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I was in Lowell today to see an old friend. I met Paul Sullivan when I went to work at the Lowell Sun 18 years ago. We were never all that close, but we knew each other and spent some time together. We’d meet Friday afternoons, local media mainly, at a place with a deck on the Concord River, and drink a lot of beer. Though he was drinking water. Large quantities of it. There were pub crawls. That guy could really knock back a lot of water. Paul was a local radio mouth. Very quick, very funny, and very shrewd, in a Lowell kind of way. Give you the shirt off his back, while watching sidelong to make sure you weren’t trying to angle him out of it. Instinctively got Lowell politics, was part of it. Offered many withering looks and jabs at my failure, as a blow-in, to get it.
Lowell is where I learned politics. It’s a place where if you aren’t playing at a couple of different levels, you aren’t even in the game. And that’s just the newsroom. I was never that good at it. The actual pols are usually operating on three or four levels or better. Lowell is a tough town. It’s Jack Kerouac’s town, if that means anything to you. I spent three and a half years there, and barely got out in one piece. But I managed to make it to the Statehouse when there were some people who wanted me in the Ayer bureau. Then I made it out. Like I said, that’s where I learned politics.
Anyway, I went to the Boston Herald. Paul ended up on WBZ, big Boston talk station. I saw him occasionally, spoke to him on the phone every now and then. Then, just about three years ago, Paul learned he had a tumor and went in for the first of five brain surgeries. In the hospital the day before the first one, he told the neurosurgeon, in his joking, off-hand, dead serious Lowell kind of way, “Don’t fuck it up.” Someone who was there told me about that. He fought hard, as they say. Not having been that close to cancer, I’ve never had a close look at exactly what that means. I guess it means enduring and keeping your spirits up through surgery, chemo, radiation, nausea, depression, not letting it get you, all of that. Paul as I knew him is the kind of guy who could do that. But a couple of months ago Paul let it be known he wasn’t doing another surgery. And yesterday, the family announced that they were stopping medication, and Paul’s in hospice care.
So this morning, I went up to Lowell with another friend who had gone to high school with Paul and worked with him at BZ, closer to him than I was, to go in say hello and goodbye, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do and say when a friend is dying. Neither of us had a clue what that was. We tried various lines on each other.
” ‘How you doing? You’re looking good, Paul. Look, I don’t know what your plans are, where you’re going, but can you put a word in for me when you get there?’ Whaddaya think, will that one be OK? He’d laugh, you know.”
Because, it is all about who you know, about who puts in a word for you, about winks and nods. Except when it isn’t.
“Yeah … uh … I wouldn’t try that one.”
The nurses kept us waiting in a day room on Paul’s floor. His door was closed. There had been a lot of people in and out all morning, but it was just family now. Finally, a nurse went in to check with the family. Paul’s brother came out. Broken nose. A Golden Gloves face. You see a lot of that in Lowell. Paul’s brother said, “We told him you were here. He lit up when he heard your names. But he can’t do this now.”
So that was it. Paul got to know that we showed. We weren’t going to see him in his reduced state, and weren’t going to have to figure out what to say.
We left the hospital, walked down a couple of blocks and stopped in to see Taupier. Former mayor of Holyoke, former city manager of Lowell. Both New England mill towns the feds nose around in periodically, and sometimes they get someone. I’ve known Tope for 20-odd years, back to Holyoke, since he was just a few years older than I am now. A jocular fat man who may be one of the kindest, most generous, most personally loyal and ruthless men I’ve ever met, who for some reason liked me, although I don’t think I ever proved particularly useful to him. Taupier likes reporters, likes people in general. He taught me a lot of what I learned about politics in Lowell. Important things like, “There are three kinds of people in a whorehouse. The ones who are getting screwed. The ones who are doing the screwing. And the piano player.” Sometimes, when I figured out levels two and three in any given situation, I’d talk to Tope, and he’d tell me I was a dope and then point out levels four and five. At least, what he wanted me to think were levels four and five, I think, though events usually bore him out.
I never would have thought Tope would outlive Paul, but life and politics are unpredictable, usually unforgiving games. There was another Lowell power player in there, more or less hanging out and conducting business, and we talked and had some laughs. Taupier, whose political stories range from 50 years ago to yesterday in a sentence, told a story about someone else, someone you’d think wouldn’t need to run things past Taupier, who walked through his door recently with a situation that needed sorting out. Sooner or later, everyone in Lowell politics walks through that door … the smart ones, anyway. Taupier is one hell of a piano player.
