Never Let Them See You Cry (34 page)

“We always said the only thing that would ever wear out on him is his mouth,” his father said.

Talking openly, even cheerfully, about the disease had become Southerland family tradition, along with an indomitable gallows humor. “One thing we can't do is run away from it,” Ray said. “There is no place to run.”

By his fourteenth birthday, Steve had founded a club for seriously ill youngsters. “Kids are better able to cope with it than parents,” he said. “And there are some things they don't want to talk to their parents about.”

At school he met daily crises with humor. He called frantically one day. “Dad, can you get down here? My leg's fallen off.”

Ray asked which one.

When chemotherapy made him sick in class, Steve's chief concern was what other kids would think. When he fell and a pretty girl caught him, he flirted. “That was fun,” he told her. True to his law-school goal, he hit the books and was voted most likely to succeed. His first ambition had been to be a football superstar, but, he said, “one-legged quarterbacks aren't catching on,” adding that he was sure to win a gold medal if hopping ever became an Olympic event. He joined the swim team and stayed in shape by wrestling with Michael.

Steve never succeeded in pinning his lithe and quick younger brother. Surprised doctors never expected Michael to be so well-coordinated and athletic after his childhood bout with cancer.

The summer of 1975, the Southerlands packed up their secondhand motor home and set out for the Grand Canyon, determined to cram as many experiences as possible over nine thousand miles and three weeks. The trip was an adventure, since Ray did all the motor home's maintenance work himself. As a result, Jane recalls, “it fell apart all across the West.”

They rode down white-water rapids and saw the Petrified Forest, Yellowstone National Park and snow-capped mountains. Two weeks into their dream vacation, at a campground in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, Ray took their small dog out for a walk.

He did not come back.

Concerned, Jane went to find them. She found a curious crowd around a man in convulsions on the ground. It was Ray. He had suffered blackouts twice before; this was by far the worst.

Again, doctors found nothing wrong, attributing the episodes to the stress of his sons' illnesses. He returned to work with his usual zeal. Assigned to a “difficult” junior high, Ray's reception was decidedly cool. This racially mixed two-thousand-member student body wanted nothing to do with a cop. Nevertheless, they were soon calling him “Dad,” and the rate of violence dramatically decreased to zero.

By year's end, Steve had grown four inches, finished his chemotherapy and was writing a book about his experiences. The family historian, planner of everything from menus to vacations, he was their cheerleader.

His special spirit would soon be needed more than ever.

Ray, now thirty-eight, remained haunted by the vacation incident. When a Miami medical team introduced a sophisticated new brain scanner, he went for a test, just to be sure. The scan revealed the real reason for Ray's attacks.

Diagnosis: brain tumor.

Ray had always said, “I don't want any of my sons to be quitters.”

Steve, now fifteen, gave his father advice: “You're not going to be a quitter. You can meet the challenge, whatever it is. This might be part of a big, heavenly plan, a grand plan to find the cure for cancer.” It would also, he quipped, provide at least four new chapters for his book.

Teddy Kennedy, whose son still corresponded with Steve, wrote to Ray: “Were another chapter to be written in President Kennedy's
Profiles in Courage
, it would be about the Southerland family.”

Ray was admitted to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in February 1976. I flew to Washington to be with them. His partner, Ron Sorensen, was also there.

We saw Ray just before surgery, his thick dark hair gone, his head shaved. “I've been wanting to get rid of this dandruff for a long time.”

By now it was routine to wisecrack and joke all the way to the operating room. Ray winked at his partner, warning doctors and nurses: “When you open up my head, all the dirty thoughts and undressed ladies are going to come flying out.”

During the six-hour wait, Jane sat in the hospital solarium, crocheting an intricate tablecloth. “When we get the time and can afford it,” she promised Steve, “we'll have a nervous breakdown.”

Ron Sorensen chewed his fingernails to the quick, then played pocket billiards. Steve lost three times, then made a request: “I've already got one handicap—can I have another?”

