Loveletters

Human Life Review, Winter 1999 by McFadden, Faith Abbott

Jim and I would have celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary on April 18, 1999. And we would have celebrated the 41st anniversary of the day we first met-October 31, 1957. Halloween. Exactly three years to the day after I became a Catholic. Jim died on October 17, 1998: the next day we would have celebrated the birthday of our daughter Christina. Jim's scribbled note to me, on October 16th: "Faith-who is coming here first on Sunday? Do 'we' want champagne?"

In mid-November Mr. James McFadden of "The Human Life Foundation" got "An invitation to Be Listed Among the Elite" in Marquis' Who's Who in the World. I informed the Senior Editorial Director of Marquis' Who's Who that my husband was no longer "in the World." I should have added that he is now an Elite in a different world.

In all our years together, Jim and I had always been together, so I never got any letters from him; but after his larynx was removed, he wrote to me constantly: at home with his red pen on his ever-present yellow legal pad, and at the office, where he could communicate faster (really fast) on his Royal: one morning as we made our way down Third Avenue (near where we went to the daily seven o'clock Mass) to our office, he began laughing-- no voice, but you could tell he was laughing-and I figured this had to do with the woman we'd observed waiting for the 34th Street crosstown bus. She had black hair and was wearing a long white blouse over a long tight black skirt, and those stylish klunky black platform shoes. The minute we got to the office, Jim dove for his typewriter and wrote: "Monica Penguinsky?"

Sometimes an observation or a pun couldn't wait for the typewriter: he would duck into a doorway and scribble it down. Back in 1996, when he knew he'd be in the hospital during Christmas, probably to have more holes ("stomas") put into him, he stopped just a half block from our apartment building and, using the top of the corner mailbox as a clipboard, he wrote: "Silent Nightnurse, Hole-ey Night." Thus began our pre-hospital re-titling of Christmas Carols. You must know the "Jolly Old St. Nicholas" song . . . my version (for Jim) was "Jolly Old St. Nicholas, Mend My Rear This Day . . ." but the best (also mine) was "The Holly and the I.V."

Jim had managed to keep going, since 1993, as more and more "normal" bodily functions were taken away; but becoming voiceless (in 1996) was by far the most devastating. He felt "trapped in silence" and looked forward to "the wee hours" [during the night-he didn't sleep much] "when silence is normal." He got some wonderful letters, such as the one last June 16th from N.Y. Post columnist Ray Kerrison, who wrote "Sometimes, the Lord seems to ask the most of those He loves the most. How you have managed to work through these years of privation is beyond me. It's truly heroic.... for a man with no voice, you make a helluva noise." But Jim could never get over not being able to really make a helluva noise: "Nobody," he wrote me one day last summer, "can know what it's like for me to be marooned in the desert island of my silent world-all my life I was famous for my quick-fire mouth-I got off all my anger and frustrations instantly-I could go back to being `OK.' Others, certainly you, couldn't forget so easily-now it's all turned back into my trapped mind, a poison I can't get out because there is no way for me to get rid of it."

But he did get rid of a lot of it, by writing ("back to the typewriter, my only 'egress' . . . and thank God I'm able to keep working . . .") and his humor. One of his endearing traits was his method of telling jokes and making puns, at the office. He would type, on 3 x 5 cards, a headline he had seen or a question about something ("Q") and show it around, while covering up the bottom half of the card that had the answer ("A") or his spin-off on a headline pun. One morning he wrote: "Talking about a Chinese art exhibit, the WQXR woman [radio announcer] called it 'Orientalia' . . . Q: What is Orientalia? A: I know it's something Bill Clinton does, but I don't know exactly what-and I don't want to know!" And when the Spice Girls were presumably breaking up, the June 2nd New York Post ran the headline 'GIRLS' ON BORROWED THYME and "Pop tarts will turn to toast . . ." Jim typed that on top of a card, and after we'd laughed at that, he uncovered the rest: "Too bad-the Spice Girls had been planning a TV show to rival Baywatch" and then (typed upsidedown) "Bayleaf."

Jim McFadden or "Mac," to some of his older friends and colleagues, had an encyclopedic mind. (I just asked our daughter Maria: "Would you say that Dad was a walking encyclopedia?" "Oh, definitely," she answered.) If some writer or editor needed a date for a war or military skirmish, or some background on a papal encyclical, it was "Call Mac." Jim knew something about everything, and everything about many things. Here are some categories of his expertise: theology, geography, history, wars (all of them and every kind of bomber and warship); Napoleon, jazz, baseball (he knew the statistics of every major ballplayer, past and present, and knew everything about Ted Williams); opera and classical music (pun: "I go for Baroque"). He loved Bach and admired the Beatles ("they have talent") and harpsichord and Mozart. ("All that pseudo-music on WQXR has none of what Mozart never lacked: he was always building, taking you with him into higher and higher planes-the 'moderns' just 'compose' notes, and more notes, going nowhere . . ")