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Paco Rodriguez dreamed of being a hero
E:60 - Hero
Uploaded by ESPN on Apr 19, 2011
Boxer Francisco "Paco" Rodriguez told his wife, Sonia, that he wanted to be a hero. But that dream seemed shattered after Rodriguez slipped into a coma and was declared brain dead after losing a title fight in Philadelphia. Through organ donation, his uncle and four women received a gift of life.
Paco Rodriguez dreamed of being a hero
By Melissa Isaacson
ESPNChicago.com
Archive
Updated: April 19, 2011, 8:09 PM ET
Dear Recipient,
My name is Sonia, the proud wife of Francisco Rodriguez. The reason for my letter is that I learned you are a recipient of my husband's donation and through this letter, I would like you to know a little bit about him. I'll start by mentioning that Francisco was a very loving husband, father and friend and most importantly, of a truly humble and kind heart, which to me made him extremely special. He was very dedicated to his family and his career. My husband was a professional athlete, who loved the sport with a passion …
Like three little ducklings, they would trail after Evaristo Rodriguez, the oldest son Alejandro or "Alex," the middle, Evaristo Jr., whom they called Tito, and the baby Francisco, whom they called Paco.
Evaristo Rodriguez, who boxed professionally in his native Mexico and in the U.S., and his wife Maria, from Guadalajara, settled in Chicago in 1979. As boys, their sons had a choice: Go to the gym or stay home with the doors locked. The gym was the safest place Evaristo knew, and boxing, he reasoned, with the head gear and gloves, the safest sport.
"No other sport interested me," he said. "I always liked it, liked being with them so they were busy. It was the best that I could do for them."
Tito, two years behind Alex and six years older than Paco, became a national Golden Gloves champion at age 17 before retiring. Alex stopped boxing at age 12 after suffering a ruptured appendix and other intestinal problems.
And the baby of the family? Evaristo first took Paco to the gym in diapers, holding him and guiding his little fists to the bag. Still, Paco didn't seem particularly motivated to box until winning a local tournament at age 13 and again at 14. At 16, he won the National Golden Gloves championship in Las Vegas, the first Chicago champion since Tito.
"Paco was on his way to becoming something great," said family friend George Hernandez, Chicago Park District boxing director. "He was going to be the one that would actually break through and make some noise in the boxing community."
Paco, they all said, was special.
_____________________
Hello Sonia,
My name is Alexis. I am the recipient of your beloved husband's heart. … I am 26 years old and single. I have future plans on becoming a nurse anesthetist. … I was diagnosed with heart failure in March 2005. After that, life became difficult for me as my health rapidly declined. My family began to make preparations for the worst …
She never expected it. Even with a grandmother who died of heart failure, a mother with a pacemaker and six aunts and uncles with varying degrees of heart disease, when you're 21, going to school, tending bar and you come down with a dry cough, you chalk it up to a cold, not pulmonary emboli. When you're on your way to a party and start feeling weak and throw up, you think flu not congestive heart failure.
"I was frightened, I didn't know what I was going to do," said Alexis Sloan of her emergency room trip in March 2005. "I hadn't started my life yet. I wanted to know what was going to happen to me."
She figured they'd give her a pill, maybe a few, and send her home. Doctors actually found a regimen that worked for a while. But less than a year later, she was told she would need a defibrillator implanted and shortly after, would need a new heart.
"I was scared, I was very scared," she said, beginning to cry. "I thought I was going to die."
_____________________
Dear Donor Family,
I am the recent recipient of your loved one's double-lung transplant. … I can only imagine how hard it would be to lose someone you love. I want you to know that because of your decision to donate their organs, that you were able to save my life. I am unable to express in words how grateful I am. I am a 23-year-old survivor of Cystic Fibrosis. CF is a genetic disease that mainly affects the lungs and digestive system, with a life expectancy of 30 years …
When doctors told Charlotte and Bob Owens that their 10-month-old baby had cystic fibrosis, they were also told that the average life expectancy for CF patients was 12. Ashely was a little more hopeful.
"I was pretty much told growing up, like ever since I was little I knew that I probably wouldn't make it to 25," she said.
Still, her parents did not treat her like a sickly child. Despite as many as four nebulizer treatments three times a day; up to four sessions consisting of thumping on her chest to clear congestion; and through frequent hospital visits for bouts of pneumonia and to help her gain weight because CF patients use up so much energy breathing, there were still friends, tennis for a while, swimming and gymnastics. No team sports though.
"Because I didn't know when I would get sick or go in the hospital," Ashley said. "I didn't feel like I would be very reliable for my teammates."
She was matter-of-fact about a lot of things. She made a "bucket list" -- ride in a hot air balloon, white-water rafting, a trip to an island, creating her own recipe and making her own Halloween costume. She wanted to graduate from college and become an elementary school teacher. And she wanted to get married.
She stayed in high school, a feat in itself. Hospital stays were lasting two to three weeks each, three to four times a year. And she met Jesse.
"I remember she was one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen ever," said Jesse Quinter, who first spotted Ashley in study hall at Owen J. Roberts High School in Pottstown, Pa., in the winter of 2003, when he was a senior and she a junior.
"I expressed that I liked her," Quinter recalled, "and she said, 'You know, that's great and I like you a lot, too, but before we get together, I need you to know everything about me so there are no surprises.' And then she told me. And it didn't bother me in any way."
She was 19 when she stopped responding to medicine.
_____________________
Dear Ashley,
… I am very sorry to hear about your illness and all the challenges you had to overcome. I have to tell you that losing my husband has been the most painful event in my life and every day I miss him even more. I really wish that he was here so that we could live life the way we had planned but in this world, we don't have the option of making life decisions. God is the only one that has the power to predispose what can and can't happen. I have to say I'm thankful with God regardless of the pain that I've been put through. I thank him for giving me five wonderful years with Francisco, because even though they were five short years, they were the best years of my life. In him, I found the best of friends, and the most wonderful man in my life. He made me extremely happy and I can't thank God and Francisco enough for electing me as his wife and the mother of his one and only child …
He liked the Cubs. She liked the Sox. They met when her sister Celia and his brother Tito, who were dating at the time, came to pick Sonia up from work. Paco came along for the ride. The four went to a concert. A few nights later, they all went bowling. And two weeks after they met, Paco asked Sonia whether she wanted to be his girlfriend.
She said yes.
He was funny. "I'm probably the funniest, too," Sonia said, "so I said, 'Well, he's funny and he's nice. I don't need anything else."
He had never wanted girls to know he was a boxer because he was afraid they would like him only for that. When he told Sonia, she didn't pay much attention. "I kind of took it as he was doing it as a hobby," she said.
Then one day he told her he was going out of town for a fight. She figured he was probably serious about this boxing thing. She didn't like the sport, disliked the violence, but she supported him.
"I said if those are his dreams, then I'm going to be there for him," she said. "Because that's how much I loved him."
They were married at Chicago's City Hall on Jan. 14, 2006, three years after they met. He was 21, she was 20.
"I never thought I would find the man of my dreams," she said. "So when I met Paco, I said I was really wrong. He had everything that I needed in a man. He was very courteous with me, he always wanted to please me. He wanted the best for him and I. It wasn't about him, it was about both of us. … "
They saved up for a big church wedding and reception, and, on the big day two years later, Sonia told her husband she wanted at least five children.
"Wow, that's quite a bit," she remembers him saying, "but I think I can do it."
They figured they'd wait until Sonia finished college and Paco was more established in his sport, but Sonia became pregnant. Paco was over the moon. He talked of moving them to Las Vegas one day and buying a house. Their daughter was born June 7, 2009. It was Paco's idea to name her Ginette, after a favorite Spanish song of Sonia's.
"He found the baby to be a bigger cause for him to really be someone in boxing," she said.
Between his job as a messenger, Paco changed diapers, washed bottles, burped and bathed Ginette. When the family left the house, he carried the baby and everything else, ignoring the teasing from his brothers.
The couple talked about their future, and Sonia hoped it would not include boxing.
She had attended a few of Paco's fights, but couldn't stand seeing him get hit and would run to the bathroom. "I'd hear stories about boxers getting seriously injured," she said, "and I didn't want to be there if it ever happened to him.
"And then after a few fights I said to him, 'You know what? I can't bear to see you in a ring.' And he said, 'If it hurts you that much, then just stay home.' So after that, I just started staying home."
Paco's mother, Maria, took one pill for nerves and another for her blood pressure just to be able to go to his fights because her son wanted her there. Sonia and his parents asked him to consider giving it up.
"The day I die," Paco would respond when his father brought it up, "I can be out there running, and if someone is going to kill me, they're going to kill me. Or I can be inside the house with you. If God wants to take me, He'll take me … "
Still, they persisted. Sonia asked him to go back to school, so he did. For a few semesters.
"Babe, this is not for me," Sonia remembered Paco telling her. "Boxing is what I want to do. I made up my mind."
Paco, by then a five-time Chicago Golden Gloves champ, reassured her.
"I'm always well prepared," she says he told her. "Nothing's going to happen to me. Don't worry."
"So I would believe him," Sonia said. "I would believe his words."
_____________________
Dear Sonia and family members,
… My name is Meghan and I too had high hopes of becoming a professional athlete. Growing up I swam and spent most of my childhood and teenage years training; waking up at 4 a.m. to go to practice before school and then leaving straight from school to return back to the pool for practice and weights. I always thought I would make the 2008 Olympics … "
Meghan Kingsley had enough concerns, but her liver was not one of them.
Sports came naturally to her. Her family lived on the grounds of a ski resort in Hidden Valley, Pa., where her father was a sales manager until she was 2. They later vacationed there, where she and her older brother were introduced to swimming. Meghan idolized Olympic medalists Janet Evans and Summer Sanders, and dreamed herself of competing in the Olympics. When she was 8, she met Evans when the then-Olympian visited Meghan's swim club in Rockville, Md.
From age 8 until 12, Meghan was one of the top swimmers in her age group in Maryland, and she remembered one race in particular when her swim club competed against a rival and it came down to the last relay, and the last flip turn, for the division lead.
"I am like, I'm not going to breathe the whole way back, I'm just going to push as hard as I can," she said. "And I swam the hardest I think I ever swam in my whole life."
Meghan touched the wall one-tenth of a second before her opponent, setting off a wild celebration and a feeling every athlete covets.
"That's something I'll never forget," she said, softly. "I think that was one of my last greatest races I ever swam."
By 13, she began slowing down and tiring easily. Her body was changing, and she assumed she was burning out. She noticed her left foot, which had turned in differently than her right since age 8, was stiffening and more arched, which had been affecting her in the breaststroke. She later noticed weakness in the left leg and balance issues.
At 15, doctors discovered she had some hearing loss, but no one seemed to be able to put all the symptoms together until, at 16, a neurologist diagnosed neurofibromatosis Type 2. Meghan was told she had numerous nonmalignant tumors in her brain and on her spine, and they were dangerous, growing on nerves that made it difficult to walk and eventually caused the loss of hearing in her left ear after the second of two brain surgeries. In the spring of 2009, she learned the hearing in her right ear was failing, as well.
News of a clinical drug trial provided hope to save the hearing in her right ear and perhaps slow the growth of the tumors.
No one told her it would almost kill her.
_____________________
Dear Sonia,
My name is Victoria, 57 years old, white female. I was a diabetic for 20 years and was on dialysis for three and a half. … On Nov. 23, 2009, I received a call, "This is the one." It has changed my whole life. I received a kidney and a pancreas and each day, I think of your husband's sacrifice, so I could live a normal life again. …"
Her mother and sister were diabetics, her older sister dying of the disease at 66, and her brother was recently diagnosed.
"I felt like it was a curse because it's supposed to skip a generation, it's not supposed to be, or so I was told, every person in your family," said Vicky Davis, who found out at 27 that she had gestational diabetes, then, at 37, Type II diabetes.
Over the years, her condition deteriorated to Type I, and when she had trouble controlling her diabetes, she was forced to begin dialysis treatments -- three times a week for four hours a day, beginning in 2005. In '06, doctors told Davis they wanted to place her on the transplant list for a new kidney and a pancreas.
She expected to have the surgery within six months. But after two years of waiting, she said, "I was thinking I should call it quits …"
_____________________
On the day of the fight, Paco, his dad and Tito, who was Paco's manager, went to breakfast, drove around Philadelphia and ended up at the steps of the Museum of Art, looking up at the Rocky statue. Paco held a video camera while his father and brother raced up the steps. Paco wanted to run, but Tito said no, they weren't taking a chance he'd get hurt.
Paco was scheduled to fight against rising star and hometowner Teon Kennedy at the legendary Blue Horizon on Nov. 20, 2009. It wasn't for a world title, but it was for a contender belt -- the vacant USBA junior featherweight championship -- which meant a shot at bigger fights and better paydays.
Paco called himself "El Niño Azteca," a showman who walked into the ring for each fight accompanied by friends, many times a small band, and handed out T-shirts with his picture on them. He was no Rocky, but those who knew him said Paco "fought like a Mexican," which meant he could take a punch with the best of them.
Fear? If Paco had it, said Hernandez, Paco's cut man that night, he would never have become the boxer he was.
"Some trainers say, 'Oh, I can teach you anything.' But you can't teach balls, you know? … " Hernandez said. "Paco had balls. There was no quit in Paco."
In the closing seconds of the first round, Paco was caught by a left hook to the chin, then staggered with an overhand right to the head, drawing an eight count by referee Benjy Esteves. The fight continued.
"I expected Teon to come out in that second round and end it there," said Bernard Fernandez, longtime boxing writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, who covered the bout. "But Paco had a great fighting heart."
In their corner, Tito asked his brother how he felt and got an "OK." Then he yelled at him.
"I told you to watch out for the right hand," Tito said. "Now keep moving."
Paco came out in the second round and took the fight to Kennedy. The bout was one of momentum shifts. Both fighters connected to the face. Kennedy's eye swelled shut. Many observers, as well as the judges, had it even or close through seven rounds.
Toward the end of the ninth round, Paco got tagged a couple of times but refused to take a knee. When the bell rang, Tito jumped into the ring along with the ring physician, Jonathan Levyn, who evaluated Paco in his corner.
"What's your name?" the doctor asked. "Do you know where you are?"
Paco passed the test; the doctor left; and Tito moved back in front of his brother.
"You gotta move," he told him. "Don't take any punishment. If you have to take a knee … it's just one point. We got three more rounds. Do you feel good?"
"Yeah," Paco responded, "I feel good."
_____________________
Dear Dad,
You always told me that whenever someone goes, it is best to remember all the good times and be grateful for all the times we had. So instead of talking about all the things I wish we got to do, I'm going to remember all the wonderful times that we did have. … Now I know this is another hard time and it's important for you to be strong for Mom and Robert … I will be in heaven watching over you and waiting till the day we can all be together. I love you Dad.
Ashley Owens was dying. It was Friday, Nov. 13, 2009, and despite even more pain in her chest and trouble breathing than usual, she drove in a downpour to the campus of West Chester University to take an elementary education test.
She parked her car, got out and made it across the street before she couldn't go any farther. She stumbled back to her car, soaking wet, and called her boyfriend, Jesse, who was also a student there, to come get her. As he had been doing for several months when Ashley had trouble walking far, Jesse came over and carried her to class. She hated it, but it was better than a wheelchair. Jesse was always there. Once he strapped on an oxygen mask and walked through the mall with her so she wouldn't feel self-conscious. And it wasn't difficult for him to carry her -- she was 5 feet tall and weighed just 69 pounds.
In pain after class and before summoning the strength to drive home, she called the University of Pennsylvania transplant center, which had informed her that until she weighed more than 70 pounds, they could not put her on the transplant list.
"Can you please just make an exception?" she pleaded. "I promise I'm going to seriously try this whole week. I'll eat. I just need to get on that list."
She had feared the idea of a lung transplant, scared off by daunting survival statistics, terrified that she would go through traumatic surgery and still not make it. "But I just realized how bad I wanted to get better," she said. "I wanted to at least go fighting than just let it take me."
Over the phone, they agreed. A few hours after that, her condition worsened to the point that she would have been too ill to qualify for the list.
On the way home, Ashley felt something pop in her chest. The pain was intense, and she felt as if she was drowning. She gasped for air. A couple of hours later, as her parents and Jesse drove her screaming to the hospital an hour away, her right lung collapsed.
As she lay in critical care at Philadelphia's St. Christopher's Hospital for Children one week later on Friday, Nov. 20, just miles from where a young boxer named Francisco "Paco" Rodriguez was to fight Teon Kennedy, Ashley was told by her doctors that she probably had about two weeks to live if she did not get a transplant. Christmas if she was lucky.
She called Jesse, who refused to hear it.
Later that afternoon, he walked into the room and told her that she was going to get the surgery and that she was going to get better. That they would grow old together. He didn't intend to propose that day, but he had bought an engagement ring a few weeks earlier and was looking for an opportunity. After talking to the doctors, he decided this was the perfect time and dropped to one knee.
"Oh no, not here in the hospital," Ashley wailed.
Jesse looked up at her. "Shh," he whispered. "Don't ruin this."
Ashley began to cry.
"We've been through a lot of stuff throughout everything with your health, and all the other fun things that we've done," he said. "And I'm sure we're going to go through a lot more stuff. I want to be there through everything, and I want you to know that whatever happens here, that I'm with you.
"Will you marry me?"
"Yes," she blurted.
"It was the best it could have been at the time," Jesse said. "It was the best way it could have happened."