A surgeon finally emerged, to identify the tumor as the lowest and least deadly of four grades of astrocytoma, a form of low-growing brain cancer. They had removed it all. Jane called it the “happiest day of my life, like the answer to a prayer. We deserved a break.”

She told Ray, still groggy, that the surgery took so long because it took doctors five hours to find his brain.

“I hope this is the last time,” said Steve, elated. “The future is pretty optimistic now.”

Ray's sole complaint next day was a slight headache and his shaven head. Eight days later, wearing a Kojak hat to cover his baldness, he ignored a waiting wheelchair, strode down a Miami concourse and was engulfed in a hero's welcome. More than a hundred cops, friends, relatives, neighbors and strangers applauded. A woman passerby saw the photographers and squealed, “It's him! It's Telly Savalas!”

Michael, who had painted a gigantic welcome-home sign, dashed through the crowd into Ray's arms. “Made it, didn't I, Tiger?” his dad said. “I knew I'd be back. I had planned to fight like you wouldn't believe.”

Bouquets of flowers and lollipops waited, from the school kids who called him Dad. The school band played a concert. Drama students staged plays. Others conducted bake sales, carwashes, plant fairs and ballgames. The kids from the “difficult” school raised $2,592 to help their favorite cop.

Ray underwent cobalt treatments, then passed a six-month checkup with flying colors. “I'm a lucky person,” he said. “I don't care what anyone says. Doctors saved two of my children and caught my cancer in time.”

That summer, the family piled into their motor home once more. This time their “vacation” destination was the National Cancer Institute, to cooperate with medical detectives seeking clues to the killer's origins. Cancer researchers say their tests may help unlock the secrets of the disease. The Southerlands were X-rayed, photographed and fingerprinted, pushed, pulled, prodded and jabbed. Blood, skin and dexterity were tested and teeth scrutinized. Nearly twenty molecular, chromosome and immunologic tests were performed, many of them unpleasant.

They never balked. They wanted the mystery solved. “There has to be a reason we're the only family like this,” Ray said. “Somewhere down the line this thing has to end.”

Scientists traced Ray's family tree hoping to learn when the killer first appeared and how often it had struck. They interviewed and tested other family members, including Ray's younger sister, Nancy, age twenty-three, a policeman's wife. Two weeks later, a malignant growth appeared on her calf. Her leg was later amputated.

Scientists learned that Ray's brother, who died at age two, was killed by a brain tumor, not by polio as Ray grew up believing. The anemia that killed his mother was a complication—of breast cancer.

NCI researchers hired a professional genealogist who traced the family back six generations, to 1840, and discovered a lost branch of the Southerland family tree. What he learned excited researchers and supported their theory, ruling out environmental causes and pointing to a genetic defect.

The relatives the genealogist found were strangers to the Southerlands but not to the killer. Cancer took the life of Ray's great-great-grandmother in 1865, when she was in her twenties. The disease killed her son in 1890, when he was in his thirties. His only son died of cancer, which struck three of his daughters. A distant cousin was a leukemia patient at age two. “Things can run in families for genetic or environmental reasons,” said Dr. John Mulvihill, chief of the Clinical Genetics Section, Clinical Epidemiology Branch of the NCI. “You can't connect an environmental thread” between such distant family branches. “Certainly what could connect them is their genes.”

Enough Southerland blood, tissue and cell samples were harvested and frozen to use in research for years. Doctors are seeking “something different in the cells from the family as compared to other people and sort of an extension that will tell us why other people get the tumors they are getting,” Mulvihill said. “There is something in their cells, whether it's genetic or enzymatic, it's something intrinsic in the cell and the way the cell divides.”

“It means that cancer literally runs in this family,” Jane said. “It's like one great big accident fell on us.”

The Southerlands continued to maintain active and happy lives. “I don't want anyone's sympathy,” Steve said. “I want their respect.”

He earned it. At age seventeen he led a successful petition drive to establish a radiation-therapy center for South Dade cancer patients. He became the first teenager ever honored as Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year.

He went to the University of Florida in 1978, but drove 350 miles home most weekends to spend time and go to movies with his kid brother. They ate popcorn, drank Cokes and brought home flowers for their mother.

