A Heart to Serve Page 21

  Dear great-grandchildren,

  My children have asked me to write down what I believe. They want their children and their children’s children to know about some of the things that are important in life. That is why I have written you this letter. I am writing it to you, even though I cannot know you. I hope, as you read it, you will know me, and know your parents and grandparents, a little better. . . .

  I believe in a few simple things. I learned about them a long time ago from my mother and my father, my sisters and my brother, my teachers and my friends. I learned a lot in life, but I have never changed these beliefs all the way through. This is what I believe.

  I believe that religion is so very important. I was raised in the Presbyterian Church in Meridian, Mississippi, and I never missed a Sunday from when I was three to when I was eighteen. I believe there is a God and in Jesus Christ. The only prayer I ever pray is thanking God for all the blessings I have. I never pray when I’m in a tight spot because I think God, in his wisdom, knows what you need. I believe in the morality of religion—the Golden Rule. I say something nice to people when they deserve it. When they don’t deserve it, I say something nice about other people, so they know how to act and they always smile.

  I believe that culture is so important. My mother was so kind, so giving, so unselfish. My wife, Dorothy, is the same. When you marry, marry someone who believes in the same things you do.

  Be happy in your family life. Your family is the most important thing you can ever have. Love your wife or your husband. Tell your children how great they are. Encourage them in everything they do. I never punished my children, never ever raised my voice with them. If they know you expect them to do right, they will do right. If you praise them for the good things they do, the bad things will disappear.

  Be happy in your career. I was a doctor. I loved being a doctor because it meant helping people, being with patients every minute. All my sons were doctors. It’s a great thing to be a doctor. Whatever work you do, do it well. Remember any job worth doing is worth doing well. Always do a quality job. . . .

  I believe good people beget good people. If you marry the right person, then you will have good children. But everywhere else in life, too, good people beget good people. In your work, when you hire good people, they, in turn, will hire good people and right on down the line. That’s how we built Hospital Corporation of America. From the board members right on down to the man in the boiler room and the woman who makes the beds, we wanted good people with integrity and high moral standards. We made such a difference in the world with HCA, and we did it because good people beget good people. . . .

  Finally, I believe it is so terribly important in life to stay humble. Use your talents wisely and use other people’s talents to help other people. Don’t think about the reward; that will probably come along if you don’t go looking for it. (I always said at HCA that if we just concentrated on doing the best job we could of giving quality care, then the bottom line would take care of itself. And it did.) Always be confident. But never be cocky. Always stay humble.

  So, my great-grandchildren, I hope you will live happy and long lives like I have. I hope this letter will help you. Maybe you will give it to your children, and they will give it to their children right on down the line. The world is always changing, and that’s a good thing. It’s how you carry yourself in the world that doesn’t change—morality, integrity, warmth, and kindness are the same things in 1910 when I was born or in 2010 or later when you will be reading this. And that’s a good thing, too.

  Love,

  Granddaddy

  These are simple truths. They reflect core values that served well this man and those who had contact with him. They became the riverbed for the lives of his five children. To this day, we gather around the table at holiday times to reread these simple truths.

  That Christmas was a low point in terms of health for both Mother and Dad. For the past three years, they had lived downstairs in a bedroom set up in the large, back game room, where growing up we five children had played Ping-Pong and had so many memorable times with neighborhood friends. Mother had been confined to a wheelchair for bad arthritis in her hips. Dad had been hospitalized for progressive congestive heart failure in November and was now recovering at home. Though physically both were ill, they were as alert and optimistic as ever.

  Just after Christmas, Karyn and I took the boys out to Snowmass, Colorado, to stay in Tommy and Trisha’s condominium. Mary and Lee and their family were there as well. Just before New Year’s Day, we received a call that Mother had been in a serious accident and had broken both of her legs when her wheelchair broke loose while being transported in a van. We immediately flew home to be with her as she recovered.

  When it rains it pours. On the day of travel back home, Harrison developed severe headaches and neck rigidity, the telltale signs of spinal meningitis. On landing in Nashville, we went straight to Children’s Hospital, where the diagnosis was confirmed and Harrison was hospitalized for treatment with high-dose antibiotics.

  The following day, Mom was rehospitalized for treatment of her leg fractures and a low-grade lower-lobe pneumonia. Karyn and I spent that week in constant rotation from Harrison at Vanderbilt, to Mom at Centennial Medical Center, and to Dad at home.

  Less than three weeks after Dad wrote the letter, on January 4, 1998, I was downstairs with him at the Bowling home when he told his devoted attendant, Brenda, that he was tired and wanted to go to bed. I said good night to him and continued working on an upcoming speech, sitting in his big reclining chair in the adjacent living room. About an hour later, Brenda urgently called for me from the back bedroom, shouting that Dad had stopped breathing. “Should I start CPR?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, joining her at his bedside, “Dad wouldn’t want that.”

  Dad had died peacefully in his sleep. And at that moment, a huge chunk of my life was instantly gone. The foundation of security that I could always rely on no matter what happened to me, no matter how many risks were taken, was ripped away from me.