_____________________
By November 2009, Alexis Sloan felt she had lived a lifetime in four years. And in some ways, she had. In 2005, she was told her heart was failing. Later that year, she was admitted to Philadelphia's Hahnemann Hospital. Her health deteriorated, her heart stopped, forcing doctors to implant a left ventricular assist device (LVAD), a surgically implanted pumping mechanism to assist a heart that can no longer do that effectively.
"Alexis," said Theresa Rowe, a nurse coordinator who helps organize transplant evaluation processes, "was as critical as it gets."
She couldn't take a shower with the device. She couldn't walk out of her house without carrying an eight-pound battery pack that lasted four hours and a backup battery pack. At home, even getting a glass of water meant she had to momentarily unhook herself from the power base unit.
She was overwhelmed the first couple of months and depressed to the point that, during one hospital stay, she unhooked herself from the power unit, knowing she could die.
"I mean, I appreciated the technology being available," she recalled, in tears, "but I felt like a robot, and for me, I couldn't live like that. … My mind was in a really dark place."
A rabid boxing fan, she hated the pity parties by well-meaning strangers and friends. Most demoralizing was the fight she had to wage to get on the transplant list, a battle made tougher, she said, after two young transplant recipients in her clinic hadn't followed post-transplant protocols.
"It was hard for me to prove I wouldn't take a new heart for granted," she said.
In May 2008, Sloan finally got on the transplant list, and, with the support of family, her attitude improved. She put the battery packs in a suitcase and wheeled it onto the train and to the senior center where she worked. She waited hopefully.
Morbid as it was, she knew from her days tending bar that the odds of receiving a new organ increased around the holidays. And so, each year as summer turned to fall, she looked forward to a call.
_____________________
The 10th round was bad.
Observers said it was as if fatigue overcame Paco all at once. Twice he slipped to the canvas, though not from blows. Once, Esteves warned Kennedy for pushing him down, but it was clear that Paco was weakening.
Finally, a fierce left-right combination by Kennedy sent Paco into the ropes. Esteves jumped in, calling the fight over at 1:52.
Tito grabbed his brother, led him back to his corner, sat him on the stool and began with his father to take off Paco's gloves.
"You all right, man?" Tito asked.
"Yeah," Paco told him.
"It's OK, man," said Tito. "We're going home. … Don't worry about it. It's just a fight. We'll come back."
The Kennedy corner came over and congratulated Paco as the ring doctor gave him simple commands.
But with one hand on the stool, Paco was unsteady as he tried to brace himself with his other hand on the ropes.
"Paquito, look at me, look at me," said Hernandez, his cut man. "How do you feel?"
"What's wrong?" Tito asked as Paco rubbed the left side of his head.
"It's a little swollen," Paco said.
Tito told him that he was going to get him some ice and that he should try to walk it off.
"Paco said, 'No. I don't feel good. I'm getting sleepy," Tito recalled.
"I told him, 'Don't go to sleep, stay with me,'" said Tito, who waved the doctor back over, who had gone to examine Kennedy.
"I started talking to him again," Tito said, "but my brother wasn't answering my questions anymore."
No more than a minute had passed since the end of the fight when Hernandez said he looked up and saw Paco's eyes roll back as his body went limp.
Looking on, horrified, Evaristo did the only thing a father could do.
"In that moment," he recalled. "I asked God not to take him, that I would exchange my life for his."
_____________________
In the ambulance on the way to Philadelphia's Hahnemann Hospital, Tito screamed at his brother: "We have to get back home! You've got a wife and daughter waiting for you!"
But the left side of Paco's brain was swelling, and, within hours doctors would tell Evaristo and Tito Rodriguez that there was little hope for Paco's survival.
Back in Chicago, Sonia and Maria were getting anxious. Too much time had passed without Paco calling to tell them about the fight. Maria called Alex, and it sounded as if he had been crying. He told his mother he had been sleeping, but she didn't buy it. He told her Paco was getting sutured.
"Tell me the truth," Maria demanded.
A half hour later, Alex arrived at the house with Celia, Sonia's sister who is Tito's wife, and told Maria and Sonia what he knew.
Their wailing filled the home.
"In my desperation as a mother, I began screaming to the heavens," Maria said, "begging God to heal my son."
Maria, Sonia and Alex took a 6 a.m. flight to Philadelphia and when she saw her son for the first time after the accident, machines pumping to keep him alive, Maria grabbed her husband and shook him.
"Why didn't you protect him?" she wept.
"I did protect him," he cried. "I don't know what happened."
Evaristo was inconsolable. He was Paco's trainer, his sons jokingly nicknaming him "Jefe" for "Boss," and the two were inseparable each day during Paco's workouts. Paco wouldn't begin until his father arrived at the gym. It was Evaristo who held his son's legs while he did sit-ups, who ran alongside him and, even into his 50s, still sparred with him.
Covered with ice packs to control a fever as he lay in grave condition, Paco coughed and twitched, giving Sonia a measure of hope amid the dire prognosis. But nurses cautioned her they were not necessarily meaningful movements. And, with final brain function tests conducted just after midnight Saturday, doctors told her that her husband was gone.
"I was so confused," she said softly, "because he had promised me he was going to come back."
Paco was pronounced dead at 7:42 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009.
Alex was in the room when Janet Andrews, transplant coordinator from the donor program Gift of Life, came to talk to Sonia.
"I said, 'Don't say anything, just listen to me first,'" Alex recalled of his words to Sonia. "'One heartbeat for Francisco was like three for someone else. And his lungs? The kid ran every day and was never out of breath. It would be such a waste for his organs to not help someone else.'"
Evaristo brought up Alex's then-9-month-old daughter Alejandra, who was born with just one kidney. But doctors had told Alex and his wife that a transplant was not necessary.
Maria immediately thought of her cousin Ramón, who was on dialysis and on the transplant list in Chicago in need of a kidney, and she was assured he would receive the organ if it was a match.
The final decision was left up to Sonia, but she did not need convincing. She and Paco had discussed organ donation, and both agreed it would be the right thing to do. And aside from initial trepidation from Tito, who had flown back home to Chicago, the family was in full support.
"This was one of the easiest conversations I ever had with a family," Andrews said. "There was no hesitation. It seemed like this was something in line with what Paco and his life was about."
At the time of Paco's death, there were approximately 108,000 people waiting on transplant lists in the U.S., including more than 6,000 in Philadelphia.
"He would always tell me he wanted to be a hero," Sonia said. "So I said if that was his goal in life, then we're going to do it for him."
_____________________
Before Ramón Tejada became so sick that he was forced to go on dialysis in 2003, his family and Paco's family often spent time together. At 30, he had developed kidney stones and cysts that indicated he was in the beginning stages of kidney failure.
In 2004, Tejada -- whom Paco and his brothers called "Uncle" -- was put on the transplant list.
Paco's kidney was a perfect match. Maria had just one request.
"She asked that I stay close to them, that I could visit maybe every day or as much as possible to be near them, and that the whole family stay closer," Ramón recalled. "I said it would give me pleasure."
Ramón thanked her.
"Don't be grateful," Maria told him. "All that I ask is that you take care of that kidney. Take care of it so it will last you many years."
_____________________
Meghan Kingsley thought it was a side effect of the trial medication she had been taking that caused her to be so ill in October '09. The idea was to either stabilize or decrease the size of the tumor to stem the hearing loss caused by neurofibromatosis. But two months after beginning the drug trial, her liver began to fail.
She was so ill that she can't remember clearly when doctors told her she would need a new liver. On Monday, Nov. 23, they told her they had one, from a male donor her age, 25.
Several hours later, with Meghan in the operating room, the family heard the helicopter land at the hospital.
Meghan has heard the story enough times to tell it herself.
"They all looked at each other like, 'Oh my goodness that's Meghan's liver, this is the moment. She's going to be given a new chance, another new life,'" she said.
Doctors told the family afterward that 10 percent of Meghan's liver was functioning and that if she had not received the new organ, she would have been dead within 48 hours.
_____________________
Although privacy laws and organ donor networks like Gift of Life in Philadelphia strive to protect the identities of donors and recipients unless both parties want to communicate with each other, the Paco Rodriguez case was unique. First, the public nature of Paco's story gave it wide circulation. And Sonia and Paco's family wanted to meet the recipients and the recipients wanted to meet them.
Early on, the recipients figured out the identity of their donor. Friends told Meghan after reading an article about Paco and putting the pieces together. Vicky said she was told when she got the call that a kidney and pancreas were available, that the donor was 25 and a boxer. Ashley did an Internet search after getting the letter from Sonia, who said her husband's name was Francisco and that he was a professional athlete.
And Alexis, who had been to fight nights at the Blue Horizon, figured it out through intuition and hearsay -- relatives heard news about the boxer's death, and, after the surgery, Hahnemann Hospital employees made casual remarks.
"How're ya doin' today, champ?" they said. "You have a strong, fighting heart."
_____________________
It's late on the afternoon of Dec. 1, 2010, in suburban Itasca, Ill., when they meet for the first time in the offices of Gift of Hope, the local organ and tissue transplant network. With assistance from Gift of Life and "E:60," Paco's family and the recipients came together -- a wish they both had expressed. Sonia walks in with her daughter in her arms, the little girl bright and squirmy and surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins.
"Where's papa?" Alex asks Ginette, whom the family calls Gigi. She smiles and points to his shirt, which has a picture of her father wearing boxing gloves and angel's wings.
Alex, Maria, Sonia and Gigi wait to meet the four women they already describe as family. Soon, the room is awash in tears.
"My mother thanks God for the chance to meet you," Alex says, translating. "From the beginning she knows that you are all very important to her, but she wanted to meet … she wanted to hear …
"My brother's heart," he says finally.
Alexis approaches Paco's mother, and the two fall sobbing into each other's arms. Alexis guides Maria's hand to her chest, her head to her heart. She does the same with Sonia's hand, then Gigi's.
"He is no longer with us," Alex says, speaking his mother's words, "but she knows that he is with us through you guys."
Alexis scoops up Gigi with hugs and kisses, and the little girl rests her head on Alexis' shoulder. A red-eyed Evaristo exchanges hugs with the women. Ramón politely shakes hands with Vicky before she tells him, "I'm Vicky. I have the other kidney."
They pledge a connection to each other that can never be broken. And the rest of their families file in -- Ashley's fiancé, Vicky's husband, Alexis' stepmother, Meghan's mom, Sharon, who holds Maria tightly.
"From one mother to another, nobody could understand it but yourself," she whispers into Maria's ear. "But I thank you for the gift that you've given us, because without him, she wouldn't be alive, either."
Gigi keeps them smiling, carrying framed photographs of her father to each of her new friends.
"All my mom asks of you guys is to take care of yourselves," Alex says. "Take care of your piece of Paco. Enjoy your second chance at life."
"It's your turn to live," Sonia says.
_____________________
Alexis, studying to become a nurse anesthetist, has gained her freedom from the pumping device for her heart. Vicky, who loves to bake, is now free to sample her goodies, to live like Paco's cousin Ramón outside the confines of diabetes. For the first time, Ashley can take a deep breath with lungs her doctors describe as "pristine." Within two weeks, she was trying to run. By summer, she was riding a bike, swimming, skating and playing tennis.
"I was just so excited I could breathe," she said. "I had these new lungs and I just wanted to push myself."
Ashley calls Alexis her "best friend," and they have scheduled speaking engagements together on behalf of Gift of Life. They keep in close contact with Meghan. And Vicky, a mother of two sons, said she considers the three girls "the daughters I never had."
They all will attend Ashley and Jesse's wedding June 25.
"I don't want to put it off because you don't know the future," said Ashley, who still has cystic fibrosis and is now diabetic as a result of one of the immunosuppressant medications she is taking. "That's something I've known ever since I was little."
Alexis, who keeps in touch with Alex weekly, had a dream not long after her heart transplant in which she was sleeping in Paco's and Sonia's house when she heard a baby crying. It was the middle of the night and Alexis picked up the child to console her, patted her on the back and said, 'It's OK, Gigi. I'm here.'"
At the time, she did not know that the correct spelling of Paco's daughter was Ginette with a 'G' and not Jeanette as she had seen it spelled. She did not know that the baby's nickname was "Gigi." But what struck Alexis was the way she picked up the baby, how she spoke to her.
"I was talking in a way a father or parent would say it to their own child, and she stopped crying," she said. "It was just like God was talking to me and I was speaking for Paco."
Meghan feels closest to Paco when she is in the hospital. Since the transplant, she has had rejection problems and a continuing battle with neurofibromatosis.
"When I'm really ill, I just think, 'Come on, Paco, work with me here,'" she said. "I think that we're partners, doing this thing together. And I'll kind of rub my liver, and I'll say, 'Come on, Paco … let's get through this. I want to get out and live my life.'"
Vicky has a picture of Paco on her refrigerator, so she can look at him every day.
For some of the recipients, there are occasional feelings of guilt.
"It's really difficult to think that he had to essentially die so that I could live," Meghan said. "The fact that he can't share moments with his family, with his child, with his wife, like I can."
_____________________
Shortly after Paco died, A.J. Rodriguez, Alex's then-13-year-old son, went to his grandfather and asked whether he could train him to box.
"No, son," Evaristo replied, "I can't. I can't train you."
"But why?" the boy asked. "I want to learn properly and do things right."
"No," Evaristo said. "I can't help you now. I don't want to go through what I did again. I don't want this to happen to me ever again with anyone else."
Boxing, once his greatest love and his greatest gift to his three boys, tore a hole in the heart of Evaristo Rodriguez.
"I don't want to know much about boxing anymore," he said late last year. "I've been told to not be upset at boxing. 'Don't be mad at boxing,' they say. 'These things happen,' they say. 'Don't be mad at boxing because it was your passion.' … But I'm not going back."
No one, not even the family, blames anyone associated with the fight, especially Paco's opponent Teon Kennedy, whom the Rodriguez family received graciously at the hospital afterward.
Did Paco truly understand the risks involved?
"We all know the risks," Hernandez said. "Any man that puts on the gloves knows the risks. I see a lot of guys that get hit and they'll say, 'That ain't nothing.' Well, that's bull. Any time you get hit, you feel the shots. …"
"You go home, you toss and turn all night 'cause you can't sleep. You go to eat, the minute you open your mouth you can feel muscle pain in your jaw. You rub your forehead, you can feel the knuckle. You get up in the morning and look in the mirror, and you see. Being a fighter, you're always in pain, you're always fighting sore. It's part of the game.
"You just don't ever think it's gonna happen to you."
_____________________
A few weeks ago, a friend who used to box with the Rodriguez boys and had been stationed in Iraq asked Alex to go with him to visit Paco's graveside. Evaristo went, too. The subject of boxing and the upcoming Illinois Golden Gloves championship came up.
"'You know, what I said about A.J. years ago is still true,'" Evaristo told Alex. "'He has a real good right hand. He will be a national champ.'"
Alex looked over at his father to make sure he had heard him correctly.
"Let's continue training," Evaristo said.
So, three Rodriguez men are in the gym again.
Alex has also decided to return to the sport he loved as a child but had to quit when he was 12. He couldn't bear to stay away.
"I was living my fighter's dream through my brother," he said, "and it's something, for whatever reason, I have to do. … Even if I get my ass knocked out of the ring, it's cool because we've come back to the game we love."
Now 15, A.J. won't compete until next year's Golden Gloves, when his father and grandfather think he will be ready. At 35, Alex will fight in the pro ranks as a senior bantamweight. He's shooting for his first bout in September.
Alexis has promised she will be there.
Organ, tissue donation
There are more than 110,000 people waiting for an organ, 18 people will die each day waiting for one, and a person's decision to become an organ donor has the potential to save as many as eight lives, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website.
April is donor awareness month. For more information about organ donation in your state or region, or to sign up to be an organ donor, visit the organdonor.gov website.
Additional resources are available at Donatelife.net.
Melissa Isaacson is a columnist for ESPNChicago.com. She can be reached at MIsaacson@espnchicago.com.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Glimpses of Salinger Tucked Inside ‘Catcher in the Rye’
Glimpses of Salinger Tucked Inside ‘Catcher in the Rye’
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
The New York Times
July 4, 2011, 10:52 am
To the list of things that J.D. Salinger found hard to bear, we can now add these: pompous graduation ceremonies and shlepping overseas to see tulips.
“I’ve been going to graduations, and there isn’t much that I find more pretentious or irksome than the sight of ‘faculty’ and graduates in their academic get-ups,’’ he wrote a friend in June 1982, mentioning that it took self-control at one point “not to gag.”
He had an equally visceral and unprintable response to the barrage of tulips that greeted him on a three-week spin through Europe in 1994. Writing to the same friend, he expressed relief that Kafka was not alive to see what “a tourist trap” town fathers had made of his house in Prague. Salinger also complained about the time he spent in Europe prowling for restaurants that offered “a decent, huge green salad.”
Notoriously cranky about a host of things from autograph seekers to Park Avenue phonies, the New York-born Jerome David Salinger moved to New Hampshire and began his retreat from public life two years after his iconic novel, “The Catcher in the Rye,” was published in 1951. Intensely private, he acceded to only a handful of interviews before he died in 2010 at the age of 91.
His views on many topics and his sensitivities to modern urban life, which were reflected, in part, in Holden Caulfield, the hero of the novel, peeked through in occasional letters to his friends.
After Salinger declined to sign a copy of “Catcher” for Mr. Mitchell in 1993, the illustrator sold 11 letters he had received from the author as far back as 1951 to a book dealer. They eventually ended up at the Morgan Library and Museum in 1998, where they sat in a vault and went on display last year, after Salinger’s death.
