Never Let Them See You Cry (33 page)

How did he react? After the telegram, he told Amy, “I told everybody that this was gonna be the best New Year I ever had. I tried so hard to find you. I feel like somebody who's been in the dark for a long, long time. You're part of me. It's great to find someone who is part of you.”

“It makes me so happy that somebody was thinking about me, that my brother was looking for me.” Excited, her unborn baby kicking vigorously, she agreed, “This will be the best year ever. You should come to live in Long Island.”

He was totally unfamiliar with the area. “As long as I could go hunting there,” he said uncertainly.

“You don't shoot little animals, do you?” the Long Island housewife asked.

“Yeah,” replied the country boy. “I throw ‘em in a pan.”

Their brother, Joseph, thirty-two, he said, “is a partier.” He was last heard from a year earlier in Texas.

Unaware of Johanna Block's third boy, he was startled when Amy said, “You know there are four of us.”

The search is not over.

It seemed as though it would be a long time before the brother and sister could meet face to face. Amy's baby was due soon. She and her husband, John, a bartender, were on a tight budget, and Ray, out of work since the explosion, was broke.

“As soon as my boat comes in,” he told me, “I'll be up there, or she'll be down here.”

“Only money is keeping us apart at this point,” Amy said.

I should have known they would see each other far sooner than they expected. When the story of their telephone introduction appeared in the
Herald
, a reader bought Ray a round-trip plane ticket and provided the incidentals, such as a coat, shoes and pocket money for the Florida country boy.

Amy filled me in, with calls, an ecstatic letter and snapshots. Good news from Great Neck. It had to be a bit awkward at first, with Amy nine months pregnant and Ray on crutches. But when he arrived, they stayed up all night talking.

“We both seem to have inherited an inner strength to keep us going and happy,” she said. “Finding him was one thing, but having us sit side by side, like we are now, is another.”

The story started the New Year right for me too.

The quality of a life is not measured by its length, but by the fullness with which we enter into each present moment
.

—N
ATIVE
A
MERICAN SAYING

True heroes are people who find the courage to fight impossible odds. Some battle savage seas, storms or city streets; others battle simply to stay alive.

The bravest people I have ever known belong to the Southerland family: Ray, a good man and a good cop, full of lightning-fast humor and mischievous grins; his wife, Jane, warm, pretty, and prone to infectious laughter, and their three handsome young sons—the perfect all-American family, which makes their ordeal all the more terrifying.

A killer stalked them for years, the world's deadliest, most merciless killer. They fought back with unmatched courage, dignity and laughter, lots of laughter. They stared death in the face and never flinched. Even when they lost, they were winners.

Midwesterners, Ray and Jane met and married in Terre Haute, Indiana. Good-looking and popular, they enjoyed a solid marriage and three lively little boys, Stephen, six, Jeffrey, three, and Michael, two.

Michael was sniffling from a cold, and Jeffrey seemed pale, so on a sunny day in June their mother trooped all three to the family physician. Jeff, blond, beautiful and big for his age, might be a bit anemic, the doctor thought. He took a blood test.

Diagnosis: acute lymphatic leukemia.

An eighteen-month battle began, to save the tyke who wore a cowboy hat as he trailed after his dad and who laughed a lot, like his mom. Jeff was too young to understand the fight. A child, his parents reasoned, knows only what he sees. If those around him are happy, so is he. “It's contagious,” Jane said. “If you're loving and you're smiling and you're kissing, that's his world. That's all he knows and all he needs to know.”

So they worked at being as happy and as normal as possible, vowing never to indulge in grief or self-pity.

Doctors tried everything, but there was no remission. Jeff's weight fell, his strength faded. His parents spent long, exhausting nights massaging the tot's painful and swollen body, ravaged by the disease, the chemotherapy and bone-marrow tests.

When doctors said that no more could be done and that Jeff had little time left, the parents decided to take what might be their last vacation together as a family.

They borrowed three hundred dollars, bundled the boys into their little 1961 red Corvair and drove to Florida for a week. They stayed at a beach motel, swam in the Gulf of Mexico and explored a historic fort in St. Petersburg. Then they drove all night, arriving home with six dollars and sunny memories.

Steve's warmest remembrance is that drive home. He sat in the backseat between his two little brothers, who fell asleep, heads nestled against his shoulders.

Two months later, in December 1967, at a Terre Haute clinic, Jeff sat wanly next to his mother as Michael and Stephen romped around the waiting room playing cowboys and Indians. Steve, the cowboy, shot Mike, who playfully collapsed across his mother's lap. As she gently rubbed her youngest son's back in a caress, she detected something that had not been there before—a small lump.

Tests began that day.

A disbelieving doctor delivered the results, reluctant to tell them. How could such a thing happen to the same family twice?

Michael had a rare cancer of the nerve linings of the spine.

