, studying in the hospital room every day and talking to the doctors about his dad’s progress. The staff was moved by the 16-year-old’s devotion and composure. In six weeks, Lynn said, they watched him become a man. “He was willing to do anything to put his dad back together,” Lynn said. “This family had been dealt an extraordinary set of circumstances, which could have torn them all apart, and, yet, we saw them holding on with extraordinary love.”

Inspired by Gene’s determination, therapists and doctors pushed him to do more in less time. They led him on walks through the hospital, through mazes of hallways and doorways, and left him to find his way back. They prodded his memory.

Before he could be released, he had to be able to recite his medications, what they were for and what time he was supposed to take them. If he paused too long, the nurses wouldn’t let it count. Aaron could have helped with his dad’s prescriptions, but Dr. Lynn resisted. As a teenager, the doctor himself had cared for a dying grandfather. He saw Aaron trying to cope with his mother’s condition. Lynn hoped he wouldn’t have to take care of his father, too. “I needed Gene to be the dad when he left here . . . to be able to take care of himself so he could take care of his family,” Lynn said.

*

After six weeks of rehabilitation, Gene finally went home. Someone had baked a cake. Streamers hung in the dining room. Kathy hadn’t wanted him home at first. She challenged the doctors--”Are you sure he’s ready?”--several times before Gene finally snapped at her.

“I felt like she wasn’t happy I was coming home, after I worked so hard for that day. I said, ‘Fine, I don’t want to come home to you, either.’ . . . I feel bad now that I got a little bugged.”

In fact, she was afraid, that she would fall down the stairs, that Gene would fall down, too. Aaron, would have to drive them both everywhere. In a week, she’d be getting brain radiation and a laser procedure to zap the tumors in her skull. “Kissy, how are we going to do this?” she asked younger sister Karen Dugan, who took care of her while Gene was hospitalized.

Gene pulled them through. He picked up where he’d left off, caring for his wife, his boys, the house, his job--just like he had told himself he would. He went to Aaron’s high school soccer games, coached a few of Cody’s and squeezed in time at his Mission Viejo hair salon, all the while nursing Kathy. A hospice worker checked in daily, and by the fall of 1995, when her cancer began to accelerate, Gene found himself feeling grateful for the help.

Sometimes, the sound of Kathy wheezing in bed as she struggled to breathe would make him feel trapped. Still, he kept moving. He brought her fried shrimp almost every day, sometimes twice a day. He and Aaron took turns massaging her head with musk oils. When he’d walk out of the bedroom to get something for her, Kathy would gaze after him and sigh. “Boy, I sure do love that Geno.”

He could feel his own body getting stronger. He took it as a sign: He was alive--and, the doctors said, healthy. He’d be around to take care of their sons after Kathy was gone.

He decided to focus on what he had: 24 years with a woman he loved more than he ever thought possible; two sons, smart and loving and full of their mother’s wit and fire; a family of in-laws who took care of him as if he were one of their own. “To have someone love you like she loved me, like we loved each other,” he said. “That’s an amazing blessing.”

*

Kathy had no last wishes, no promise-me-this requests. She talked around the inevitable, telling Gene he needed to learn how to do the checkbook, the bills, and fix Cody’s favorite nachos, but not saying why. When her family celebrated Christmas two weeks early in 1995 because they were secretly worried she wouldn’t make it through the holiday, Kathy would say only: “This is really morbid.”

Sometimes she tried to sound relaxed, as if she were going on a short trip and needed to remind him to put the trash out on Tuesdays. But it was clear to him, that she knew she was dying. Somehow, it made him feel better.

She was sleeping on New Year’s Eve afternoon, 1995, when he slipped from the house to buy a casket. A hospice nurse had asked that morning if he’d made any arrangements. He brought Kathy’s father and her two sisters with him. They chose two plots at Pacific View Cemetery. “One is waiting for me right next to hers,” he said.

When he returned home, Kathy looked at his tired face. She struggled to ask where he had been all day but was wheezing with every breath. A tumor on her upper chest had grown so large, it was pushing against her throat and neck, forcing her head to one side.

He paused, remembering the polished wood coffin and the cream-colored lining. He imagined the grassy spot at the Newport Beach cemetery, high enough to boast a peek of the ocean if the day was clear and the trees were kept trimmed on the slope below.

And for the first time in their 23-year marriage, he lied to his wife.

Twenty days later, she drew her last breath about 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 20, 1996. All her family was there, holding her hands, cradling her head. Gene worried about Aaron, who stood next to him, trying so hard not to cry. He worried about his mother-in-law, Faith Fingerson, who was practically holding Kathy in her lap, rocking her. He worried a little about his own pain. It was choking him. He’d thought he’d be ready.

Still, he wanted her hurting to be over. He wanted to catch up to Aaron, who had slipped from the house without a sound. But before he did, he stood in the doorway and watched Kathy die.

*

It wasn’t until the funeral three days later that Gene stole a few moments alone with Kathy. He wanted to see her in her casket before the service started. He didn’t want to share her with anyone.

