FEB. 22 1974 Page 9
mon sickness. One morning
MOVED
was taken to the operat-
ing room for a marrowtest, and when he came backI asked,
“Marrow hurt bad?”
Ele replied enthusiastically, “Marrow hurt bad.” Then I]
had a marrow, and the same exchange took placein reverse.
We both had a hemoglobin transfusion on the same day.
I said, “Blond make you feel good.”
He enthusiasticaliy agreed again. “Yes, blood feel good.”
PeSeeeTee
gee
eo
On October 27; at long last, John took the needle out of
my ary and pronounced the pneumonia under control. |
asked
how hefelt for one Jast lime, and this time he
said again, “Fine. Fine.” We said good-bye, and I left the
hospital,
With
_ permission, I had written a column about
him J imagine it was because of the column that someone
in the Interior Department, under whose bureaucratic aegis
fell, called Amanda in the office about ten days after
] had left the hospital and asked her to tell me that
was dead.
;
Amanda hated to tell inc, but finally she did.
“What did he die of?” T asked.
“The man said pneumonia,” she said, and then quickly
added, “But don’t you go thinking it was your fault.”
The chances are that
picked up whatever virus
or bacteria bad made me sick. But John Glick told me not
to worry, that the chemotherapy had failed and poor
was termina! anyway.
.
death deeply depressed me for a while. There
was, of course, what might be called the send-not-to-ask
syndrome. With my lowdefenses the pnenmonia might well
have killed me; John Glick was surprised by how quickly
I recovered, given my corporal’s guard of granulocytes.
There was also the depressing feeling, hard to shake olf,
that I had somehow been responsible for
death.
There was the further feeling, as hard to shake off, that we
Americans were responsible for his death—that we had
killed him with our bomb. His was the world's first death
from a hydrogen bomb, and the bomb was ours. Andfinally,
there was tho fecling of the desperate, irrational unfairness
of the death of this gentle, oddly innocent young man.
For some time, I found a line, I think from TY. S. Eliot
(though I can’t find it), going Uuough my mind: “The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.”
Before
died, { had long believed in my mind that
the nuclear weapon, in its indiscriminate, unimaginable brutality, was an insane weapon, suicidal, inherently unusable.
Now I knew it in my heart,
_ ia oe
pees
tes
-
eo
ree
[This saterial is excerpted from Stewart Alsop's
nee hook "Stay of Execurteseu sort of memoir”
published Ly Lispincott.
We received the in-
formation courtesy af Qulcie Thorstensen]
as
PRIVACY ACT MATERIAL RE