  I immediately called Karyn and the other family members, all of whom gathered at the house. In tearful, somber tones, we discussed how to tell Mom. None of us had envisioned them ever not being together, and Mother literally had focused her entire life on her husband, Tommy, supporting him in his profession and caring for him daily over more than sixty years of married life. We all decided to go as a family to the hospital to tell her.

  Bobby volunteered to be the spokesman, so as we gathered around her bed late that night, waking her up from a deep sleep, he told her gently, in a compassionate and controlled way that only he could have pulled off, that Dad had died. She was quiet and you could sense the spiritual loss she felt. She said she understood us, but in some ways you could tell she just didn’t believe us. We talked a bit and then let her go back to sleep.

  The visitation was held two nights later at our lifelong family church, Westminster Presbyterian. It was packed. It was raining hard, so to accommodate the visitors, we had five separate receiving lines, one to a child, rather than a single long one. Karyn slipped out a few minutes early to go be with Mother at the hospital.

  No one could possibly have guessed what would happen over the following twenty-four hours. While still at visitation, I got an urgent call from Karyn saying that Mother was not doing well, and that I should come right over. I said some hasty good-byes at the visitation and headed toward the hospital, just a few miles away. But while I was still in the car on the way, my cell phone rang again.

  “Dodie just died in her sleep,” said Karyn sorrowfully.

  We will never know the exact cause of Mother’s death. What we do know is that she was never the same after she learned of Dad’s departure. Her heart simply slowed and stopped.

  As our family reflected together on Mom’s and Dad’s lives later that night, we all recognized that as much as we grieved losing her, there was something extremely appropriate about Mother’s passing so
close to the same time as Dad. It was fitting that two people who loved each other so much should pass into eternity together.

  Dad’s funeral was to be held on the day following the visitation, now a brief fifteen hours after the death of Mom. Mary suggested, “Why don’t we have a joint funeral and have them buried together, at the same time?”

  “Impossible,” the funeral director emphatically declared. But Mary insisted, explaining that they had lived inseparably, thus they should leave this world still inseparable.

  When people arrived at the church for Dad’s memorial service the next day, they were astonished to find something unexpected. At the front of the church there were two simple wooden caskets, not one, side by side, almost touching. They soon discovered they were at a service honoring not one but both of our parents. It was raining heavily the day of the memorial service, but the church was crowded with people. Eulogies were offered by former Tennessee governor and close family friend Winfield Dunn, our longstanding church pastor K. C. Ptomey, and Karl VanDevender, Dad’s doctor, medical partner, and, more important, in his later years his closest friend.

  In his eulogy, it was Karl who best captured in eloquent words what everyone was thinking: “While the loss of one person we so greatly loved should be met with a chorus of words, I feel as if the loss of two has brought about a reverential silence. The death of Mrs. Frist last night makes this moment something else entirely. Even though we may have said at times she could never live without him, the fact of it has left us stunned and overwhelmed. One death is the story of an end of a long and illustrious life. Two deaths is a love story.” And a love story it was.

  Today, years later, I still think of Mother and Dad every day, listening for their voices in how to handle a certain situation, commenting on something they said or did, attempting to honor their legacy by living my life in accordance with their examples.

  Leaving this legacy for our children is the central reason Karyn and I decided to renovate the home I was born and grew up in on Bowling Avenue in a quiet residential section of Nashville after I left the Senate: to pass on to the next generation the values that played out there for almost fifty years among two unselfish, humble, and loving parents and five children. In our library today as a reminder of my father’s enduring values you will see inscribed on the wall, “Good people beget good people,” “The curve is always going up,” and, in the corner—“Two deaths is a love story.”

  The image of my dad growing up in a “boardinghouse” environment extends to our home yet today. Just as our family home was a haven for my friends and me as we were growing up, so is our home a place where our sons’ friends are always welcome. Now that we have moved back to Nashville to live in the family home, our family feels a sense of continuity with our heritage, a connectedness to our roots, as though we have come full circle. As Dad said so simply, “Your family is the most important thing you can ever have.”

  9

  Capitol Crossfire

  I could tell by the ashen look on Ramona’s face that this was no ordinary interruption. Ramona was glued to the television set propped on the filing cabinet in the corner, as I stepped through the doorway of her office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington.

  “What is it, Ramona? What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Senator, something terrible just happened over at the Capitol,” she managed to say, as she raised her hand to her heart.

  It was a sunny, blue-sky Friday afternoon, July 24, 1998, near the end of the business day, and I had just returned from the Senate floor, where I had been presiding. I had gaveled the Senate closed until Monday, and then Senator Rod Grams from Minnesota and I had headed back toward the Dirksen Building.

  Rod and I were walking through the tunnel that connected the Capitol to Dirksen when my cell phone rang. I glanced at the phone and immediately recognized the number of the Capitol Physicians’ Office. We had an informal agreement that if the Capitol physician received word of a medical emergency on the Hill, they would give me a call in case I was already in the area and could possibly administer emergency aid before the official response teams arrived.

  This was one such call. Details were sketchy, but someone had said something about hearing gunshots in the Capitol.