Michael, at fourteen, planned to be an architect. Cancer-free for nearly ten years, he was a medal-winning swimming champ, an Olympic hopeful who could cut through the water like a fish, leaving Steve, who had taught him to swim, in his wake. However, in late 1978, Michael's perfect backstroke underwent subtle changes.

His side ached when he arched his back. Fearing the worst, his parents whisked him to Cincinnati.

Diagnosis: osteogenic bone cancer, apparently triggered by the radiation treatments that had saved his life a decade earlier.

Doctors planned pioneering surgery never attempted in the United States. Michael knew it was delicate and dangerous. He hung his junior Olympic backstroke medal over his bed. “I'm psyched up for this. No matter how it goes,” he told his dad, “pin my medal on me.”

He insisted that his mother tape a handwritten sign to his spine before he went to the operating room. A reminder to the surgeons:
REMEMBER, I'M A SWIMMER.

This vigil stretched into twelve hours. Surgeons removed a cancerous vertebra, replacing it with metal braces and parts of his ribs.

Michael came home two months later, twenty pounds lighter and half an inch shorter. Pasty and frail, he lay flat across two airline seats, encased in a fifty-pound shoulder-to-knee plaster cast. Painted on the cast was a blue bow tie, vest, red carnation and a pocketwatch permanently set at 3:30, school dismissal time. It was his turn to hide the effects of chemotherapy with a hat.

The press and a crowd was waiting. That too had become tradition. From his supine position, Mike jokingly introduced big brother Steve as “my backbone.”

A routine bone scan six weeks later became a cliffhanger. A hot spot, a possible tumor, had appeared above his left knee. Jane flew to Cincinnati to join Mike and Ray. Her flight stopped over in Tampa, and as the jet took off, she glimpsed the twinkling lights of the motel on Tampa Bay where they had spent their last short vacation as a whole family. “I saw that motel and thought, thirteen years later—and I'm still at it,” she said. “You'd think someday it would quit.”

Doctors decided the frightening image was caused by Michael's immobility—unable to sit or even be tilted. He flew to Cincinnati for chemotherapy so often that he logged more hours in the air than a commercial pilot. In three months he was lifting weights. In four he was walking, first with parallel bars, then a walker, and finally crutches. When he stepped slowly off a Delta jet the body cast replaced by a plaster jacket bearing a Superman emblem, Miamians gave him a hero's welcome.

Four months later, pain overtook him. The cancer had spread. “I'll fight it to the end,” he vowed.

“He's brave,” his mother said with a smile. “He's not going to lie down and die. We never say quit, you know.”

Ray would grin and shrug his shoulders when asked how he was. “Not so bad. Not bad at all, considering that the whole family has cancer.”

Four months later surgeons proposed a last desperate move to save Michael. They would sever his spinal cord, remove seven cancerous vertebrae, then rebuild the cancer-riddled spine with steel rods, plastic and bones from the legs he would never use again.

Michael agreed. Growing up in a wheelchair, he said, beats not growing up at all.

On April 1, 1980, a team of seventeen surgeons operated for seventeen hours. The patient, age fifteen, returned home for the summer, talking about the future. “I want to see Steve finish law school. I want to be married. I want to have kids. I look forward to enjoying every bit of life that I can.”

Ray breezed through his fall physical. But when he returned to NCI for a routine checkup in spring 1981, he took growing doubts with him. Something was not right. Miami's fast-talking, articulate Officer Friendly was stumbling over words. His right hand sometimes went numb.

Doctors isolated the problem: a tumor, unrelated to the first, spreading fast through the left side of his brain. On May 5, his forty-third birthday, they told him they would remove as much as they could, but to take it all would strip him of his ability to speak and move.

The crisis was double-barreled. Ray's operation would be at the NCI. Michael was already set for surgery in Cincinnati. Ulcers had cruelly exposed his plastic-and-metal artificial spine.

“In the past we could concentrate our energies on one problem at a time,” said Steve, now twenty-one. “Now they are overlapping. This is surely a test of us as human beings.”