Mr. Mitchell’s longtime girlfriend, Ruth E. Linke, has since unearthed three additional letters, which have found their way to the Morgan, too. She spotted one inside Mr. Mitchell’s passport, along with photographs Salinger had forwarded of his two young children, and some creased math homework that Salinger’s son, Matthew, completed in 1966, when he was 6 and needed two lines to sign his name. (The photos and the homework appear to be enclosures that got detached from two letters the museum already had in its collection.)
This spring, while cleaning out the last of Mr. Mitchell’s boxes, she found two more letters in Mr. Mitchell’s unsigned copy of “Catcher.”
“She e-mailed me out of the blue a month ago,” and offered them for sale, recalled a delighted Declan Kiely. As the Morgan’s top curator for literary and historical manuscripts, he was all too happy to add them to the museum’s collection.
One of the new acquisitions — the one where the author disparages tulips — is now on display in the McKim building, which housed J.P. Morgan’s personal library. It will be there until Sept. 25, nuzzling a composition Mozart wrote at 5 and poems Sylvia Plath wrote at 14.
Salinger’s other two letters will be shown next year.
All three of the new acquisitions are vintage Salinger, sprinkled with regular-guy interjections and segues like “Buddyroo” and “Moron that I am.”
There is also that familiar mix of high and low that peppers Salinger’s fiction. The same 1994 letter that dropped Kafka’s name also made passing reference to Betty Lou, the Sesame Street muppet. Salinger claimed her little-girl voice was easier for him to make out than his soft-spoken spouse’s.
Hard of hearing, he found himself constantly asking “What?” at home and needed close-captioning to watch television, he wrote, unless the movie they were watching was Hitchcock’s “Thirty-Nine Steps.” That, he wrote, “I probably know by heart.’’
“Would that captions went with people’s foreheads,’’ he added, rather fancifully.
Salinger fans may be cheered to know that the new letters contain further hints that they may yet behold additional Salinger manuscripts. Salinger made passing reference in the 1982 letter to “my manuscripts.” The 1994 letter was more open ended but contained a section that could mean time spent at the typewriter: “I work on,” he wrote. “Same old hours, pretty much.”
The most recent letter, written two days after Christmas 1995, is one of his funnier efforts, even though he insisted that he had not “a shred of interesting news” to report.
Half of the postcard can be described as an ode to cats, which began: “Sometimes I can’t remember what I saw in Dogs for so many years.”
With two kittens and a larger Russian Blue making themselves at home each night atop the family bed, Salinger wrote that once the kittens finished growing, he might have to ask his wife to leave to make room for the menagerie.
Why did J.D. Salinger spend the last 60 years hiding in a shed writing love notes to teenage girls?
Why did J.D. Salinger spend the last 60 years hiding in a shed writing love notes to teenage girls?
By Anne De Courcy
www.dailymail.co.uk
Last updated at 7:57 AM on 29th January 2010
The writer J. D. Salinger, who died yesterday aged 91, was as famous for his five decades of stringent reclusiveness as for his best-known novel, The Catcher In The Rye, which was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1951.
It also marked the beginning of an obsessive withdrawal from the world. This hermit, who guarded his privacy with a shotgun and guard dogs behind high walls, was equally fierce in protecting his anonymity with squads of lawyers who attempted to block anything intimate being written about him.
He was the ultimate anti-celebrity, refusing interviews and insisting his photograph was removed from the dust-jackets of his books.
The only recent photograph of him (taken many years ago) is of him wearing a furious face as he fends off an intruding cameraman.
Genius, hermit and sexual predator: Novelist J.D.Salinger was also the ultimate anti-celebrity
Along with this quest for total seclusion went a predilection for teenage girls - not so much a Lolita syndrome as an urge to discover innocence and then mould it to the shape he wished.
Born in New York on January 1, 1919, J.D. (Jerome David) Salinger's early life gave little hint of what he would become, although there were several factors that affected him deeply.
One was the shock of believing he was Jewish and then discovering that he was only half-Jewish - his mother was, in fact, a Catholic.
Another was his doomed first love affair, in 1941, with the 16-year-old Oona O'Neill, whom he had wished to marry - she later wed Charlie Chaplin.
Their romance ended when he was called up by the Army in 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbour.
More scarring still, however, were his experiences in World War II, in which he saw numerous comrades killed around him.
He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day and fought all the way to Paris. There, he met Ernest Hemingway who encouraged his writing.
Still in Europe when the war ended, he was sent to Germany to interrogate Nazis.
There, he fell in love with a girl called Sylvie - later believed to be a former Nazi official - whom he married and, after eight months, divorced.
He later described her as 'an evil woman who bewitched me'.
He returned to the U.S. and began his writing career with short stories. Then, in 1951, he published the novel on which he had been working for ten years.
J.D. Salinger alongside copies of his classic novel The Catcher In The Rye and his volume of short stories Nine Stories
This was The Catcher In The Rye, a tale that captured the essence of teenage angst before anyone knew it existed, and it had instant and lasting success.
So far, it has sold more than 120 million copies worldwide and still regularly tops polls of the most popular novel of all time. When Mark Chapman shot John Lennon, he was carrying a copy.
Told in the voice of its tall, grey-haired hero, Holden Caulfield, who runs away from boarding school to New York, where he finds everyone 'phoney' except his adored little sister Phoebe, it spawned a new genre of fiction that remains stupendously popular: the first-person narrative of someone young, neurotic, misunderstood, insecure and vulnerable. It was an undoubted masterpiece.
But two years after this literary and financial success gave him untold freedom and independence, Salinger headed off to the remote rural town of Cornish, New Hampshire - and the isolation that characterised the rest of his life.
The house he chose stood behind high walls and a screen of trees and was located on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River valley. It was reached by a rough road that winds for several miles up a hill.
There was no name on the mailbox at the end of the steep drive leading to the house, and No Trespassing signs hung on several of the trees.
Assassin: John Lennon signs an autograph for crazed fan Mark Chapman
At first, he made occasional forays to New York. At a party, he met a young student, Claire Douglas, the 18-year-old half-sister of a British aristocrat.
Soon she moved in, and in 1955, when Claire was 20 and Salinger 36, they married. But as Salinger's desire for solitude increased, he made her burn all her papers and cut off all contact with her friends and family.
He also built himself a separate cabin a quarter of a mile away in the woods, painted it dark green as camouflage against possible intruders, and spent most of the time there working.
Claire, who had tried desperately to please him, found herself plunged into an isolation she had never sought.
But when she became pregnant, Salinger cut off all contact with the outside world and from the fourth month of her pregnancy, she saw no one whatsoever.
Jailed: Chapman said the motive for his murder of Lennon could be found in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
Thirteen months after the birth of their daughter, Margaret, Claire had spiralled into depression and ran away with the baby. But she returned four months later to the husband she still loved, and in 1960 their son Matthew was born.
Salinger shifted the entire focus of his life to the cabin in the woods, staying there for up to two weeks at a time, burning wood in his stove to heat up the cans of food or meals brought to him by Claire or their children.
Sometimes he would sit outside between the reflectors he had installed to help him tan.
Margaret's 2000 biography of her father, Dream Catcher, paints a vivid, and disturbing, picture of her parents' life in Connecticut.
Works: The Catcher In The Rye has sold more than 60million copies. Right, J.D. Salinger with his daughter Margaret on the cover of her memoir about her father
Salinger became increasingly eccentric, drinking his own urine and sitting in a special device known as an orgone box, which was supposed to promote health.
He hated sickness, which he tried to cure in his children with homeopathy and acupuncture practised with wooden dowels instead of needles; when they cried with pain or his methods failed, he would fly into a rage.
He worked sitting in an old car seat, typing on an ancient typewriter at a desk made from a plain slab of wood. He hated being disturbed, even by Margaret.
One remark he made at this time to his ten-year-old daughter expresses much of his attitude to women. After a quarrel he told her: 'We'd better find a way to make up because when I'm through with a person - I'm through with them'.
It was perfectly true; but in his first marriage, it was his wife who cracked first. By 1966, the strain of Claire's life of isolation had begun to have a physical effect on her.
She suffered from sleeplessness, loss of weight and sexual problems. In 1966, she filed for divorce, which was granted the following year.
Then, in spring 1972, Salinger saw a picture of a young writer, Joyce Maynard, on the cover of the New York Times Magazine with the headline An 18-Year- Old Looks Back On Life. Soon, Joyce was receiving fan letters from him.
Intrigued, she wrote back - and soon gave up her degree course at Yale University to live with him in New Hampshire.
She was 19; he was 53, with a lifestyle based on macrobiotics and Zen Buddhism - at various times he was also to become involved with Scientology and Christian Science.
Their sexual problems began at once. Salinger did not want more children and their relationship, according to Joyce, was based on oral sex - she had a condition that made full sex painful.
The nine-month affair ended while on holiday in Florida with his children, whose custody he had kept. Salinger told her to leave at once, go home and clear her things out of his house before he returned. (In 1999, she put the story of their affair in a memoir, At Home In The World, and sold 14 letters from Salinger at Sotheby's, where they fetched almost £100,000.)
Salinger went back to his life of seclusion in the hidden cabin, around which he now owned 450 acres. Dressed in a blue boiler suit, he wrote every day, although not for publication - a possible treasure trove of up to ten novels are believed to lie in his locked safe.
In 1981, he began a relationship with the 36-year-old actress Elaine Joyce, again initiated by letter. This lasted for several years, until he met Colleen O'Neill, the director of the annual town fair, who was 40 years his junior. They married in the late Eighties.
Salinger's privacy was momentarily breached in October 1992 when a fire broke out in his house and Colleen had to drive her blue pickup truck to a telephone box to call the fire brigade.
One of the reporters who were drawn by the news spotted him looking at the damage, but as soon as he approached, the white-haired writer darted away.
Give or take the reprinting of an early story, Hapworth 16, 1924, it is almost 50 years since the publication of his last book, Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters, in 1963, a silence he explained himself with words that could be his epitaph: 'I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.'
By Anne De Courcy
www.dailymail.co.uk
Last updated at 7:57 AM on 29th January 2010
The writer J. D. Salinger, who died yesterday aged 91, was as famous for his five decades of stringent reclusiveness as for his best-known novel, The Catcher In The Rye, which was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1951.
It also marked the beginning of an obsessive withdrawal from the world. This hermit, who guarded his privacy with a shotgun and guard dogs behind high walls, was equally fierce in protecting his anonymity with squads of lawyers who attempted to block anything intimate being written about him.
He was the ultimate anti-celebrity, refusing interviews and insisting his photograph was removed from the dust-jackets of his books.
The only recent photograph of him (taken many years ago) is of him wearing a furious face as he fends off an intruding cameraman.
Along with this quest for total seclusion went a predilection for teenage girls - not so much a Lolita syndrome as an urge to discover innocence and then mould it to the shape he wished.
Born in New York on January 1, 1919, J.D. (Jerome David) Salinger's early life gave little hint of what he would become, although there were several factors that affected him deeply.
One was the shock of believing he was Jewish and then discovering that he was only half-Jewish - his mother was, in fact, a Catholic.
Another was his doomed first love affair, in 1941, with the 16-year-old Oona O'Neill, whom he had wished to marry - she later wed Charlie Chaplin.
Their romance ended when he was called up by the Army in 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbour.
More scarring still, however, were his experiences in World War II, in which he saw numerous comrades killed around him.
He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day and fought all the way to Paris. There, he met Ernest Hemingway who encouraged his writing.
Still in Europe when the war ended, he was sent to Germany to interrogate Nazis.
There, he fell in love with a girl called Sylvie - later believed to be a former Nazi official - whom he married and, after eight months, divorced.
He later described her as 'an evil woman who bewitched me'.
He returned to the U.S. and began his writing career with short stories. Then, in 1951, he published the novel on which he had been working for ten years.
This was The Catcher In The Rye, a tale that captured the essence of teenage angst before anyone knew it existed, and it had instant and lasting success.
So far, it has sold more than 120 million copies worldwide and still regularly tops polls of the most popular novel of all time. When Mark Chapman shot John Lennon, he was carrying a copy.
Told in the voice of its tall, grey-haired hero, Holden Caulfield, who runs away from boarding school to New York, where he finds everyone 'phoney' except his adored little sister Phoebe, it spawned a new genre of fiction that remains stupendously popular: the first-person narrative of someone young, neurotic, misunderstood, insecure and vulnerable. It was an undoubted masterpiece.
But two years after this literary and financial success gave him untold freedom and independence, Salinger headed off to the remote rural town of Cornish, New Hampshire - and the isolation that characterised the rest of his life.
The house he chose stood behind high walls and a screen of trees and was located on a bluff overlooking the Connecticut River valley. It was reached by a rough road that winds for several miles up a hill.
There was no name on the mailbox at the end of the steep drive leading to the house, and No Trespassing signs hung on several of the trees.
At first, he made occasional forays to New York. At a party, he met a young student, Claire Douglas, the 18-year-old half-sister of a British aristocrat.
Soon she moved in, and in 1955, when Claire was 20 and Salinger 36, they married. But as Salinger's desire for solitude increased, he made her burn all her papers and cut off all contact with her friends and family.
He also built himself a separate cabin a quarter of a mile away in the woods, painted it dark green as camouflage against possible intruders, and spent most of the time there working.
Claire, who had tried desperately to please him, found herself plunged into an isolation she had never sought.
But when she became pregnant, Salinger cut off all contact with the outside world and from the fourth month of her pregnancy, she saw no one whatsoever.
Thirteen months after the birth of their daughter, Margaret, Claire had spiralled into depression and ran away with the baby. But she returned four months later to the husband she still loved, and in 1960 their son Matthew was born.
Salinger shifted the entire focus of his life to the cabin in the woods, staying there for up to two weeks at a time, burning wood in his stove to heat up the cans of food or meals brought to him by Claire or their children.
Sometimes he would sit outside between the reflectors he had installed to help him tan.
Margaret's 2000 biography of her father, Dream Catcher, paints a vivid, and disturbing, picture of her parents' life in Connecticut.
Salinger became increasingly eccentric, drinking his own urine and sitting in a special device known as an orgone box, which was supposed to promote health.
He hated sickness, which he tried to cure in his children with homeopathy and acupuncture practised with wooden dowels instead of needles; when they cried with pain or his methods failed, he would fly into a rage.
He worked sitting in an old car seat, typing on an ancient typewriter at a desk made from a plain slab of wood. He hated being disturbed, even by Margaret.
One remark he made at this time to his ten-year-old daughter expresses much of his attitude to women. After a quarrel he told her: 'We'd better find a way to make up because when I'm through with a person - I'm through with them'.
It was perfectly true; but in his first marriage, it was his wife who cracked first. By 1966, the strain of Claire's life of isolation had begun to have a physical effect on her.
She suffered from sleeplessness, loss of weight and sexual problems. In 1966, she filed for divorce, which was granted the following year.
Then, in spring 1972, Salinger saw a picture of a young writer, Joyce Maynard, on the cover of the New York Times Magazine with the headline An 18-Year- Old Looks Back On Life. Soon, Joyce was receiving fan letters from him.
Intrigued, she wrote back - and soon gave up her degree course at Yale University to live with him in New Hampshire.
She was 19; he was 53, with a lifestyle based on macrobiotics and Zen Buddhism - at various times he was also to become involved with Scientology and Christian Science.
Their sexual problems began at once. Salinger did not want more children and their relationship, according to Joyce, was based on oral sex - she had a condition that made full sex painful.
The nine-month affair ended while on holiday in Florida with his children, whose custody he had kept. Salinger told her to leave at once, go home and clear her things out of his house before he returned. (In 1999, she put the story of their affair in a memoir, At Home In The World, and sold 14 letters from Salinger at Sotheby's, where they fetched almost £100,000.)
Salinger went back to his life of seclusion in the hidden cabin, around which he now owned 450 acres. Dressed in a blue boiler suit, he wrote every day, although not for publication - a possible treasure trove of up to ten novels are believed to lie in his locked safe.
In 1981, he began a relationship with the 36-year-old actress Elaine Joyce, again initiated by letter. This lasted for several years, until he met Colleen O'Neill, the director of the annual town fair, who was 40 years his junior. They married in the late Eighties.
Salinger's privacy was momentarily breached in October 1992 when a fire broke out in his house and Colleen had to drive her blue pickup truck to a telephone box to call the fire brigade.
One of the reporters who were drawn by the news spotted him looking at the damage, but as soon as he approached, the white-haired writer darted away.
Give or take the reprinting of an early story, Hapworth 16, 1924, it is almost 50 years since the publication of his last book, Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters, in 1963, a silence he explained himself with words that could be his epitaph: 'I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.'
Monday, July 4, 2011
Historian Iris Chang won many battles / The war she lost raged within
Historian Iris Chang won many battles / The war she lost raged within
By Heidi Benson
SFGate.com, Collections
April 17, 2005
On a cloudy Monday morning in early November, author Iris Chang, 36, drove her white 1999 Oldsmobile Alero down Alum Rock Avenue toward the green foothills of East San Jose.
She passed the iron gates of Calvary Catholic Cemetery, where marble statues of winged angels, their heads bowed in prayer, mark the graves of early settlers. She passed the football field and the blocky, concrete auditorium of James Lick High School. Turning right, she pulled into the strip mall across the street from the school. She parked in front of Reed's Sport Shop, a redwood-shingled emporium that sells fishing, cycling and hunting gear.