They had no time to absorb the bad news. The following day, Ray carried Jeff into the hospital for the last time. Jane softly told her son to “close your eyes and go to sleep.” He did so, and died. He was four years old. Jane and Ray had been so sure Jeff would live until Christmas that his presents were already wrapped.

Big brother Steve, nearly eight, wept inconsolably. Throughout Jeff's illness, he took care of Michael. Now that Michael was ill, Steve took care of his parents. In all the times of crisis, he would quickly say, “I'll take care of that, Dad.”

Michael, age three, underwent cancer surgery twenty days after Jeff's funeral. “I thought Mike's chances were zero,” Ray said. “I thought it was the end.” Jane stayed at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Ohio with Mike, while Ray worked two jobs in Terre Haute. He would drive to the cemetery at night and play his police-car spotlight across Jeff's hillside grave. Could Mike be saved, he wondered, and if so, would he be crippled?

When Mike's tumor reappeared, surgeons operated again and gave him a 30 percent chance of survival. He endured cobalt treatments until he was five.

Crisis welded the Southerlands together. Ray and Jane had heard of parents growing apart after losing a child. They made a pact: It would never happen to them. When one could not sleep, they stayed up together. They wallpapered the entire kitchen one sleepless night, finishing at dawn.

Ray, a former Marine, finished college in three and a half years, at age twenty-eight He and Jane cherished memories of their brief vacation in the sun. They loved Florida, and doctors agreed mat the climate might improve Michael's fragile health.

They moved to Miami in February 1972. Steve was eleven. Michael, now seven, had beaten cancer. He appeared cured. Chances were good he would stay that way. Ray joined the Metro-Dade Police Department. When a supervisor asked for radar experts, he and another rookie eagerly stepped forward. They discovered on their first assignment that neither knew a thing about radar. Each presumed the other did, but Ray Southerland and Ron Sorensen became a team, best friends for life. Perhaps they got along so well because, unlike many cops, both believed people are basically good. Ray worked as a robbery detective and undercover, but his fondness for young people eventually led him to the Officer Friendly beat, working with school kids.

Mike and Steve excelled in school. Jane sold better dresses at a major department store. They bought a house in the suburbs, and both boys became active in sports. Working together, the parents had reduced $28,000 in outstanding medical bills to $400. The Southerlands were nearly back on their feet.

Then it happened again.

“Did you hear about Ray Southerland's son?” a Dade homicide detective asked casually. “It's a damn shame,” he muttered. What he told me could not be worse, or so it seemed then. Steve, the thirteen-year-old son of Police Officer Ray Southerland, was hospitalized, suffering from bone cancer. Then the detective dropped the bombshell: Ray and his wife, Jane, had had three sons—this was the third struck by cancer.

This cannot be true, I thought, scribbling notes. Life is not
that
unfair.

I found Ray Southerland in Cincinnati and learned that it was indeed true. The unspeakable had happened to the same family for the third time. “This one kills me,” he said. The tough cop's voice trembled. Steve, a straight-A student and a star athlete, had injured his left leg in a football game. Pain persisted in what appeared to be a pulled muscle. X rays had revealed a tumor.

Ray and Jane had driven all night, rushing Steve to the hospital in Cincinnati. If anyone could perform a miracle they felt it would be the Ohio surgeons who had saved Michael.

“It seems like a nightmare being back here,” Ray told me from a hospital pay phone. “It brought back all the bad memories. If ever a boy deserved not to have cancer, it's him. He's a little boy who goes to Sunday School. Nobody has to tell him to go. They were all perfect children, but Steve is something special. He helped us through all the other crisis times. I don't understand it.”

Doctors were also baffled. Similar tumors sometimes occur in members of the same family, but the malignancies that stalked the Southerland children were each rare, different and apparently unrelated.

Human tragedy had become medical history.

“This is the first time that this particular group of cancers has occurred in the same family in the United States,” Dr. Alvin Mauer said. Mauer, medical director at St. Jude's Hospital, which specializes in childhood cancers, had treated Michael. Now he conferred with Stephen's surgeon. “It could be lightning striking not once, but three times,” he said.

“The chances of three children in the same family all developing different, completely unrelated types of cancer are very remote,” said Leo Grossman, a Miami Beach pediatrician.

“The odds are astronomical,” said another specialist in childhood diseases, “an amazing streak of unbelievably bad luck.”

Maybe not luck but something more sinister. “It's terribly important to find if there is some common thread, some common denominator,” Dr. Mauer said. “It could help us to better understand cancer and its causes.”

The first story appeared on the front page of
The Miami Herald
on March 17, 1974, accompanied by a family portrait, a happy moment from the past, forever frozen in time.