That’s it. I don’t have anything any more profound than that. Nothing about what it’s all worth and what it means. These are people for whom life is politics, and going back there ended up being just a chance to reflect on how life and politics can take you places you never quite expected, you meet remarkable people there, and it all continues on in ways not quite expected.
Speaking of which, Tope and I talked about this Niki Tsongas-John Ogonowski race, in the special election to replace U.S. Rep. Marty Meehan … another Lowell pol I know from way back, and talked to a lot about levels four and five before he held any office. He resigned from Congress a few months ago to become chancellor of UMass Lowell. Niki, the Democrat, is the widow of the late senator and presidential candidate Paul Tsongas, dead of cancer himself a decade ago. i knew Tsongas a little. another shrewd Lowell pol, but I don’t know the wife at all, and just met Ogonowski once, at a 9/11 memorial dedication. Ogonowski, the Republican, is a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel whose brother John was pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, killed on Sept. 11, 2001. It’s Tsongas’ race to lose, Democrat with name recognition, Tope said, but Ogonowski can’t be counted out. Independents in the Merrimack Valley trend conservative, and that 9/11 connection has legs. If he mobilizes them, it could happen. I told him my theory, that if the GOP National Committee had half a brain, they’d realize what a great kickoff to 2008 it would be to have a 9/11 pilot’s brother elected to Congress from blue Massachusetts, and they’d throw everything they could into that race. We’ll see what happens with that.
Topics: history, media, pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:31 pm on Friday, September 7, 2007
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September 8th, 2007 at 12:26 am
I like to think that when my time comes (as it will sooner, rather than later) that someone will say to me: “I’m glad I knew you, and I will remember you.” You can’t ask more than that.
I’m sorry for your friend. But you’ve made it clear you’ll remember him.
September 8th, 2007 at 2:18 am
When everything else is stripped away, it’s memories what count.
September 8th, 2007 at 8:45 am
[...] To a friend who has cancer. [...]
September 8th, 2007 at 9:28 am
[...] Sep 8th, 2007 by Michael van der Galiën To a friend who has cancer. [...]
September 8th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
This is a beautiful story, Jules. You could have taken out paragraph twelve; what you have here is profound, just as it is.
As Jeff says, memories are in a sense everything. By sharing your memories of Paul in your loving and serious voice you have shared your friend with us, and shared a lot of what he means to you, and a lot about why. That’s a nice tribute.
I lost four friends in row a few years back, all roughly my age, and needless to say it shook me up. One of the most important things I learned is that telling our stories to one another is a good thing to do.
The last time I spoke with my friend Karen was on the phone from Seattle just after my friend Connie’s memorial service. I told Karen that the service had been beautiful, and that it had been helpful to reflect together on who this person had been and what she had meant to us. Karen allowed as how it was a very nice thing indeed for people to be able to have that support from one another. We both knew what we were talking about. I’m happy to say that I had already read to her the story I wrote about her that I read at her service a month later. Over time we learn not to be so embarrassed about our stories. They have the power to heal, so it’s important to share them.
By the way, RebeccaH? I’m glad I know you. Even though I only know you a little through your voice online, you matter to me and I will remember you. (Unless you end up being the one with the opportunity to remember me, of course!)
September 8th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
That’s very kind, Sarah.
September 8th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
I read Paul Sullivan’s story and it hearkened back to my father’s diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer back in 2004. He was having bone pain in his leg, and they were going to take him to the MRI to see what was wrong, and he broke the femur. The next day, we found out the real reason - his lung cancer had spread. In 2005, he went through the regiment of chemotherapy, only to discover in May 2005 he was having headaches. The new diagnosis - tumors in his brain. This meant radiation in his brain, causing him progressively to use a cane, then a walker, and then becoming wheelchair bound - and he could never drive again. August 2005, the march of cancer went on, and continued to his spine and back. By then, our family brought him home and we began hospice care.
He began to rally in September 2005, but soon enough in October, he began to sleep a lot and his health was declining slowly. I knew the end was coming when we had the funeral director come to our house to plan his service. A week after my birthday, and eight days after my parents celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary, my father began to show signs that his death was coming. He lapsed into a coma, and three days later, passed away peacefully in his sleep. He was 63.
I think my father bravely fought this demonic disease, and as Paul Sullivan’s case, my father lived the rest of his days as well as he could. He retained quite a bit of his sense of humor, even through sessions of radiation that scrambled his brain, and even if it was a difficult day that required pain pills or oxygen. To have those faculties while the Grim Reaper is pacing the hallways (drinking that awful sludge that passes for coffee from the hospital cafeteria, playing Sudoku, indulging in gossip from the nurse’s station) is comforting and a sign that even after the funerals and sad songs and burial, you’ll still have memories.