Tall and slender, with glossy black hair falling well past her shoulders, Iris emerged from her car wearing blue jeans and sneakers. She walked through the whooshing automatic doors and turned right. On the far wall, a gallery of mounted deer heads marked her destination: the hunting department. This was not her first visit. She knew where to find the glass case of Civil War era pistol replicas, classified as "relics." She knew that in California, she could purchase a relic immediately and avoid the 10-day waiting period necessary with other guns.
At 11:56 a.m., Iris presented her driver's license and counted out $517 in cash -- she was carrying nearly $4,000 -- and left the store with an ivory-handled Ruger "Old Army" .45 replica revolver. Back in her car, she slipped the gun and owner's manual into a cardboard box labeled "Real Estate Documents" that lay on the passenger seat. That night, she had dinner with her husband of 13 years, Brett Douglas. They went to bed at midnight.
Before dawn, Iris awoke and got into her car. Driving west toward Santa Cruz on Highway 17, she took a turnoff 25 miles from her home and parked on a steep gravel utility road within sight of the highway. Nearby, Bear Creek Road curled up the lonesome hills, thick with black oak.
At 9:15 a.m. Tuesday, a county water district employee drove past the Oldsmobile. He stopped and honked but there was no response. Thinking the driver must be asleep, he got out of his car and banged on the hood. He noticed condensation on the windows, peered inside and saw Iris in the driver's seat with her hands crossed in her lap. The revolver lay on her left leg. Her head rested against the window. Blood covered her clothes. In the backseat, a teddy bear was tucked into the car seat of her 2-year-old son, Christopher. The water district employee called his supervisor, who called 911.
Homicide detectives would eventually determine that Iris had loaded all six chambers of the gun, placed the barrel between her lips, and fired. The half-inch lead ball perforated her hard palate, passed through her left dural sinus, her left cerebral and occipital lobes, broke partially through her skull and came to rest without exiting her scalp.
When her body was discovered, Iris Chang had been dead for two hours.
At Reed's Sport Shop one month after her death, the spot on the top shelf of the glass-topped case where Iris' gun had lain was still vacant. "She was in on more than one occasion," said Reed's manager, Pat Kalcic, a tall outdoorsman. "She appeared to have done research." The clerk who sold her the gun told investigators Iris had said she collected antique firearms. "She got what she wanted and got out," he said.
That such a beautiful woman would be remembered is not unusual. But Kalcic and his employees did not know how unusual Iris Chang was: a world- renowned author whose work had stirred international controversy. Neither did they know she had been bent on suicide.
On the day of Iris Chang's death, word spread quickly over news wires and the Internet. Her obituary was published in newspapers worldwide. She had gained an international reputation in 1997 when she was only 29 for writing "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II." It was the first history of Japan's brutal 1937 occupation of China's capital city and documented the weekslong rampage.
"Rape of Nanking" became an immediate best-seller and established her as an outspoken advocate for victims of Japanese war crimes. The debate it provoked -- between those Japanese who deny the atrocities and the Chinese who seek an official apology and reparations -- continues.
"Iris scraped away the scar tissue of something that had been half forgotten and half healed over, and to this date, it's still a very raw wound, " said Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Schell reviewed her book favorably in the New York Times. "She ventured into a minefield of unexploded ordnance."
News of her suicide brought forth a chorus of disbelief. Questions hung in the air:
-- How could someone with such success, surrounded by loving family and friends, take her own life?
-- Was she "the last victim of the Rape of Nanking," plagued and destroyed by the dark histories she illuminated?
-- Did her single-minded determination, her habit of working beyond exhaustion, contribute to her death?
-- Did she suffer a fatal reaction to powerful drugs that she refused to take as prescribed?
Speculation that she may have been killed by Japanese ultranationalists continued to turn up on Web logs and Internet chat rooms. At the same time, her foes said her suicide proved that "Rape of Nanking" was nothing but lies.
Irrefutably, Iris Chang won many battles in her fight for justice. But as she began to manifest symptoms of bipolar illness, she perceived them as a failure of will. Such harsh logic, symptomatic of the disease, rendered her unable to extend her own magnificent compassion to herself.
In the end, the war she could not win raged internally.
Together, Mr. and Mrs. Chang answered the door of their quiet, two-story townhouse in San Jose. It had been one week since their daughter's death. The foyer was filled with enormous bouquets sent by well-wishers. From the terrace, the view was peaceful -- broad green fields and golden poplars.
Married 41 years, the Changs are a handsome, gracious couple. Both were born in mainland China. Their families fled the 1949 Communist revolution and settled in Taiwan, where the two met in high school. They met again at Taiwan University -- and yet again when each won a science scholarship to Harvard in 1962. Ying-Ying is a biochemist. Her husband, Shau-Jin, is a theoretical physicist. They married in 1964, and each earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1967.
As that November afternoon darkened into evening, the Changs sat at their Danish-modern dining room table and told stories about Iris, speaking sometimes in past tense and sometimes in present tense.
They told of the time in grade school when Iris decided "if Dear Abby can do it -- I can do it," and she started her own advice column, writing questions and answers. Then, in high school, Iris became determined to revive the school's literary magazine, and quickly enlisted a staff and a sponsor. Her mother said, "She was always publishing something."
Rising from his chair, her father pulled a small red leather volume from the bookshelf. "Poetry by Iris Chang" was written in neat cursive on the title page. "She's very systematic -- you see, every poem has a date on it. She just knows how to do things," he said, tenderly smoothing out a page. "This was lying in our basement. Now, it becomes our treasure."
Iris was a serious child, her mother recalled. "Every day she seemed to have something new. She liked to talk, so it's very fun to watch her talking," she said. "She also liked to beat the system."
Her father patted the tabletop. "Yes!" he said, grinning. "Every time we set a rule, she always tried to find some way to get around it. We always had to argue all the exceptions she could think of. It's never boring with her -- it's interesting." Slowing down, he repeated, "It's interesting."
His voice slipped to a whisper. "It's been too short."
Iris Shun-Ru Chang was born March 28, 1968, in Princeton Hospital, on the university campus in New Jersey where her parents were doing postdoctoral work. They lived on a leafy country road named Einstein Drive. After two years at Princeton, the family moved to a Midwestern college town, Champaign-Urbana, in Illinois. "He got the job, we went," Mrs. Chang explained. Soon they were both teaching and conducting research at the University of Illinois. Their second child, Michael, was born in 1970.
"Michael is very outgoing, very extroverted -- Iris is different," said Mrs. Chang. "Iris can be a loner; it doesn't bother her." She touched her fingertips to her forehead, then waved her hand to the heavens: "It's because Iris is a dreamer." Iris learned to read at age 4. At 10, she entered a young- author competition and won first place. Winning that prize led to dreams of becoming a writer, her father said.
"Iris always came to us to discuss her problems," her mother said. "We are a very close family. We are lucky -- she could tell me everything she felt. She was easily hurt, though sometimes she didn't show it. I would tell her, 'You can care too much about what people say about you.' " Iris was sometimes teased for her earnestness. She wanted to be independent, to think for herself.
Iris and her brother went to University High -- known as Uni High -- on the campus where their parents taught. The small, academically elite school has produced many Nobel laureates.
At 14, Iris was studying advanced math and decided to join an all-boys computer club called Submit. She easily passed the 20 exams necessary to qualify, only to be told that she must take five more.
"The boys came together to say, 'Crisis! There's a girl who wants to get into Submit,' " Mr. Chang recalled. "So they tried to make it harder and harder." Iris insisted she had already passed.
"They had a big fight," he said. "Iris thought it was an injustice. She was mad. So you see, she was really a fighter. If they had let her get into Submit, she may not have become a journalist," he added.
"We should be grateful."
Iris met the man she would marry in 1989, when she was a sophomore in journalism at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Brett Douglas was a tall, low-key redhead, nearly two years her senior and an engineering graduate student when they were introduced at a Sigma Phi Delta fraternity party on campus.
Sixteen years later, and five days after her death, Brett sat in the living room of the San Jose town home they shared, surrounded by family photos. The air was still, heavy with grief. A red tricycle and a jogging stroller flanked the front door. The sound of children singing wafted in from the swimming pool nearby. The pool, a turquoise rectangle surrounded by pines, sat at the center of the village-like complex.
Brett's father, Ken Douglas, had flown out to keep his son company. A reassuring presence, he stood at the kitchen counter, fixing a sandwich for lunch. He had only recently retired from the family farm in central Illinois that had been in the family for five generations.
Speaking of the night they met, Brett said, "Iris was beautiful, vivacious -- and sober. She just seemed to be more driven and to have more zest for life than anyone I'd ever met. I knew immediately I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her."
It didn't take him long to propose, but their 1989 engagement stretched out while Brett finished grad school in Urbana. Meanwhile, Iris was one of a dozen journalism undergraduates chosen for an accelerated Associated Press training program. She was assigned to the AP office in Chicago.
Brett soon grew concerned that Iris was overextended. "Iris could write two or three stories a day, and they loved her because she wrote so fast," he said. "But she worked herself way too hard when she was there. She wore herself out." Her mother concurred: "At AP, she worked so hard she couldn't sleep. I was worried. She never did sleep very well or eat very well."
When her internship was up, Iris was offered a permanent job at AP. She went to the Chicago Tribune instead, but didn't enjoy "politicking for assignments," Brett said. Opting for a master's degree, she was accepted by the Graduate Writing Seminar at Johns Hopkins University and moved to Baltimore in 1990. Her long-distance engagement to Brett entered its second year. By now, Brett was living in Santa Barbara, working toward a doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of California. They kept in touch every day by e-mail.
At Johns Hopkins, Iris studied playwriting, fiction, poetry and science writing. As a teacher's assistant, she taught a class in creative writing. She wrote her thesis on "The Poetry of Science." Soon she exceeded the dreams of every student in the program by getting a book contract from a major publisher while still in school. She was 22.
"Iris was a phenomenon," said one of her former teachers at Johns Hopkins, Ann Finkbeiner. In the fall of 1990, Iris took Finkbeiner's "Science Stories" course. "She talked almost obsessively. She got very, very wound up in things," Finkbeiner said. "You didn't always feel she was talking to you --
it was as if she had to talk. To me, it was part of that whole intensity that made Iris able to do what she went on to do."
Barbara Culliton, now editor in chief of Genome News Network, was then director of the Johns Hopkins science writing program. Her friendship with Iris, Culliton said, "lasted from the day she walked in as a student -- in effect, to the day she died."
Culliton was sufficiently impressed by Iris' talent to recommend her to Susan Rabiner, editorial director of Basic Books, the "serious nonfiction" division of HarperCollins Publishers. It was unusual for Basic Books to consider such an untested writer. But Rabiner had been looking for someone conversant in the sciences and in Mandarin to write a biography of Hsue-Shen Tsien. Tsien was a top physicist at Cal-Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was deported during the Red scare of the 1950s. He returned to China and went on to develop its missile system.
Rabiner recalled telling Iris, " 'You're young, but take a flyer.' I didn't know if I'd hear from her again." Less than two months later, she did. Iris called to say she had found Tsien's son and had interviewed him in Mandarin. "Clearly, Iris was a strong, smart and directed young woman," Rabiner said. She helped Iris write a proposal and the project was quickly put under contract.
"Iris was so excited when she got the contract for the book," Brett said, recalling how obsessively she ferreted out material. "She contacted people who'd been lost for years, dug up records that nobody ever knew existed. She wrote her 100-page book proposal in a couple of weeks."
By now, Brett had taken a job with a Santa Barbara engineering firm. He and Iris were married in August 1991 in Champaign-Urbana. Their mothers helped to plan the wedding. The newlyweds settled in Santa Barbara, and Iris began writing the book about Tsien. In 1992, at 24, she received a $15,000 award from the MacArthur Foundation, which helped fund the project.
The book, "Thread of the Silkworm," was published in 1995. It was well- reviewed, though it never sold in great numbers. But soon Iris would write one of the most controversial books of the decade. That book would sell half a million copies.
Iris Chang found the inspiration for her new book in 1994 when she came face-to-face with poster-size photographs of Nanking war crimes at a conference in Cupertino. She was 26.
"I walked around in shock," she later wrote. "Though I had heard so much about the Nanking massacre as a child, nothing prepared me for these pictures -- stark black-and-white images of decapitated heads, bellies ripped open and nude women forced by their rapists into various pornographic poses, their faces contorted into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame. In a single blinding moment I recognized the fragility of not just life but the human experience itself."
The conference had been sponsored by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia. Iris discovered this group of Chinese American activists after she and Brett moved to Northern California when he got a job with Cisco Systems.
After seeing the Nanking pictures, Iris wrote: "I was suddenly in a panic that this ... reversion in human social evolution would be reduced to a footnote of history ... unless someone forced the world to remember it."
Iris called Rabiner. "There's a book I must do," she said. She offered to pay Basic Books to publish it. "No, no! We don't work that way," Rabiner insisted. "Tell me why you want to tell the story."
Iris had been haunted since childhood by the graphic stories she was told about Nanking. Her maternal grandparents had escaped just weeks before the Japanese arrived. As a youngster, Iris had sought books on the subject in her school library. But there was none. As she later told an interviewer, "I wrote 'Rape of Nanking' out of a sense of rage. I didn't really care if I made a cent from it. It was important to me that the world knew what happened in Nanking back in 1937." Rabiner sensed the book would be important and signed Iris to write it.
Later, Iris told interviewers that, as a child, "it was hard for me to even visualize how bad it was, because the stories seemed almost mythical -- people being chopped into pieces, the Yangtze River running red with blood. It was very painful for me to think about, even then."
While writing the book, Iris found it "almost impossible to separate myself from the tragedy," she said. "The stress of writing this book and living with this horror on a daily basis caused my weight to plummet," she said. "I had to write it, if it was the last thing I ever did in my life."
On her trip to China, she met with survivors from Nanking. "Every single survivor I met was desperately anxious to tell his or her story," she later said. "I spent several hours with each one, getting the details of their experiences on videotape. Some became overwrought with emotion during the interviews and broke down into tears. But all of them wanted the opportunity to talk about the massacre before their deaths."
Seeing how the survivors lived was as harrowing as hearing their stories. Iris was "shocked and depressed" to see their living conditions in Nanking. "Most lived in dark, squalid apartments cluttered with the debris of poverty and heavy with mildew and humidity," she wrote. "During the massacre some had received physical injuries so severe they had been prevented from making a decent living for decades. Most lived in poverty so crushing that even a minimal amount of financial compensation from Japan could have greatly improved the conditions of their lives."
During two years of research, Iris made significant historical discoveries. She found the diaries of a pair of Westerners who were among the heroes of Nanking. The first was John Rabe, a German member of the Nazi party who was living in the Chinese capital in 1937. He established an International Safety Zone in Nanking before the Japanese soldiers arrived from Shanghai. Iris dubbed him the "Oskar Schindler of Nanking."
The other diarist -- the "Anne Frank of Nanking" -- was an Illinois woman named Minnie Vautrin. (In the book, Iris noted that Vautrin had graduated with honors from her own alma mater, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.) In 1937, Vautrin was a missionary and teacher at the Nanking Women's College when its campus became part of the Safety Zone. She harbored hundreds of Chinese women and children there during the occupation. But there were untold numbers of women she could not save from capture, torture or death at the hands of Japanese soldiers. Haunted by the belief that she had failed, Vautrin suffered a breakdown in 1940. While on the ship home, she tried repeatedly to leap overboard. Back in Illinois one year later, she committed suicide.
"Civilization is tissue thin," Iris wrote. She called this the most important lesson to be learned from the tragedy of Nanking. And she believed her research produced irrevocable proof of Japanese atrocities. She wrote:
"After reading several file cabinets' worth of documents on Japanese war crimes as well as accounts of ancient atrocities from the pantheon of world history, I would have to conclude that Japan's behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise."
The book hit the stores at Christmas, a tough selling season for serious nonfiction. It became a surprise best-seller. A groundswell of interest in the Chinese American community had quickly spread to booksellers and the broader reading public. Newsweek ran an excerpt, and soon Iris was a familiar face on TV news shows. Reader's Digest devoted a cover story to her.
"We weren't really prepared for the success of the book," Brett said. "Iris wasn't prepared and her publisher wasn't prepared. I don't know how many printings it went through. They just kept saying, 'We'll print another 10,000, we'll print another 10,000.' "
Rabiner said Iris "found her voice" in promoting "Rape of Nanking." "She had so many bookings, she could easily be on the road for 2 1/2 weeks before coming back home. She came alive before crowds -- she loved to share, and she was interested in other people's lives. That's why she was such a powerful role model for so many Chinese Americans. She was committed to her cause, and she radiated life."
At the same time, torrents of hate mail came in, Brett said. "Iris is sensitive, but she got charged up," he recalled. "When anybody questioned the validity of what she wrote, she would respond with overwhelming evidence to back it up. She's very much a perfectionist. It was hard for her not to react every single time."
Most of the attacks came from Japanese ultranationalists. "We saw cartoons where she was portrayed as this woman with a great big mouth," Brett said. "She got used to the fact that there is a Web site called 'Iris Chang and Her Lies.' She would just laugh."
But friends say Iris began to voice concerns for her safety. She believed her phone was tapped. She described finding threatening notes on her car. She said she was confronted by a man who said, "You will NOT continue writing this. " She used a post office box, never her home address, for mail.
"There are a fair number of people who don't take kindly to what she wrote in 'The Rape of Nanking,' " Brett said, "so she's always been very, very private about our family life."
The book's popularity meant a lengthy book tour. "Over a year and a half, she visited 65 cities," Brett said. "Most authors are worn out after five or six cities." He could see the travel was taking a toll on her. In 1998, Brett recalled, "for her 30th birthday, we went out to a little resort near Santa Cruz and she literally didn't want to leave the room."