  I hurried to my office, where I watched the chilling newscast with Ramona for a few moments. Then I was on my way. Gus Puryear, my new legislative director from Nashville, who had come up to work with me, had pulled the car out of the garage and was waiting for me on the back side of the Dirksen Building. He was on his cell phone as I hopped into the car. “Ramona just called and said there has definitely been a shooting at the Capitol.”

  “Okay, get me as close to the Capitol as you can,” I replied. Gus whipped the vehicle out of the parking slot and headed behind the Russell Building on the way to Constitution Avenue.

  “Do you know how many shooters there might be?” Gus asked.

  “No, I have no idea,” I replied, peering out the window, trying to see what was going on. The streets were clogged due to summer tourists and the Friday afternoon rush hour, as we approached the north entrance to the Capitol. A Capitol police officer stopped us at the intersection.

  “Senator Frist,” I identified myself to the officer. “I’m trying to get to the Capitol.”

  “Well, you won’t be able to get in this way,” the officer explained. “Emergency vehicles are on their way.”

  I threw open the car door right in the middle of the intersection and jumped out. “Wait here for me, Gus,” I said, nodding toward the southwest corner of the Russell Building. I left my suit coat in the car and ran toward the Capitol, my tie flapping in the late-afternoon sunshine. As I sprinted past the guard station on the side of the Capitol grounds, I called out to the guard without slowing my pace. “What happened?”

  The guard recognized me and waved me through. “We have men down inside!” he shouted. I kept going, racing across the east perimeter of the Capitol lawn. The ambulances and emergency responders had not yet arrived, but I could hear the sounds of screaming sirens in the background. Other than the Capitol Police, I was one of the first on the scene.

  In those pre-9/11 days, the U.S. Capitol was one of the most accessible federal buildings in America. Unlike the White House, which was surrounded by wrought-iron fencing and accessible only through tightly controlled security entrances, the “People’s House” was largely open to the public. We loved it that way. Capitol Police were stationed at the doorways, along with a magnetometer—a metal detector—but once visitors cleared those checks, they were free to roam as they pleased, to sightsee, run into their representatives in the hallways, or watch Congress from the gallery. While some entrances to the Capitol were designated for lawmakers and staff only, on most days, anyone could enter the door now in front of me.

  But not today. A Capitol Police officer raised his hand to stop me, then recognized me and pointed toward the “Documents Door,” a busy lower-level entrance, just to the left of the majestic main steps leading up to the Rotunda. One of the Capitol Police hurried me inside and whispered hoarsely, “Men are down on the floor. We think three people have been shot, but there may be others.”

  Although I didn’t know it at the time, a few minutes earlier, Russell Eugene Weston, a man with a history of mental illness, had walked through the same door. When Weston attempted to go around the metal detector just inside, Capitol Police officer Jacob J. Chestnut stopped him and instructed him to go through the detector. Instead, Weston pulled out a Smith & Wesson .38 handgun and shot Chestnut in the head.

  Further inside the hallway, bustling with visitors young and old, another officer heard the shot, grabbed his own pistol, and opened fire in Weston’s direction. The gunshots echoed through the cavernous marble halls, and seasoned Capitol regulars as well as tourists screamed in panic. One or more of the shots may have hit Weston; another struck twenty-four-year-old Angela Dickerson, who was visiting the Capitol that day wi
th relatives. The bullet fragment creased her face, just missing her right eye; another bullet pierced her shoulder, exiting the other side.

  Ronald Beamish, a seventy-year-old British tourist, was the first to reach the fallen Officer Chestnut. Mr. Beamish’s family members took cover in a restroom while he tried to assist the fallen officer. Beamish never saw the gunman.

  Another woman tried to flee the crossfire by running into a small side corridor a few feet from the metal detector. She passed by an alcove with an elevator and a stairwell leading to the crypt, the basement area below the Capitol Rotunda, and pushed through a door marked private. do not enter. Weston followed close behind her.

  The door was the back entrance to the suite of offices occupied by House Majority Whip Tom DeLay and his staff. Just inside was Special Agent John Gibson, a member of DeLay’s plainclothes security detail. When Gibson heard the gunfire out in the hallway, he jumped to his feet and shouted for everyone in the room to take cover. “Get down! Get down!” he yelled. Several staffers ducked under desks; others ran into an inner office area that housed the offices of DeLay and several staff members.

  The rear door to the office suite opened, and the frightened female tourist tumbled into the room. Right behind her barged Weston.

  With lightning reflexes, Agent Gibson pushed the woman out of the way. Weston was firing already as Gibson pointed his nine-millimeter pistol at the intruder. Weston’s bullet blasted into Gibson’s chest, dropping him to the floor, but not before the officer had squeezed off several rounds, hitting Weston in the chest, thigh, shoulder, and abdomen. The rampaging Weston fell in a heap, up against the back wall as his blood quickly soaked the carpet where he fell.

  I knew none of this, of course, as I bounded through the Documents Door. The scene inside was horrific. Seeing the first man lying on the floor in a pool of blood, I recognized immediately that his condition was critical. The head wound was massive. I turned him on his back and did a ten-second exam; I began resuscitation efforts immediately.