“She looked so beautiful,” he said, remembering the bubble-gum colored scarf tied in a perfect wrap around her head. It matched her pale pink dress with the roses sewn down the front, the one he helped choose at Nordstrom, the one he knew she’d love. He looked at her, put his face near hers. “I promise I’ll take care of the boys,” he whispered. “They won’t forget you. I won’t forget you.”

He stepped away. Then he sobbed.

Life came to a halt after that day. People stopped coming by the house so often. The telephone rarely rang. Gene compared it to the end of a storm, when things calm down and it’s quiet again.

He was numb, but he pushed on, mostly for his sons, he says now. He stayed up on their school activities, encouraging them to keep moving. He went back to work, but only with his landscaping company. It gave him more time to be with Cody, who at 6 was old enough to mourn, but too young to fully understand his loss.

At home, Gene kept things pretty much the way they were. He sorted stacks of photo albums and had some of his favorite shots blown up. He put some on the fireplace mantle, others on his bedroom dresser and lit candles by them. In her night stand drawer were piles of scarves she’d worn on her head, pieces of fabric that still held her sweet, musky scent. He put them to his face, breathing her back to him.

He wasn’t afraid of the memories. He craved them. It hurt most at night, when he would crawl into bed and drown in its emptiness. “When the person you love more than anything in the world is there with you every night, you don’t think for a minute how awful it would be alone.”

So he would lie there, thinking about their life. In the dark, he remembered things that made him smile, like the time she poured prune juice down his throat because he’d fallen asleep on the couch. She always wanted him to stick up for himself more, so one year she gave him a book, “The Art of Intimidation,” hoping it would help. He thought about that at night sometimes.

Gene worked through his grief that way--with little bursts of memories. He let his boys work through it in their own way, too. He didn’t take them to counseling or church--not because he didn’t believe in God, but because he’d always felt spirituality was a personal thing. There were no answers that could explain his loss, he said. So he didn’t look for them.

He was caught off guard by how suddenly he could start aching for her again. A year after Kathy died, Gene took Aaron to Stanford University to begin his freshman year, and he was startled by how sad he felt looking at the families around them. There was no one for him to share this with.

*

Ponytail flying, coach Gene runs down the soccer field, dribbling the ball and hollering to get his fourth-grade players in place. He blows a whistle as Cody, now 11, tries to steal the ball away. He almost does, to the cheers of his teammates. Gene grins and ruffles Cody’s hair, straight and blond like his mother’s.

It’s been almost five years since Kathy died, and six since Gene almost did. Life for him is not unlike it always was, sprinkled with family dinners and birthday celebrations, baseball games and soccer tournaments. He talks to his mom, who lives in Utah, every night by phone. He still cuts hair--but only in his garage, and only for relatives and close friends. He runs the house alone now. With every task, he can’t help but think of Kathy. It was important to her that he know how to keep the house moving. He thinks she would be proud.

Aaron, about to graduate from Stanford, is bound for medical school because he wants to save people. Medicine makes sense to him. God still does not. But Gene isn’t worried. His son may never know religion the way Kathy did, the way she wanted them all to, but Gene knows his son.

“He is a good young man,” he said. “Even after everything he’s been through, he is honest and loving and he’s good to people.”

Cody keeps his dad going, with school, video games and an unusual fourth-grade habit of being punctual. “It’s time to go, dad,” he’ll say when Gene is puttering around the house before practice.

His dad takes things more slowly than before. Gene doesn’t want to miss a moment. He has learned to live with the loneliness. Someone’s pager will go off, and he’ll remember how she’d send him “hello beeps” in the middle of the day, in their special code--a series of 4s that was their sign language for smiles.

Sometimes, he finds himself lighting candles by her pictures, or thumbing through her scarves. He considers what it would be like to be in a new relationship. Now 47, he allows himself to wonder--nothing more. “It’d be nice to hold a woman again. But then I see how unhappy couples are these days, and I don’t know if it’d be worth it. I had something so amazing. . . . How could I ever hope to come close to that again?”

Annual visits to neurologist Dobkin have shown the aneurysm still is completely clotted. The only thing to keep checking is the shunt that drains fluid from his brain to his abdomen, a tube that may have to be adjusted or replaced someday, but for now works fine. “If it ain’t broke, we ain’t touching it,” Dobkin tells his patient.

Gene doesn’t run marathons, mostly because the heat bothers him more than ever. When he gets hot, he has trouble with his words, and sometimes it’s like he runs marathons in his head just trying to find the word he’s looking for.

Dobkin assures him there is nothing to worry about, that there is no time bomb. So Gene tries not to think about it. It’s not in his character to dwell on the what-ifs. He just does what he has to do every day, to finish the job he and Kathy started.

Cody keeps him going, and he is afraid to think about what he’ll do when he’s really alone. Maybe he’ll travel, or make giant stained-glass windows like he used to years ago. Maybe he’ll start running again, or buy a boat and go sailing. He’d like that, he thinks.

Or maybe he’ll stay right where he is--in the house he refuses to change, surrounded by the memories that have kept him going through loss and grief and--he can now say--healing.

“We have such a teeny-tiny window in this world,” he said. “I feel like you have to hold on and make the most of it. You kiss your kids, value what you have and what you know. . . . I am so happy to be alive.”