Somehow, she always bounced back, energized by her role as spokesperson for a movement. Among her many television appearances was a memorable evening on "Nightline," where she was the only Asian and the only woman among a panel of China experts.
"To see her on TV, defending 'Rape of Nanking' so fiercely and so fearlessly -- I just sat down, stopped, in awe," said Helen Zia, author of "Asian-American Dreams: Emergence of an American People" and co-author, with Wen-Ho Lee, of "My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused."
"Iris truly had no fear. You could see it in the steadiness of her voice and in her persistence," Zia recalled. "She would just say, matter-of-factly, 'Japan is lying and here's why.' "
Later, Iris challenged the Japanese ambassador to a debate on the "MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" on PBS. After the ambassador spoke of events in Nanking, Iris turned to the moderator and said: "I didn't hear an apology."
"Chinese Americans grew up hearing about this forgotten holocaust," said Zia, whose grandmother was killed in Nanking. "It was family lore."
When Zia and Iris met for the first time, they planned a quick lunch. But lunch lasted through dinner. "We sat down and started talking, and we had a lot to say. For Asian Americans to write nonfiction about Asia or Asian America was relatively new. Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan really blew the doors open for fiction writers. But for us to be able to write nonfiction, the stories of our lives -- on a lot of levels, it was revolutionary."
Despite support from esteemed historians and journalists, including Stephen Ambrose and George Will, some judged Iris' version of history too subjective. "This was something of a roots venture for her -- to reconnect with the country that her family had drifted off from," said UC Berkeley's Schell. "And she brought an incredible reserve of emotion to it. Iris was first and foremost an advocate. She was an able journalist, but she allowed herself to become deeply involved emotionally in her subjects, which gave her accessibility. But some scholars felt that she was a little too involved with her subject matter."
Rabiner, who later became an agent and represented Iris, said, "The book was beyond well reviewed -- it was a mega-best-seller that continues to sell. It showed that at times history has to be written by a member of the community, out of a passion the author shares with the community. It caused an international scandal because the Japanese to this day have not conceded the extent of the wartime atrocities perpetrated against the Chinese and others. It also showed publishing houses that there is a market for books about the Chinese experience."
The book rocketed Iris into the pantheon of American intellectuals. In 1998, she and Brett were invited to attend Renaissance Weekend -- the meeting-of-the-minds seminar held each New Year's weekend in South Carolina. "Iris was much in demand and gave many talks," Brett recalled, adding with a laugh, "she was schmoozing the whole time." There, Iris had lengthy conversations with then-President Bill Clinton and gave him a signed copy of "The Rape of Nanking."
But when Brett and Iris were invited back the next year, the young couple took a different tack. They attended lectures but Iris gave fewer talks; she was still recovering from the book tour. Meanwhile, they decided they had put their plans for a family on hold long enough.
"When we first got married, we said we were going to start trying to have a child after four years," Brett said. "And then we stretched it to six, and then 'The Rape of Nanking' hit the best-seller list and she was out promoting it for almost two years. By the time that was done, it was already eight years. So we finally started trying, and then we had our son in 2002."
Christopher was born Aug. 31 that year. He was a happy baby, with his mother's jet-black hair. "We wondered what we did with all of our time before we had a son," Brett said, "because of the amount of time that a little one involves. What made it much easier is that we did have a wonderful nanny to help."
They had moved from a small apartment in Sunnyvale to the San Jose townhome. "We bought this house when we knew he was on the way. There are so many kids his age here."
Iris' parents retired in early 2001, and after Christopher was born, they moved from Illinois and into a home in the same complex. Her mother hoped Iris would take on a lighter topic for her next book, especially with a baby in the house. The Nanking book had "made Iris sad."
Iris took her advice, though the book she began was enormously ambitious. "The Chinese in America: A Narrative History" was published by Viking in 2003. Iris told her mother that working on it was a vacation after "Rape of Nanking. "
But soon she found herself drawn to a subject just as dark.
Iris Chang rang the doorbell on Ed Martel's front porch in Kenosha, Wis., on Dec. 4, 2003. It's a date he won't forget.
"She sat down and cross-examined me like a district attorney for five solid hours," said Martel, 86, one of the last remaining survivors of the Bataan Death March of World War II. His daughter, Maddy, remembered the day well, too. "We set out a very big lunch -- meat trays and sandwiches and desserts," she said. "My dad was so excited that she was doing this, and so honored."
Months earlier, Iris had seized on a letter in her "book ideas" file about a Midwestern pocket of Bataan survivors, all members of two tank battalions. "They drop so fast," the letter had read. The correspondent was Sgt. Anthony Meldahl, a supply sergeant with the Ohio National Guard who had admired Iris' work. Meldahl was now urging Iris to join his oral-history project. She did, and, starting in November 2003, would make four trips to meet with Bataan vets -- in Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky. Each time, Iris swept into town and conducted four or five intensive interviews in as many days. "She was like a battalion commander," Meldahl said.
"It's amazing when you watch Iris do research," Brett said. "She would go into a town -- and with Tony Meldahl's help, it was even better. She would have a team of three vets and their children and their wives. Iris would be interviewing them, somebody else would be filming them, somebody else would be photocopying records, and somebody would be sending documents down to UPS. And Iris would buy lunch and dinner for everybody, and they all thought it was great.
"These people wanted their story told for a long, long time, and they knew that because Iris had success as an author, she'd be able to do a very good job," Brett said.
Ed Martel's story began on Dec. 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor was still smoldering when Japanese planes bombed the Philippines' Bataan Peninsula, where Martel was stationed with a National Guard tank battalion. With few rations, little ammunition and no reinforcements, 70,000 American and Filipino troops held off the Japanese for months.
When the American general surrendered on April 9, the Japanese forced the troops to walk 65 miles through sweltering jungle. Some 8,000 died on the notorious "death march." Those who survived spent the rest of the war in a bleak prison camp; some were shipped to Japan as slave laborers. Once the Allies won the war, the story was forgotten. It had been the largest U.S. Army surrender in history.
"It's baffling to me that the U.S. today has so little knowledge of the four months we held out," Martel told The Chronicle by telephone from his home in Wisconsin. "We marvel at how America turned their backs on us."
Martel was slightly hard of hearing, but his memory was crisp. He recalled telling Iris about the worst of his Bataan experiences. "Iris asked me to tell about atrocities," he said. "Twice I broke down and had to leave the room."
After he and his fellow soldiers had been starved and beaten for months, a Japanese guard knocked him to the ground, piercing his chest with his bayonet. Martel cried, "You son of a bitch! Just do it!" His daughter recalled that in telling Iris this story, he got terribly worked up. "Why did he have to toy with me like that?" he cried. It was as if he were back in Bataan. But just in time, Iris changed the subject, prompting him to tell a lighter story.
"Did you really look like Charlie Chaplin?" asked Iris, knowing Martel had been saved from near starvation by the brushy mustache he wore. The mustache reminded his Japanese captors of "The Little Tramp." So, in return for performing a short, Chaplinesque shuffle, he would be rewarded with a handful of scallions.
"Iris was very loving," Martel's daughter said. "Talking to her, you felt like she was one of the family." After the interview, they kept up an active correspondence. Iris sent the Martels photographs from her trip, cards for Chinese New Year and updates on her Bataan project. One picture she sent showed Iris hugging Martel and his wife. He framed it and hung it on a wall in his home. Next to it, now, is a copy of Iris' obituary. When Martel read in a newspaper about her death, he asked his daughter, "Is that our Iris?"
Iris connected so well with these veterans because each of their stories mattered to her. She didn't just ask what had happened, she asked what they had felt. Theirs was not just a story of war, but of boys becoming men, she said in a transcription of one of her many taped interviews. "It boggles the imagination, what you went through," she said. "You'll have to forgive me, but I find myself often deeply affected by these stories."
Between trips to the Midwest, Iris conducted yet another book tour. In early 2004, she traveled to promote the paperback version of "The Chinese in America." Brett said, "It was, I think, 21 cities in 28 days. And that really took its toll on her, too."
Her last Bataan trip was scheduled for July 2004. She planned to visit Harrodsburg, Ky., where several survivors lived and where an old Bataan-era tank stood sentry in the town square. She hoped to gain access to a time capsule of audiotapes that was sealed within that tank after the war.
Getting ready for the trip, Iris went into overdrive. "In the past, when Iris was working on something, she might work for 48 hours straight and then she would crash for 20 hours, and then she'd be back up, working again," Brett said. "But this time, I had assumed she was sleeping all day after working all night. But it turned out she wasn't sleeping during the day either. She was trying to be a top-notch mother and she was also trying to prepare for her trip."
The nanny was the only person aware that Iris had been up for three days with no sleep. But the nanny spoke only Mandarin. Later, Brett learned that the nanny had urged Iris to cancel the trip.
"Iris was really good at putting her best face forward, even when she was totally exhausted, so I didn't really perceive that there was a real problem," Brett said. "We had our lives so structured. Either she was watching Christopher or I was watching Christopher, or she was working or I was working. We didn't see each other as much as we did in the past."
He added, sadly, "I think if we had, I would have noticed earlier that things were going wrong."
Normally, Iris never did interviews alone. She preferred to meet someone in each town who could introduce her to the veterans and their families. For the Wisconsin trip, she had hooked up with people from the Bataan Commemorative Research Project, a historical archive and Web site created by faculty and students at Proviso East High School in Maywood, Ill.
"World War II hit the town of Maywood really hard," said Ian Smith, chair of the school's history department. "This high school alone lost 200 students -- 28 were with the Bataan company."
Smith had been Iris' liaison in Wisconsin; another Proviso High teacher was to be her guide in Kentucky. But just before Iris left for Kentucky -- the last week of July 2004 -- a family emergency forced the teacher to cancel. Iris would be working solo. Her parents saw her off that morning. "She was very tired," her mother said. "She should not have gone."
By the time her plane landed in Louisville, she was overwhelmed by exhaustion and anxiety. She got from the airport to the hotel, but that was all she could do. Iris collapsed in bed. Soon she managed to call her mother.
"I knew Iris was not right," her mother said. "She couldn't eat or drink. She was very depressed." She asked if Iris had any friends there she could call for help. One of the veterans -- a colonel she had planned to meet in Louisville -- came to the hotel. Smith said the colonel spent only a short time with her. "She was afraid of him when he showed up," Smith said. "But he spoke to her mother on the phone and told Iris, 'Your mom is on the phone, so it's OK.' "
That afternoon, she checked herself in to Norton Psychiatric Hospital in Louisville, with help from the colonel. Through a third party, the colonel declined to be interviewed.
"First they gave her an antipsychotic, to stabilize her," her mother said. "For three days they gave her medication, the first time in her life." (The family would not name specific drugs.)
In three days, her parents came to take her home. Doctors at Norton Hospital had diagnosed "brief reactive psychosis," her father said. This could be a one-time event or it could signal the onset of bipolar disorder, the doctors told them.
Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a mood disorder that affects one in every 70 people. The cycle of mood shifts that distinguish the disease -- from manic highs to depressive lows -- differs with every sufferer. Without treatment, the condition worsens over time.
Though Iris had previously suffered what her parents called "down" periods after bouts of intense exertion, the lows were never as extreme as what befell her in Kentucky. "She had never seen anyone for depression or anything before," her mother said.
They brought her home, and at first Iris responded well to rest and treatment. "But gradually, she became very depressed," said her father, adding that her doctor in California prescribed an additional medication, an antidepressant. "But Iris herself did not believe she was sick." And she was determined not to be hospitalized again.
"She didn't like the idea that she was taking medicine," her father said. "Iris was impatient. First she thought it would be a couple of weeks" before she improved, "but we tried to convince her that it would be several months, because that is what the doctors said."
Her mother added, "She was in therapy all the time, but it didn't help, and she took the medicine on and off. The medicine made her feel sluggish. So she took a little bit and then she stopped -- and it shouldn't be stopped like that."
Iris had convinced her doctor to reduce her dosage. "She's very strong- willed," her mother said. "The doctors wanted her to continue in therapy, so sometimes they would go along with her."
Between August and November, Iris saw two different therapists before finding one who seemed a good fit. But, her father said, "In spite of many sessions, Iris did not tell the therapist her deepest thoughts. He was misled by Iris. He thought Iris was improving."
Brett said Iris was anxious to get back to work. "She was so driven," Brett said, "she just wouldn't take time off." But that meant diving back into her Bataan Death March research.
Those close to Iris had always seen her ups and downs as part of the natural cycle of a brilliant person with intense drive, passionate commitment and a capacity for hard work. These were considered her finest traits. Now, the family rushed to learn everything they could about her illness. Brett devised a "20-Point Plan to Make Iris Well," listing such remedies as going to the beach; calling friends; eating well (on her desk, she kept a book titled "How Food Affects Your Mood" next to her Franklin Planner); and getting exercise. Brett set up a home gym in the basement and coached her through hourlong workouts with hand weights. Still, the depression failed to lift.
She was seeing a therapist two to three times a week, Brett said, but fought against having family members participate. "Iris was a very strong person, even when she was depressed," said Brett. "She didn't like other people taking control, so she resisted" his attending any of her therapy sessions. "There were up and down periods," he said. "There was a time earlier, in September, when we were worried, but she seemed to come out of that."
Their son, who had turned 2 years old in August, became aware of a change. "Christopher sensed that something was going wrong with Iris," Brett said. "He could tell that she was a lot different after she came back from Louisville. It was obvious she wasn't the same person that she was before," he said. "When Iris' condition got really bad, we sent him to stay with my parents in Illinois. We called him every day, sometimes two or three times a day."
Rabiner became worried, too. "Iris told me now was not the time to go on with the Bataan project. I told her, 'Take a break.' You're not on a moving train. You have a young kid. Let go, We all said, 'Take a break.' "
One of Iris' best friends, Barbara Masin, came up from Santa Barbara for a long weekend visit. "I urged her to talk with someone -- either Brett, or me, or someone. She finally agreed that she would talk to me. I was there for three days and we talked. For her, it was a relief," said Masin.
"We went out and did really long hikes, and it seemed to help. At the end of the three days, I was making silly little jokes and she was laughing. We arranged for her to come down and stay with me soon," she said. "But as I was leaving, she got apathetic again."
Three days before Iris' death, Brett dreamed up a special weekend, just for her. On Saturday night they went to dinner at Fresh Choice and out to the movies. "We went to see 'Ray,' " Brett said. "I thought it would be inspirational. And she loved it. She hadn't ever heard much of Ray Charles' music before, and when we got home, she went upstairs and was browsing all kinds of information on Ray Charles on the Internet."
Sunday morning, they drove to Santa Cruz for lunch on the pier, then went to her favorite spa, Chaminade -- a 300-acre mission-style resort, surrounded by redwoods and eucalyptus, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Iris got a massage. "Then we came home, and that was our last weekend together," he said, fighting back tears.
After leaving Reed's Sport Shop at noon on Monday, Nov. 8, Iris tried to load the revolver she had just purchased. But the gun jammed. Such "black powder" firearms, popular with Civil War re-enactors, require skill to load and fire. The lead balls must be individually prepared, packed with gunpowder and topped with a percussive cap.
According to the police report, Iris phoned a local gunsmith, an antique firearms specialist who did business from his home. She told him she had an old revolver that was unsafe to shoot. They made an appointment. At 12:40 p.m., she stopped for lunch at FujiSan Sushi in Milpitas Square. The manager knew her as a customer and an author -- Iris and Brett ate there often. But this time, "she appeared unhappy," the manager told investigators. Iris ate quickly, asked for green tea to go and charged $15.11 to her credit card.
Iris arrived at the gunsmith's at about 2 p.m., carrying a Reed's Sport Shop Bag. The gunsmith told police he had spotted a can of gunpowder in the bag. This kind of "black powder" is unstable and unsafe indoors, so he insisted she first take the can outside. She told him she had not asked for instructions when she bought the gun. He showed her how to load the gun and tried to give her basic safety and handling instructions. Later, he would tell police that she "seemed distracted or aloof."
Hoping to practice shooting, she asked the gunsmith to go with her to a nearby indoor firing range. He explained that the gunpowder she had was unsafe to use indoors. She promised to buy less volatile powder. They made an appointment to meet Wednesday at the firing range. She paid the gunsmith $10. They had spent one hour together.
After dinner Monday night, Iris returned a call to her agent. "We spoke for two hours, from 8:30 to 10:30 p.m.," Rabiner said. "I'd left a message -- I actually had business to talk about. A book packager wanted to publish a children's version of 'The Chinese in America.'
"Much of the conversation was upbeat. Other parts were not. She asked me if I was religious -- I said I wasn't, not at all. In a funny kind of way, she was resolute, she was calm. She had been sad for several months, but she didn't seem in an acute phase. "
Rabiner invited Iris to spend a week or so at her home in Westchester County, N.Y. "I figured we'd take a week off and just relax, walk the woods up here. I thought it would break the spell, break the hold of these emotions. I told her that I wanted her to call me the next night and every night after that until she worked out the details. I got off the phone confused and concerned, but I was too unsophisticated about psychological problems to realize that she was saying goodbye to me."
That night, Iris and Brett followed their routine and went to sleep around midnight. "But I woke up at 2 a.m. and she was pacing the hallway," Brett said. "Iris wanted to talk, and I said, 'You should go to bed, it's 2 in the morning.' She went back to bed. Then she got back up again. I said, 'You need to go to bed.' So she went back to bed and I watched her until she fell asleep."