The type of cancer would determine the treatment. Should it be Ewing's tumor, Steve would go back to Florida for radiation and chemotherapy, with a 10 percent chance of survival. If it was osteogenic, they would amputate, but his chances would increase to 20 percent.

“That's enough to give us hope,” Ray said. “If we have hope we have everything going for us. We live day by day now.”

Diagnosis: osteogenic bone cancer.

Though frightened, Steve agreed that “it was my leg or my life.” Ray and Jane kissed his left foot and Steve rolled off to surgery, his spirits high.

“He's one of a kind,” his mother said. “We're lucky to have him.”

I asked how they would pay the bills. “We don't even look at the monetary side,” Ray said. “We both worked and paid it off before.”

The newspaper story appeared, and suddenly the Southerlands were no longer alone in their struggle. Reader response was overwhelming. The good people out there constantly restore a reporter's faith in humankind.

Everyone cared. The family's story of bravery in the face of tragedy appeared in newspapers and on radio and TV newscasts. The Southerlands were incredibly appealing. Someone said it was as if the Waltons had cancer. Police in Miami established a fund to help pay mounting medical expenses. The New York Yankees, in spring training in Florida, donated net receipts from a Sunday exhibition game. Michael, now nine, threw out the first ball. Children at a ghetto elementary school where Ray, as Officer Friendly, had warned against the dangers of drug abuse emptied piggy banks, solicited neighbors and plunked down their allowances, raising $585 to help pay medical expenses.

“They are as high as kites,” an elated teacher told me. “They're so proud of themselves.”

Employees of a Miami restaurant celebrated Steve Southerland Day by donating tips and salaries. Steve's junior high track team won a coveted county championship and sent him the trophy. From San Francisco Bay police officers: $3,800 and a coin-stuffed piggy bank filled by their children. Steve received five thousand pieces of mail from all over the world. “I don't know what to say,” Ray said. “People are so wonderful.”

Steve responded in character. A day after surgery the spunky teenager gritted his teeth and stood painfully for the first time, on a temporary metal-and-plastic leg.

Told that chemotherapy would make his hair fall out, Steve said he never liked his straight hair anyway and would like to try a curly wig. His courage endeared him to the staff. He took his first uncertain step a week ahead of schedule, following it with two more before sinking, exhausted, into a wheelchair. When an elevator returned him to his floor, he struggled to his feet, asked a startled nurse to alert his waiting parents and walked slowly down the corridor to join them.

Doctors, nurses and visitors applauded and cheered.

A letter that buoyed his spirits came from Teddy Kennedy, Jr. The son of Senator Edward Kennedy had also lost a leg to cancer. The young Kennedy mentioned a recent Colorado ski trip and invited Steve sailing at Hyannisport when he was able.

Steve answered Kennedy's letter and announced plans to become a lawyer. “My father, in a sense, deals in the law. And that's what I want to do.”

Ohio Governor John J. Gilligan sent his car to chauffeur Steve to the opening day of baseball season in Cincinnati. Steve saw Hank Aaron tie Babe Ruth's lifetime record by slamming his 714th home run. He returned to the hospital with a baseball signed by Aaron, talked sports with author George Plimpton, was presented with a football autographed by the Miami Dolphins and received get-well wishes from then-President Richard Nixon.

The Southerlands drew other notable attention. Intrigued researchers from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, asked them to submit to family testing. Doctors hoped to learn if some genetic factor might have triggered the boys' cancers. The Southerlands agreed without hesitation. “We hope to God they find a link that can save other people,” Ray said.

Ever the investigator, Ray advanced a theory, a suspicion, of his own: something that haunted him, something frightening that had happened long ago, on an Indiana autumn afternoon. Ray and Jane, then pregnant with Michael, had taken Steve and Jeff to visit an animal farm. The animals were said to be tame and friendly, but as Ray parked, an ape leaped through the car window and attacked Jeff on his mother's lap, savagely biting and tearing at the tot's left arm as the frantic parents pounded the creature to make him stop.

The sutured wounds became infected, and Jeff, feverish and listless for six weeks, was never really the same again. Soon he was gravely ill with leukemia. Ray read that the mouth of an ape is a fertile breeding ground for viruses. Could some virus transmitted by the animal have caused Jeff's leukemia? And did the illness somehow trigger his brothers' malignancies?

Unlikely, but so is the entire Southerland case history.

Steve vowed to celebrate his May birthday in Miami—“if I have to jog all the way.” On April 19, less than a month after surgery, a cheering crowd, including football Dolphins Jim Mandich and Bill Stanfill, welcomed him home at Miami International Airport. When asked how he felt, Steve wisecracked. “I don't have a leg to stand on. But I can't kick, if my knee joint rusts.” Delighted to be home, he bantered about football, the weather and his new artificial leg. “They say if it's not paid for in thirty days it will self-destruct,” he said, showing off the leg, which had triggered an airport metal detector.