Waking at 5 a.m., Brett saw Iris was gone. So was her car. He went to her desk in her upstairs office and found a note next to the computer. He immediately called the police.
Ultimately, three notes were found, all dated Monday, Nov. 8, 2004. The first was short, titled "Statement of Iris Chang." It read: "I promise to get up and get out of the house every morning. I will stop by to visit my parents then go for a long walk. I will follow the doctor's orders for medications. I promise not to hurt myself. I promise not to visit Web sites that talk about suicide."
Then she wrote a suicide note -- addressed to her parents, Brett and her brother -- followed by a lengthy revision. The first draft said: "When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day -- but by the minute. It is far better that you remember me as I was -- in my heyday as a best-selling author -- than the wild-eyed wreck who returned from Louisville . . . . Each breath is becoming difficult for me to take -- the anxiety can be compared to drowning in an open sea. I know that my actions will transfer some of this pain to others, indeed those who love me the most. Please forgive me. Forgive me because I cannot forgive myself."
In the final version, she added: "There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do. I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me. . .
"Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government's attempt to discredit me.
"I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead."
After Iris Chang's Oldsmobile was found off Highway 17 on Tuesday morning, Nov. 9, the California Highway Patrol was called to the scene. The Highway Patrol then called the Santa Clara Sheriff's homicide unit and detective Sgt. Dean Baker, a 33-year veteran, took over the investigation.
"There is an aspect of paranoia in the majority of suicides," Baker said. "A lot of people -- depending on how disturbed they are -- feel that people are plotting against them." And often, he added, "people think they've wronged everybody and can't possibly do anything to make up for what they think they've done wrong. Generally, there's an apology."
After studying the final results of the Santa Clara Country medical examiner's report, Baker closed his investigation March 1, 2005. The coroner's report, dated Dec. 23, 2004, stated: "Based on the medical investigator's report and the autopsy findings, Iris Chang, a 36-year-old Asian female, died from a self-inflicted intra-oral gunshot wound."
Baker explained his conclusion: "There's no evidence that any kind of conspiracy caused her death. We've seen a lot of suicides. We've seen staged suicides and we've seen homicides. I have no evidence of foul play. Everything points to suicide."
The number of calls to Asian Community Mental Health Services spiked in the days after Iris Chang's death. Most of the calls were from women, said Betty Hong, executive director of the Oakland clinic.
"Depression is a silent epidemic among Asian Americans because we tend not to seek help soon enough," Hong said. "It's a double-edged sword. There's a stigma within the culture about accessing care, because then people will think there is something wrong with you and your family. And then there's the issue of the model minority. Asians were the first immigrant community that 'made it,' and we should all be doctors and lawyers." That is, successful and invulnerable.
Stress does not cause mental illness, but it can worsen the symptoms, doctors say. Iris pushed herself "to be the best possible mother and the best possible writer," Brett said. This put her under enormous stress. On top of that, she wasn't sleeping.
"A lack of sleep is one of the hallmark symptoms of mania," Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, author of "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide," told The Chronicle. "Typically, people start losing sleep, then stay up later and later each night. It has a terrible reverberating effect. The lack of sleep can exacerbate the illness and vice versa."
Rabiner believes that neither the subject matter of her work nor the intensity of her work habits precipitated Iris' manic-depressive symptoms. "Iris was suffering from clinical depression," she said, "and it deepened rapidly over a period of about three months. People tend to think that clinical depression is like a bad-hair day. It's a disease. If she had a brain tumor, people would better understand."
Along with fear for her safety, Iris' illness generated feelings of self- blame. In her goodbye note, Iris described her guilt about having allowed her son, Christopher, to be vaccinated before the age of 2. She feared these vaccinations may have caused him to become autistic. But today Christopher is healthy. Family members say he shows no signs of autism.
When Brett woke to find Iris gone early Monday morning, he called San Jose police, reporting that she was missing, on medication and a suicide risk. The Police Department drafted a missing person's report. The report stated that Iris had been taking two medications: the mood stabilizer Depakote, an anticonvulsant similar to lithium; and a smaller dosage of Risperdal, an antipsychotic drug commonly used to control mania, which is also thought to reduce suicide risk. Sluggishness is a common side effect of Depakote, because it subdues the manic phase of bipolar disorder by depressing the central nervous system.
Iris' reluctance to take medication may indicate the difficulty she had accepting her illness as an illness. "For anybody who experiences mental illness for the first time, it's very hard to accept that it is your biology that is making it happen. It's very hard to believe that there is something wrong with your mind," said Dr. David Lo, director of Santa Cruz Mental Health Services and former director of Chinatown Mental Health Center in San Francisco.
Families, too, have trouble coping. "There is no way that a family member could sort out all the details, let alone their own feelings, because they're connected to the person," Dr. Lo explained.
"The onus is on us, as Western medical professionals, to be aware of cultural influences -- and to be proactive in educating family members and the patient when there is a first encounter with mental illness," he said. "It is a scary, dangerous and terrifyingly confusing time."
As Iris' good friend Barbara Masin said, "Those who are close to her did everything that they possibly could have done. There is always free will. I believe that Iris was very strong-willed and whatever she wanted to do, she would do."
Brett voiced a similar conclusion. "When somebody like Iris makes up their mind that they're going to commit suicide, they're going to do it. She was too strong-willed not to."
A poster-size photograph of Iris, lit by candlelight, stood vigil on the lawn of Spangler Mortuary in Los Altos in the early evening of Nov. 18. It was a Thursday, nine days after her death.
In the picture, Iris was standing, her head bowed in prayer like a saint or an angel. In the month after her death, the image would be the central icon at each of three Bay Area memorials.
At the first memorial -- that evening's "visitation" -- friends signed the guest book and offered condolences to the family. They approached the open casket, where they stopped, gazed at her for a final time and bowed three times, in Chinese custom. Beautiful as always, she was dressed in an indigo blue suit, identical in color and hue to the dress in the photograph.
The next morning, Friday, Nov. 19, dawned cold, clear and sunny. At the Gate of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in Los Altos Hills, the photograph stood on an easel before the chapel. Hundreds gathered for the memorial service and burial. After eloquent eulogies by family and friends, a tribute written by U. S. Rep. Michael Honda was recited, which he had read into the Congressional Record earlier that week:
"Her fierce pride of her Chinese American heritage empowered others with the certainty that they were truly Americans ... Our community has lost a role model and close friend; the world has lost one of its finest and most passionate advocates of social and historical justice."
The Gate of Heaven was well named. Open sky surrounds broad, rolling lawns at the crest of a hill. Iris Chang's grave faces west toward wooded hillsides painted with November's glorious reds and yellows, colors of consolation before winter's starkness. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, the black-clad tribe of mourners formed a line. One by one, each dropped a single purple iris or one red rose into the grave, saying, "Goodbye, Iris."
One month later, on Saturday, Dec. 11, the same elegant photograph of Iris was displayed at a memorial honoring her on the 67th anniversary of the invasion of Nanking. As a duo played traditional Chinese music, a group of nearly 100 gathered at the Millbrae headquarters of the Chinese-language daily the World Journal. The event was organized by Global Alliance and the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition.
One speaker called Iris "a hero for those muffled by injustice." Another said: "Let us thank her parents. They are the ones who brought her up." Between eulogies, a guitarist played "Let It Be." Then, a larger-than-life video image of Iris appeared on a wide-screen monitor: She was speaking as an expert witness in a mock grand jury trial of Emperor Hirohito, filmed at the 2003 Youth Conference at San Francisco City College, which the Nanking Redress Coalition sponsored. Finally, the group stood to sing a halting but heartfelt rendition of "Amazing Grace."
To soothe the pain of her loss, it would be tempting to seek a single, simple explanation for the suicide of Iris Chang. Though troubling to realize, those things that protect us most -- faith, family, health, financial stability -- are often powerless against mental illness.
"People who are in great treatment, who have all the love and support in the world, can still commit suicide," Jamison, author of "Understanding Suicide," has said. "Sometimes, people can be both mentally ill and highly disciplined, highly structured, highly productive members of society, whether you're talking about science or business or the arts. It happens every day of the week, and people just don't know it because people don't talk about it."
Every suicide is the tragic terminus of a tangle of roads, a route unique as a thumbprint.
The fundamental question about suicide, as Howard I. Kushner wrote in "Self-Destruction in the Promised Land," is this: "Why, when faced with a similar set of circumstances -- whether cultural, psychological or biological -- does one person commit suicide while another does not?"
No one knows the answer.
By Heidi Benson
SFGate.com, Collections
April 17, 2005
On a cloudy Monday morning in early November, author Iris Chang, 36, drove her white 1999 Oldsmobile Alero down Alum Rock Avenue toward the green foothills of East San Jose.
She passed the iron gates of Calvary Catholic Cemetery, where marble statues of winged angels, their heads bowed in prayer, mark the graves of early settlers. She passed the football field and the blocky, concrete auditorium of James Lick High School. Turning right, she pulled into the strip mall across the street from the school. She parked in front of Reed's Sport Shop, a redwood-shingled emporium that sells fishing, cycling and hunting gear.
Tall and slender, with glossy black hair falling well past her shoulders, Iris emerged from her car wearing blue jeans and sneakers. She walked through the whooshing automatic doors and turned right. On the far wall, a gallery of mounted deer heads marked her destination: the hunting department. This was not her first visit. She knew where to find the glass case of Civil War era pistol replicas, classified as "relics." She knew that in California, she could purchase a relic immediately and avoid the 10-day waiting period necessary with other guns.
At 11:56 a.m., Iris presented her driver's license and counted out $517 in cash -- she was carrying nearly $4,000 -- and left the store with an ivory-handled Ruger "Old Army" .45 replica revolver. Back in her car, she slipped the gun and owner's manual into a cardboard box labeled "Real Estate Documents" that lay on the passenger seat. That night, she had dinner with her husband of 13 years, Brett Douglas. They went to bed at midnight.
Before dawn, Iris awoke and got into her car. Driving west toward Santa Cruz on Highway 17, she took a turnoff 25 miles from her home and parked on a steep gravel utility road within sight of the highway. Nearby, Bear Creek Road curled up the lonesome hills, thick with black oak.
At 9:15 a.m. Tuesday, a county water district employee drove past the Oldsmobile. He stopped and honked but there was no response. Thinking the driver must be asleep, he got out of his car and banged on the hood. He noticed condensation on the windows, peered inside and saw Iris in the driver's seat with her hands crossed in her lap. The revolver lay on her left leg. Her head rested against the window. Blood covered her clothes. In the backseat, a teddy bear was tucked into the car seat of her 2-year-old son, Christopher. The water district employee called his supervisor, who called 911.
Homicide detectives would eventually determine that Iris had loaded all six chambers of the gun, placed the barrel between her lips, and fired. The half-inch lead ball perforated her hard palate, passed through her left dural sinus, her left cerebral and occipital lobes, broke partially through her skull and came to rest without exiting her scalp.
When her body was discovered, Iris Chang had been dead for two hours.
At Reed's Sport Shop one month after her death, the spot on the top shelf of the glass-topped case where Iris' gun had lain was still vacant. "She was in on more than one occasion," said Reed's manager, Pat Kalcic, a tall outdoorsman. "She appeared to have done research." The clerk who sold her the gun told investigators Iris had said she collected antique firearms. "She got what she wanted and got out," he said.
That such a beautiful woman would be remembered is not unusual. But Kalcic and his employees did not know how unusual Iris Chang was: a world- renowned author whose work had stirred international controversy. Neither did they know she had been bent on suicide.
On the day of Iris Chang's death, word spread quickly over news wires and the Internet. Her obituary was published in newspapers worldwide. She had gained an international reputation in 1997 when she was only 29 for writing "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II." It was the first history of Japan's brutal 1937 occupation of China's capital city and documented the weekslong rampage.
"Rape of Nanking" became an immediate best-seller and established her as an outspoken advocate for victims of Japanese war crimes. The debate it provoked -- between those Japanese who deny the atrocities and the Chinese who seek an official apology and reparations -- continues.
"Iris scraped away the scar tissue of something that had been half forgotten and half healed over, and to this date, it's still a very raw wound, " said Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Schell reviewed her book favorably in the New York Times. "She ventured into a minefield of unexploded ordnance."
News of her suicide brought forth a chorus of disbelief. Questions hung in the air:
-- How could someone with such success, surrounded by loving family and friends, take her own life?
-- Was she "the last victim of the Rape of Nanking," plagued and destroyed by the dark histories she illuminated?
-- Did her single-minded determination, her habit of working beyond exhaustion, contribute to her death?
-- Did she suffer a fatal reaction to powerful drugs that she refused to take as prescribed?
Speculation that she may have been killed by Japanese ultranationalists continued to turn up on Web logs and Internet chat rooms. At the same time, her foes said her suicide proved that "Rape of Nanking" was nothing but lies.
Irrefutably, Iris Chang won many battles in her fight for justice. But as she began to manifest symptoms of bipolar illness, she perceived them as a failure of will. Such harsh logic, symptomatic of the disease, rendered her unable to extend her own magnificent compassion to herself.
In the end, the war she could not win raged internally.
Together, Mr. and Mrs. Chang answered the door of their quiet, two-story townhouse in San Jose. It had been one week since their daughter's death. The foyer was filled with enormous bouquets sent by well-wishers. From the terrace, the view was peaceful -- broad green fields and golden poplars.
Married 41 years, the Changs are a handsome, gracious couple. Both were born in mainland China. Their families fled the 1949 Communist revolution and settled in Taiwan, where the two met in high school. They met again at Taiwan University -- and yet again when each won a science scholarship to Harvard in 1962. Ying-Ying is a biochemist. Her husband, Shau-Jin, is a theoretical physicist. They married in 1964, and each earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1967.
As that November afternoon darkened into evening, the Changs sat at their Danish-modern dining room table and told stories about Iris, speaking sometimes in past tense and sometimes in present tense.
They told of the time in grade school when Iris decided "if Dear Abby can do it -- I can do it," and she started her own advice column, writing questions and answers. Then, in high school, Iris became determined to revive the school's literary magazine, and quickly enlisted a staff and a sponsor. Her mother said, "She was always publishing something."
Rising from his chair, her father pulled a small red leather volume from the bookshelf. "Poetry by Iris Chang" was written in neat cursive on the title page. "She's very systematic -- you see, every poem has a date on it. She just knows how to do things," he said, tenderly smoothing out a page. "This was lying in our basement. Now, it becomes our treasure."
Iris was a serious child, her mother recalled. "Every day she seemed to have something new. She liked to talk, so it's very fun to watch her talking," she said. "She also liked to beat the system."
Her father patted the tabletop. "Yes!" he said, grinning. "Every time we set a rule, she always tried to find some way to get around it. We always had to argue all the exceptions she could think of. It's never boring with her -- it's interesting." Slowing down, he repeated, "It's interesting."
His voice slipped to a whisper. "It's been too short."
Iris Shun-Ru Chang was born March 28, 1968, in Princeton Hospital, on the university campus in New Jersey where her parents were doing postdoctoral work. They lived on a leafy country road named Einstein Drive. After two years at Princeton, the family moved to a Midwestern college town, Champaign-Urbana, in Illinois. "He got the job, we went," Mrs. Chang explained. Soon they were both teaching and conducting research at the University of Illinois. Their second child, Michael, was born in 1970.
"Michael is very outgoing, very extroverted -- Iris is different," said Mrs. Chang. "Iris can be a loner; it doesn't bother her." She touched her fingertips to her forehead, then waved her hand to the heavens: "It's because Iris is a dreamer." Iris learned to read at age 4. At 10, she entered a young- author competition and won first place. Winning that prize led to dreams of becoming a writer, her father said.
"Iris always came to us to discuss her problems," her mother said. "We are a very close family. We are lucky -- she could tell me everything she felt. She was easily hurt, though sometimes she didn't show it. I would tell her, 'You can care too much about what people say about you.' " Iris was sometimes teased for her earnestness. She wanted to be independent, to think for herself.
Iris and her brother went to University High -- known as Uni High -- on the campus where their parents taught. The small, academically elite school has produced many Nobel laureates.
At 14, Iris was studying advanced math and decided to join an all-boys computer club called Submit. She easily passed the 20 exams necessary to qualify, only to be told that she must take five more.
"The boys came together to say, 'Crisis! There's a girl who wants to get into Submit,' " Mr. Chang recalled. "So they tried to make it harder and harder." Iris insisted she had already passed.
"They had a big fight," he said. "Iris thought it was an injustice. She was mad. So you see, she was really a fighter. If they had let her get into Submit, she may not have become a journalist," he added.
"We should be grateful."
Iris met the man she would marry in 1989, when she was a sophomore in journalism at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Brett Douglas was a tall, low-key redhead, nearly two years her senior and an engineering graduate student when they were introduced at a Sigma Phi Delta fraternity party on campus.
Sixteen years later, and five days after her death, Brett sat in the living room of the San Jose town home they shared, surrounded by family photos. The air was still, heavy with grief. A red tricycle and a jogging stroller flanked the front door. The sound of children singing wafted in from the swimming pool nearby. The pool, a turquoise rectangle surrounded by pines, sat at the center of the village-like complex.
Brett's father, Ken Douglas, had flown out to keep his son company. A reassuring presence, he stood at the kitchen counter, fixing a sandwich for lunch. He had only recently retired from the family farm in central Illinois that had been in the family for five generations.
Speaking of the night they met, Brett said, "Iris was beautiful, vivacious -- and sober. She just seemed to be more driven and to have more zest for life than anyone I'd ever met. I knew immediately I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her."
It didn't take him long to propose, but their 1989 engagement stretched out while Brett finished grad school in Urbana. Meanwhile, Iris was one of a dozen journalism undergraduates chosen for an accelerated Associated Press training program. She was assigned to the AP office in Chicago.
Brett soon grew concerned that Iris was overextended. "Iris could write two or three stories a day, and they loved her because she wrote so fast," he said. "But she worked herself way too hard when she was there. She wore herself out." Her mother concurred: "At AP, she worked so hard she couldn't sleep. I was worried. She never did sleep very well or eat very well."
When her internship was up, Iris was offered a permanent job at AP. She went to the Chicago Tribune instead, but didn't enjoy "politicking for assignments," Brett said. Opting for a master's degree, she was accepted by the Graduate Writing Seminar at Johns Hopkins University and moved to Baltimore in 1990. Her long-distance engagement to Brett entered its second year. By now, Brett was living in Santa Barbara, working toward a doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of California. They kept in touch every day by e-mail.
At Johns Hopkins, Iris studied playwriting, fiction, poetry and science writing. As a teacher's assistant, she taught a class in creative writing. She wrote her thesis on "The Poetry of Science." Soon she exceeded the dreams of every student in the program by getting a book contract from a major publisher while still in school. She was 22.
"Iris was a phenomenon," said one of her former teachers at Johns Hopkins, Ann Finkbeiner. In the fall of 1990, Iris took Finkbeiner's "Science Stories" course. "She talked almost obsessively. She got very, very wound up in things," Finkbeiner said. "You didn't always feel she was talking to you --
it was as if she had to talk. To me, it was part of that whole intensity that made Iris able to do what she went on to do."
Barbara Culliton, now editor in chief of Genome News Network, was then director of the Johns Hopkins science writing program. Her friendship with Iris, Culliton said, "lasted from the day she walked in as a student -- in effect, to the day she died."
Culliton was sufficiently impressed by Iris' talent to recommend her to Susan Rabiner, editorial director of Basic Books, the "serious nonfiction" division of HarperCollins Publishers. It was unusual for Basic Books to consider such an untested writer. But Rabiner had been looking for someone conversant in the sciences and in Mandarin to write a biography of Hsue-Shen Tsien. Tsien was a top physicist at Cal-Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was deported during the Red scare of the 1950s. He returned to China and went on to develop its missile system.
Rabiner recalled telling Iris, " 'You're young, but take a flyer.' I didn't know if I'd hear from her again." Less than two months later, she did. Iris called to say she had found Tsien's son and had interviewed him in Mandarin. "Clearly, Iris was a strong, smart and directed young woman," Rabiner said. She helped Iris write a proposal and the project was quickly put under contract.
"Iris was so excited when she got the contract for the book," Brett said, recalling how obsessively she ferreted out material. "She contacted people who'd been lost for years, dug up records that nobody ever knew existed. She wrote her 100-page book proposal in a couple of weeks."
By now, Brett had taken a job with a Santa Barbara engineering firm. He and Iris were married in August 1991 in Champaign-Urbana. Their mothers helped to plan the wedding. The newlyweds settled in Santa Barbara, and Iris began writing the book about Tsien. In 1992, at 24, she received a $15,000 award from the MacArthur Foundation, which helped fund the project.
The book, "Thread of the Silkworm," was published in 1995. It was well- reviewed, though it never sold in great numbers. But soon Iris would write one of the most controversial books of the decade. That book would sell half a million copies.
Iris Chang found the inspiration for her new book in 1994 when she came face-to-face with poster-size photographs of Nanking war crimes at a conference in Cupertino. She was 26.
"I walked around in shock," she later wrote. "Though I had heard so much about the Nanking massacre as a child, nothing prepared me for these pictures -- stark black-and-white images of decapitated heads, bellies ripped open and nude women forced by their rapists into various pornographic poses, their faces contorted into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame. In a single blinding moment I recognized the fragility of not just life but the human experience itself."
The conference had been sponsored by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia. Iris discovered this group of Chinese American activists after she and Brett moved to Northern California when he got a job with Cisco Systems.
After seeing the Nanking pictures, Iris wrote: "I was suddenly in a panic that this ... reversion in human social evolution would be reduced to a footnote of history ... unless someone forced the world to remember it."
Iris called Rabiner. "There's a book I must do," she said. She offered to pay Basic Books to publish it. "No, no! We don't work that way," Rabiner insisted. "Tell me why you want to tell the story."
Iris had been haunted since childhood by the graphic stories she was told about Nanking. Her maternal grandparents had escaped just weeks before the Japanese arrived. As a youngster, Iris had sought books on the subject in her school library. But there was none. As she later told an interviewer, "I wrote 'Rape of Nanking' out of a sense of rage. I didn't really care if I made a cent from it. It was important to me that the world knew what happened in Nanking back in 1937." Rabiner sensed the book would be important and signed Iris to write it.
Later, Iris told interviewers that, as a child, "it was hard for me to even visualize how bad it was, because the stories seemed almost mythical -- people being chopped into pieces, the Yangtze River running red with blood. It was very painful for me to think about, even then."
While writing the book, Iris found it "almost impossible to separate myself from the tragedy," she said. "The stress of writing this book and living with this horror on a daily basis caused my weight to plummet," she said. "I had to write it, if it was the last thing I ever did in my life."
On her trip to China, she met with survivors from Nanking. "Every single survivor I met was desperately anxious to tell his or her story," she later said. "I spent several hours with each one, getting the details of their experiences on videotape. Some became overwrought with emotion during the interviews and broke down into tears. But all of them wanted the opportunity to talk about the massacre before their deaths."
Seeing how the survivors lived was as harrowing as hearing their stories. Iris was "shocked and depressed" to see their living conditions in Nanking. "Most lived in dark, squalid apartments cluttered with the debris of poverty and heavy with mildew and humidity," she wrote. "During the massacre some had received physical injuries so severe they had been prevented from making a decent living for decades. Most lived in poverty so crushing that even a minimal amount of financial compensation from Japan could have greatly improved the conditions of their lives."
During two years of research, Iris made significant historical discoveries. She found the diaries of a pair of Westerners who were among the heroes of Nanking. The first was John Rabe, a German member of the Nazi party who was living in the Chinese capital in 1937. He established an International Safety Zone in Nanking before the Japanese soldiers arrived from Shanghai. Iris dubbed him the "Oskar Schindler of Nanking."
The other diarist -- the "Anne Frank of Nanking" -- was an Illinois woman named Minnie Vautrin. (In the book, Iris noted that Vautrin had graduated with honors from her own alma mater, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.) In 1937, Vautrin was a missionary and teacher at the Nanking Women's College when its campus became part of the Safety Zone. She harbored hundreds of Chinese women and children there during the occupation. But there were untold numbers of women she could not save from capture, torture or death at the hands of Japanese soldiers. Haunted by the belief that she had failed, Vautrin suffered a breakdown in 1940. While on the ship home, she tried repeatedly to leap overboard. Back in Illinois one year later, she committed suicide.
"Civilization is tissue thin," Iris wrote. She called this the most important lesson to be learned from the tragedy of Nanking. And she believed her research produced irrevocable proof of Japanese atrocities. She wrote:
"After reading several file cabinets' worth of documents on Japanese war crimes as well as accounts of ancient atrocities from the pantheon of world history, I would have to conclude that Japan's behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise."
The book hit the stores at Christmas, a tough selling season for serious nonfiction. It became a surprise best-seller. A groundswell of interest in the Chinese American community had quickly spread to booksellers and the broader reading public. Newsweek ran an excerpt, and soon Iris was a familiar face on TV news shows. Reader's Digest devoted a cover story to her.
"We weren't really prepared for the success of the book," Brett said. "Iris wasn't prepared and her publisher wasn't prepared. I don't know how many printings it went through. They just kept saying, 'We'll print another 10,000, we'll print another 10,000.' "
Rabiner said Iris "found her voice" in promoting "Rape of Nanking." "She had so many bookings, she could easily be on the road for 2 1/2 weeks before coming back home. She came alive before crowds -- she loved to share, and she was interested in other people's lives. That's why she was such a powerful role model for so many Chinese Americans. She was committed to her cause, and she radiated life."
At the same time, torrents of hate mail came in, Brett said. "Iris is sensitive, but she got charged up," he recalled. "When anybody questioned the validity of what she wrote, she would respond with overwhelming evidence to back it up. She's very much a perfectionist. It was hard for her not to react every single time."
Most of the attacks came from Japanese ultranationalists. "We saw cartoons where she was portrayed as this woman with a great big mouth," Brett said. "She got used to the fact that there is a Web site called 'Iris Chang and Her Lies.' She would just laugh."
But friends say Iris began to voice concerns for her safety. She believed her phone was tapped. She described finding threatening notes on her car. She said she was confronted by a man who said, "You will NOT continue writing this. " She used a post office box, never her home address, for mail.
"There are a fair number of people who don't take kindly to what she wrote in 'The Rape of Nanking,' " Brett said, "so she's always been very, very private about our family life."
The book's popularity meant a lengthy book tour. "Over a year and a half, she visited 65 cities," Brett said. "Most authors are worn out after five or six cities." He could see the travel was taking a toll on her. In 1998, Brett recalled, "for her 30th birthday, we went out to a little resort near Santa Cruz and she literally didn't want to leave the room."
Somehow, she always bounced back, energized by her role as spokesperson for a movement. Among her many television appearances was a memorable evening on "Nightline," where she was the only Asian and the only woman among a panel of China experts.
"To see her on TV, defending 'Rape of Nanking' so fiercely and so fearlessly -- I just sat down, stopped, in awe," said Helen Zia, author of "Asian-American Dreams: Emergence of an American People" and co-author, with Wen-Ho Lee, of "My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused."
"Iris truly had no fear. You could see it in the steadiness of her voice and in her persistence," Zia recalled. "She would just say, matter-of-factly, 'Japan is lying and here's why.' "
Later, Iris challenged the Japanese ambassador to a debate on the "MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour" on PBS. After the ambassador spoke of events in Nanking, Iris turned to the moderator and said: "I didn't hear an apology."
"Chinese Americans grew up hearing about this forgotten holocaust," said Zia, whose grandmother was killed in Nanking. "It was family lore."
When Zia and Iris met for the first time, they planned a quick lunch. But lunch lasted through dinner. "We sat down and started talking, and we had a lot to say. For Asian Americans to write nonfiction about Asia or Asian America was relatively new. Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan really blew the doors open for fiction writers. But for us to be able to write nonfiction, the stories of our lives -- on a lot of levels, it was revolutionary."
Despite support from esteemed historians and journalists, including Stephen Ambrose and George Will, some judged Iris' version of history too subjective. "This was something of a roots venture for her -- to reconnect with the country that her family had drifted off from," said UC Berkeley's Schell. "And she brought an incredible reserve of emotion to it. Iris was first and foremost an advocate. She was an able journalist, but she allowed herself to become deeply involved emotionally in her subjects, which gave her accessibility. But some scholars felt that she was a little too involved with her subject matter."
Rabiner, who later became an agent and represented Iris, said, "The book was beyond well reviewed -- it was a mega-best-seller that continues to sell. It showed that at times history has to be written by a member of the community, out of a passion the author shares with the community. It caused an international scandal because the Japanese to this day have not conceded the extent of the wartime atrocities perpetrated against the Chinese and others. It also showed publishing houses that there is a market for books about the Chinese experience."
The book rocketed Iris into the pantheon of American intellectuals. In 1998, she and Brett were invited to attend Renaissance Weekend -- the meeting-of-the-minds seminar held each New Year's weekend in South Carolina. "Iris was much in demand and gave many talks," Brett recalled, adding with a laugh, "she was schmoozing the whole time." There, Iris had lengthy conversations with then-President Bill Clinton and gave him a signed copy of "The Rape of Nanking."
But when Brett and Iris were invited back the next year, the young couple took a different tack. They attended lectures but Iris gave fewer talks; she was still recovering from the book tour. Meanwhile, they decided they had put their plans for a family on hold long enough.
"When we first got married, we said we were going to start trying to have a child after four years," Brett said. "And then we stretched it to six, and then 'The Rape of Nanking' hit the best-seller list and she was out promoting it for almost two years. By the time that was done, it was already eight years. So we finally started trying, and then we had our son in 2002."
Christopher was born Aug. 31 that year. He was a happy baby, with his mother's jet-black hair. "We wondered what we did with all of our time before we had a son," Brett said, "because of the amount of time that a little one involves. What made it much easier is that we did have a wonderful nanny to help."
They had moved from a small apartment in Sunnyvale to the San Jose townhome. "We bought this house when we knew he was on the way. There are so many kids his age here."
Iris' parents retired in early 2001, and after Christopher was born, they moved from Illinois and into a home in the same complex. Her mother hoped Iris would take on a lighter topic for her next book, especially with a baby in the house. The Nanking book had "made Iris sad."
Iris took her advice, though the book she began was enormously ambitious. "The Chinese in America: A Narrative History" was published by Viking in 2003. Iris told her mother that working on it was a vacation after "Rape of Nanking. "
But soon she found herself drawn to a subject just as dark.
Iris Chang rang the doorbell on Ed Martel's front porch in Kenosha, Wis., on Dec. 4, 2003. It's a date he won't forget.
"She sat down and cross-examined me like a district attorney for five solid hours," said Martel, 86, one of the last remaining survivors of the Bataan Death March of World War II. His daughter, Maddy, remembered the day well, too. "We set out a very big lunch -- meat trays and sandwiches and desserts," she said. "My dad was so excited that she was doing this, and so honored."
Months earlier, Iris had seized on a letter in her "book ideas" file about a Midwestern pocket of Bataan survivors, all members of two tank battalions. "They drop so fast," the letter had read. The correspondent was Sgt. Anthony Meldahl, a supply sergeant with the Ohio National Guard who had admired Iris' work. Meldahl was now urging Iris to join his oral-history project. She did, and, starting in November 2003, would make four trips to meet with Bataan vets -- in Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky. Each time, Iris swept into town and conducted four or five intensive interviews in as many days. "She was like a battalion commander," Meldahl said.
"It's amazing when you watch Iris do research," Brett said. "She would go into a town -- and with Tony Meldahl's help, it was even better. She would have a team of three vets and their children and their wives. Iris would be interviewing them, somebody else would be filming them, somebody else would be photocopying records, and somebody would be sending documents down to UPS. And Iris would buy lunch and dinner for everybody, and they all thought it was great.
"These people wanted their story told for a long, long time, and they knew that because Iris had success as an author, she'd be able to do a very good job," Brett said.
Ed Martel's story began on Dec. 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor was still smoldering when Japanese planes bombed the Philippines' Bataan Peninsula, where Martel was stationed with a National Guard tank battalion. With few rations, little ammunition and no reinforcements, 70,000 American and Filipino troops held off the Japanese for months.
When the American general surrendered on April 9, the Japanese forced the troops to walk 65 miles through sweltering jungle. Some 8,000 died on the notorious "death march." Those who survived spent the rest of the war in a bleak prison camp; some were shipped to Japan as slave laborers. Once the Allies won the war, the story was forgotten. It had been the largest U.S. Army surrender in history.
"It's baffling to me that the U.S. today has so little knowledge of the four months we held out," Martel told The Chronicle by telephone from his home in Wisconsin. "We marvel at how America turned their backs on us."
Martel was slightly hard of hearing, but his memory was crisp. He recalled telling Iris about the worst of his Bataan experiences. "Iris asked me to tell about atrocities," he said. "Twice I broke down and had to leave the room."
After he and his fellow soldiers had been starved and beaten for months, a Japanese guard knocked him to the ground, piercing his chest with his bayonet. Martel cried, "You son of a bitch! Just do it!" His daughter recalled that in telling Iris this story, he got terribly worked up. "Why did he have to toy with me like that?" he cried. It was as if he were back in Bataan. But just in time, Iris changed the subject, prompting him to tell a lighter story.
"Did you really look like Charlie Chaplin?" asked Iris, knowing Martel had been saved from near starvation by the brushy mustache he wore. The mustache reminded his Japanese captors of "The Little Tramp." So, in return for performing a short, Chaplinesque shuffle, he would be rewarded with a handful of scallions.
"Iris was very loving," Martel's daughter said. "Talking to her, you felt like she was one of the family." After the interview, they kept up an active correspondence. Iris sent the Martels photographs from her trip, cards for Chinese New Year and updates on her Bataan project. One picture she sent showed Iris hugging Martel and his wife. He framed it and hung it on a wall in his home. Next to it, now, is a copy of Iris' obituary. When Martel read in a newspaper about her death, he asked his daughter, "Is that our Iris?"
Iris connected so well with these veterans because each of their stories mattered to her. She didn't just ask what had happened, she asked what they had felt. Theirs was not just a story of war, but of boys becoming men, she said in a transcription of one of her many taped interviews. "It boggles the imagination, what you went through," she said. "You'll have to forgive me, but I find myself often deeply affected by these stories."
Between trips to the Midwest, Iris conducted yet another book tour. In early 2004, she traveled to promote the paperback version of "The Chinese in America." Brett said, "It was, I think, 21 cities in 28 days. And that really took its toll on her, too."
Her last Bataan trip was scheduled for July 2004. She planned to visit Harrodsburg, Ky., where several survivors lived and where an old Bataan-era tank stood sentry in the town square. She hoped to gain access to a time capsule of audiotapes that was sealed within that tank after the war.
Getting ready for the trip, Iris went into overdrive. "In the past, when Iris was working on something, she might work for 48 hours straight and then she would crash for 20 hours, and then she'd be back up, working again," Brett said. "But this time, I had assumed she was sleeping all day after working all night. But it turned out she wasn't sleeping during the day either. She was trying to be a top-notch mother and she was also trying to prepare for her trip."
The nanny was the only person aware that Iris had been up for three days with no sleep. But the nanny spoke only Mandarin. Later, Brett learned that the nanny had urged Iris to cancel the trip.
"Iris was really good at putting her best face forward, even when she was totally exhausted, so I didn't really perceive that there was a real problem," Brett said. "We had our lives so structured. Either she was watching Christopher or I was watching Christopher, or she was working or I was working. We didn't see each other as much as we did in the past."
He added, sadly, "I think if we had, I would have noticed earlier that things were going wrong."
Normally, Iris never did interviews alone. She preferred to meet someone in each town who could introduce her to the veterans and their families. For the Wisconsin trip, she had hooked up with people from the Bataan Commemorative Research Project, a historical archive and Web site created by faculty and students at Proviso East High School in Maywood, Ill.
"World War II hit the town of Maywood really hard," said Ian Smith, chair of the school's history department. "This high school alone lost 200 students -- 28 were with the Bataan company."
Smith had been Iris' liaison in Wisconsin; another Proviso High teacher was to be her guide in Kentucky. But just before Iris left for Kentucky -- the last week of July 2004 -- a family emergency forced the teacher to cancel. Iris would be working solo. Her parents saw her off that morning. "She was very tired," her mother said. "She should not have gone."
By the time her plane landed in Louisville, she was overwhelmed by exhaustion and anxiety. She got from the airport to the hotel, but that was all she could do. Iris collapsed in bed. Soon she managed to call her mother.
"I knew Iris was not right," her mother said. "She couldn't eat or drink. She was very depressed." She asked if Iris had any friends there she could call for help. One of the veterans -- a colonel she had planned to meet in Louisville -- came to the hotel. Smith said the colonel spent only a short time with her. "She was afraid of him when he showed up," Smith said. "But he spoke to her mother on the phone and told Iris, 'Your mom is on the phone, so it's OK.' "
That afternoon, she checked herself in to Norton Psychiatric Hospital in Louisville, with help from the colonel. Through a third party, the colonel declined to be interviewed.
"First they gave her an antipsychotic, to stabilize her," her mother said. "For three days they gave her medication, the first time in her life." (The family would not name specific drugs.)
In three days, her parents came to take her home. Doctors at Norton Hospital had diagnosed "brief reactive psychosis," her father said. This could be a one-time event or it could signal the onset of bipolar disorder, the doctors told them.
Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a mood disorder that affects one in every 70 people. The cycle of mood shifts that distinguish the disease -- from manic highs to depressive lows -- differs with every sufferer. Without treatment, the condition worsens over time.
Though Iris had previously suffered what her parents called "down" periods after bouts of intense exertion, the lows were never as extreme as what befell her in Kentucky. "She had never seen anyone for depression or anything before," her mother said.
They brought her home, and at first Iris responded well to rest and treatment. "But gradually, she became very depressed," said her father, adding that her doctor in California prescribed an additional medication, an antidepressant. "But Iris herself did not believe she was sick." And she was determined not to be hospitalized again.
"She didn't like the idea that she was taking medicine," her father said. "Iris was impatient. First she thought it would be a couple of weeks" before she improved, "but we tried to convince her that it would be several months, because that is what the doctors said."
Her mother added, "She was in therapy all the time, but it didn't help, and she took the medicine on and off. The medicine made her feel sluggish. So she took a little bit and then she stopped -- and it shouldn't be stopped like that."
Iris had convinced her doctor to reduce her dosage. "She's very strong- willed," her mother said. "The doctors wanted her to continue in therapy, so sometimes they would go along with her."
Between August and November, Iris saw two different therapists before finding one who seemed a good fit. But, her father said, "In spite of many sessions, Iris did not tell the therapist her deepest thoughts. He was misled by Iris. He thought Iris was improving."
Brett said Iris was anxious to get back to work. "She was so driven," Brett said, "she just wouldn't take time off." But that meant diving back into her Bataan Death March research.
Those close to Iris had always seen her ups and downs as part of the natural cycle of a brilliant person with intense drive, passionate commitment and a capacity for hard work. These were considered her finest traits. Now, the family rushed to learn everything they could about her illness. Brett devised a "20-Point Plan to Make Iris Well," listing such remedies as going to the beach; calling friends; eating well (on her desk, she kept a book titled "How Food Affects Your Mood" next to her Franklin Planner); and getting exercise. Brett set up a home gym in the basement and coached her through hourlong workouts with hand weights. Still, the depression failed to lift.
She was seeing a therapist two to three times a week, Brett said, but fought against having family members participate. "Iris was a very strong person, even when she was depressed," said Brett. "She didn't like other people taking control, so she resisted" his attending any of her therapy sessions. "There were up and down periods," he said. "There was a time earlier, in September, when we were worried, but she seemed to come out of that."
Their son, who had turned 2 years old in August, became aware of a change. "Christopher sensed that something was going wrong with Iris," Brett said. "He could tell that she was a lot different after she came back from Louisville. It was obvious she wasn't the same person that she was before," he said. "When Iris' condition got really bad, we sent him to stay with my parents in Illinois. We called him every day, sometimes two or three times a day."
Rabiner became worried, too. "Iris told me now was not the time to go on with the Bataan project. I told her, 'Take a break.' You're not on a moving train. You have a young kid. Let go, We all said, 'Take a break.' "
One of Iris' best friends, Barbara Masin, came up from Santa Barbara for a long weekend visit. "I urged her to talk with someone -- either Brett, or me, or someone. She finally agreed that she would talk to me. I was there for three days and we talked. For her, it was a relief," said Masin.
"We went out and did really long hikes, and it seemed to help. At the end of the three days, I was making silly little jokes and she was laughing. We arranged for her to come down and stay with me soon," she said. "But as I was leaving, she got apathetic again."
Three days before Iris' death, Brett dreamed up a special weekend, just for her. On Saturday night they went to dinner at Fresh Choice and out to the movies. "We went to see 'Ray,' " Brett said. "I thought it would be inspirational. And she loved it. She hadn't ever heard much of Ray Charles' music before, and when we got home, she went upstairs and was browsing all kinds of information on Ray Charles on the Internet."
Sunday morning, they drove to Santa Cruz for lunch on the pier, then went to her favorite spa, Chaminade -- a 300-acre mission-style resort, surrounded by redwoods and eucalyptus, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Iris got a massage. "Then we came home, and that was our last weekend together," he said, fighting back tears.
After leaving Reed's Sport Shop at noon on Monday, Nov. 8, Iris tried to load the revolver she had just purchased. But the gun jammed. Such "black powder" firearms, popular with Civil War re-enactors, require skill to load and fire. The lead balls must be individually prepared, packed with gunpowder and topped with a percussive cap.
According to the police report, Iris phoned a local gunsmith, an antique firearms specialist who did business from his home. She told him she had an old revolver that was unsafe to shoot. They made an appointment. At 12:40 p.m., she stopped for lunch at FujiSan Sushi in Milpitas Square. The manager knew her as a customer and an author -- Iris and Brett ate there often. But this time, "she appeared unhappy," the manager told investigators. Iris ate quickly, asked for green tea to go and charged $15.11 to her credit card.
Iris arrived at the gunsmith's at about 2 p.m., carrying a Reed's Sport Shop Bag. The gunsmith told police he had spotted a can of gunpowder in the bag. This kind of "black powder" is unstable and unsafe indoors, so he insisted she first take the can outside. She told him she had not asked for instructions when she bought the gun. He showed her how to load the gun and tried to give her basic safety and handling instructions. Later, he would tell police that she "seemed distracted or aloof."
Hoping to practice shooting, she asked the gunsmith to go with her to a nearby indoor firing range. He explained that the gunpowder she had was unsafe to use indoors. She promised to buy less volatile powder. They made an appointment to meet Wednesday at the firing range. She paid the gunsmith $10. They had spent one hour together.
After dinner Monday night, Iris returned a call to her agent. "We spoke for two hours, from 8:30 to 10:30 p.m.," Rabiner said. "I'd left a message -- I actually had business to talk about. A book packager wanted to publish a children's version of 'The Chinese in America.'
"Much of the conversation was upbeat. Other parts were not. She asked me if I was religious -- I said I wasn't, not at all. In a funny kind of way, she was resolute, she was calm. She had been sad for several months, but she didn't seem in an acute phase. "
Rabiner invited Iris to spend a week or so at her home in Westchester County, N.Y. "I figured we'd take a week off and just relax, walk the woods up here. I thought it would break the spell, break the hold of these emotions. I told her that I wanted her to call me the next night and every night after that until she worked out the details. I got off the phone confused and concerned, but I was too unsophisticated about psychological problems to realize that she was saying goodbye to me."
That night, Iris and Brett followed their routine and went to sleep around midnight. "But I woke up at 2 a.m. and she was pacing the hallway," Brett said. "Iris wanted to talk, and I said, 'You should go to bed, it's 2 in the morning.' She went back to bed. Then she got back up again. I said, 'You need to go to bed.' So she went back to bed and I watched her until she fell asleep."
Waking at 5 a.m., Brett saw Iris was gone. So was her car. He went to her desk in her upstairs office and found a note next to the computer. He immediately called the police.
Ultimately, three notes were found, all dated Monday, Nov. 8, 2004. The first was short, titled "Statement of Iris Chang." It read: "I promise to get up and get out of the house every morning. I will stop by to visit my parents then go for a long walk. I will follow the doctor's orders for medications. I promise not to hurt myself. I promise not to visit Web sites that talk about suicide."
Then she wrote a suicide note -- addressed to her parents, Brett and her brother -- followed by a lengthy revision. The first draft said: "When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day -- but by the minute. It is far better that you remember me as I was -- in my heyday as a best-selling author -- than the wild-eyed wreck who returned from Louisville . . . . Each breath is becoming difficult for me to take -- the anxiety can be compared to drowning in an open sea. I know that my actions will transfer some of this pain to others, indeed those who love me the most. Please forgive me. Forgive me because I cannot forgive myself."
In the final version, she added: "There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do. I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me. . .
"Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government's attempt to discredit me.
"I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead."
After Iris Chang's Oldsmobile was found off Highway 17 on Tuesday morning, Nov. 9, the California Highway Patrol was called to the scene. The Highway Patrol then called the Santa Clara Sheriff's homicide unit and detective Sgt. Dean Baker, a 33-year veteran, took over the investigation.
"There is an aspect of paranoia in the majority of suicides," Baker said. "A lot of people -- depending on how disturbed they are -- feel that people are plotting against them." And often, he added, "people think they've wronged everybody and can't possibly do anything to make up for what they think they've done wrong. Generally, there's an apology."
After studying the final results of the Santa Clara Country medical examiner's report, Baker closed his investigation March 1, 2005. The coroner's report, dated Dec. 23, 2004, stated: "Based on the medical investigator's report and the autopsy findings, Iris Chang, a 36-year-old Asian female, died from a self-inflicted intra-oral gunshot wound."
Baker explained his conclusion: "There's no evidence that any kind of conspiracy caused her death. We've seen a lot of suicides. We've seen staged suicides and we've seen homicides. I have no evidence of foul play. Everything points to suicide."
The number of calls to Asian Community Mental Health Services spiked in the days after Iris Chang's death. Most of the calls were from women, said Betty Hong, executive director of the Oakland clinic.
"Depression is a silent epidemic among Asian Americans because we tend not to seek help soon enough," Hong said. "It's a double-edged sword. There's a stigma within the culture about accessing care, because then people will think there is something wrong with you and your family. And then there's the issue of the model minority. Asians were the first immigrant community that 'made it,' and we should all be doctors and lawyers." That is, successful and invulnerable.
Stress does not cause mental illness, but it can worsen the symptoms, doctors say. Iris pushed herself "to be the best possible mother and the best possible writer," Brett said. This put her under enormous stress. On top of that, she wasn't sleeping.
"A lack of sleep is one of the hallmark symptoms of mania," Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, author of "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide," told The Chronicle. "Typically, people start losing sleep, then stay up later and later each night. It has a terrible reverberating effect. The lack of sleep can exacerbate the illness and vice versa."
Rabiner believes that neither the subject matter of her work nor the intensity of her work habits precipitated Iris' manic-depressive symptoms. "Iris was suffering from clinical depression," she said, "and it deepened rapidly over a period of about three months. People tend to think that clinical depression is like a bad-hair day. It's a disease. If she had a brain tumor, people would better understand."
Along with fear for her safety, Iris' illness generated feelings of self- blame. In her goodbye note, Iris described her guilt about having allowed her son, Christopher, to be vaccinated before the age of 2. She feared these vaccinations may have caused him to become autistic. But today Christopher is healthy. Family members say he shows no signs of autism.
When Brett woke to find Iris gone early Monday morning, he called San Jose police, reporting that she was missing, on medication and a suicide risk. The Police Department drafted a missing person's report. The report stated that Iris had been taking two medications: the mood stabilizer Depakote, an anticonvulsant similar to lithium; and a smaller dosage of Risperdal, an antipsychotic drug commonly used to control mania, which is also thought to reduce suicide risk. Sluggishness is a common side effect of Depakote, because it subdues the manic phase of bipolar disorder by depressing the central nervous system.
Iris' reluctance to take medication may indicate the difficulty she had accepting her illness as an illness. "For anybody who experiences mental illness for the first time, it's very hard to accept that it is your biology that is making it happen. It's very hard to believe that there is something wrong with your mind," said Dr. David Lo, director of Santa Cruz Mental Health Services and former director of Chinatown Mental Health Center in San Francisco.
Families, too, have trouble coping. "There is no way that a family member could sort out all the details, let alone their own feelings, because they're connected to the person," Dr. Lo explained.
"The onus is on us, as Western medical professionals, to be aware of cultural influences -- and to be proactive in educating family members and the patient when there is a first encounter with mental illness," he said. "It is a scary, dangerous and terrifyingly confusing time."
As Iris' good friend Barbara Masin said, "Those who are close to her did everything that they possibly could have done. There is always free will. I believe that Iris was very strong-willed and whatever she wanted to do, she would do."
Brett voiced a similar conclusion. "When somebody like Iris makes up their mind that they're going to commit suicide, they're going to do it. She was too strong-willed not to."
A poster-size photograph of Iris, lit by candlelight, stood vigil on the lawn of Spangler Mortuary in Los Altos in the early evening of Nov. 18. It was a Thursday, nine days after her death.
In the picture, Iris was standing, her head bowed in prayer like a saint or an angel. In the month after her death, the image would be the central icon at each of three Bay Area memorials.
At the first memorial -- that evening's "visitation" -- friends signed the guest book and offered condolences to the family. They approached the open casket, where they stopped, gazed at her for a final time and bowed three times, in Chinese custom. Beautiful as always, she was dressed in an indigo blue suit, identical in color and hue to the dress in the photograph.
The next morning, Friday, Nov. 19, dawned cold, clear and sunny. At the Gate of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in Los Altos Hills, the photograph stood on an easel before the chapel. Hundreds gathered for the memorial service and burial. After eloquent eulogies by family and friends, a tribute written by U. S. Rep. Michael Honda was recited, which he had read into the Congressional Record earlier that week:
"Her fierce pride of her Chinese American heritage empowered others with the certainty that they were truly Americans ... Our community has lost a role model and close friend; the world has lost one of its finest and most passionate advocates of social and historical justice."
The Gate of Heaven was well named. Open sky surrounds broad, rolling lawns at the crest of a hill. Iris Chang's grave faces west toward wooded hillsides painted with November's glorious reds and yellows, colors of consolation before winter's starkness. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, the black-clad tribe of mourners formed a line. One by one, each dropped a single purple iris or one red rose into the grave, saying, "Goodbye, Iris."
One month later, on Saturday, Dec. 11, the same elegant photograph of Iris was displayed at a memorial honoring her on the 67th anniversary of the invasion of Nanking. As a duo played traditional Chinese music, a group of nearly 100 gathered at the Millbrae headquarters of the Chinese-language daily the World Journal. The event was organized by Global Alliance and the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition.
One speaker called Iris "a hero for those muffled by injustice." Another said: "Let us thank her parents. They are the ones who brought her up." Between eulogies, a guitarist played "Let It Be." Then, a larger-than-life video image of Iris appeared on a wide-screen monitor: She was speaking as an expert witness in a mock grand jury trial of Emperor Hirohito, filmed at the 2003 Youth Conference at San Francisco City College, which the Nanking Redress Coalition sponsored. Finally, the group stood to sing a halting but heartfelt rendition of "Amazing Grace."
To soothe the pain of her loss, it would be tempting to seek a single, simple explanation for the suicide of Iris Chang. Though troubling to realize, those things that protect us most -- faith, family, health, financial stability -- are often powerless against mental illness.
"People who are in great treatment, who have all the love and support in the world, can still commit suicide," Jamison, author of "Understanding Suicide," has said. "Sometimes, people can be both mentally ill and highly disciplined, highly structured, highly productive members of society, whether you're talking about science or business or the arts. It happens every day of the week, and people just don't know it because people don't talk about it."
Every suicide is the tragic terminus of a tangle of roads, a route unique as a thumbprint.
The fundamental question about suicide, as Howard I. Kushner wrote in "Self-Destruction in the Promised Land," is this: "Why, when faced with a similar set of circumstances -- whether cultural, psychological or biological -- does one person commit suicide while another does not?"
No one knows the answer.
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