Flashback 2011: Potter’s field burial not so lonely after all

Homewood Memorial Gardens

     I'm recovering from surgery, so we're raiding the archive until I'm back in the saddle.

     Death isn't my beat, but you can't work for 39 years at a newspaper and not encounter it, whether watching a body being pulled from the river, the medical examiner performing autopsies on Harrison Street, or Loyola medical students studying cadavers at a gross pathology class. This emerged from that last story, a potter's field burial. Mitch Dudak quoted the story at the end of June in a fine obituary of Tim Kowalski, mortuary science teacher, and I realized I'd never posted it here. And as a reminder pulling one thread leads to another, it was wandering around the Homewood cemetery that I happened upon the grave of the "Martyr to Radio."

     A boxy U-Haul truck wends its way slowly along the curving roadway of Homewood Memorial Gardens, to a group waiting by a large, shallow hole in a section of the cemetery known as The Garden of the Good Samaritan No. 11. The sun is bright, the sky blue, a pleasant day for November.
     The truck backs up to the lip of the hole. The rear door opens to reveal 24 plywood coffins. A corrugated metal ramp is run from the truck into the pit.
     A smell rolls out that I’ve come to think of as “refrigerated death,” a queasy blend of meat and bleach. The bodies are fresh from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office on Harrison.
     Last month I wrote a column contrasting the dignified ceremony that Loyola conducts for its medical school cadavers, complete with poems, prayers and priests, with what I imagined to be the lonely burial at potter’s field: “the sack shrouded body is tossed into a pit with a minimum of fuss.”
     Even as I typed those words, it struck me: I had overstepped what I actually knew and launched into speculation — dangerous for a journalist — and if I was going to comment on this, I had better go see what I was talking about.
     The burials are conducted monthly. These two dozen bodies had arrived at the morgue in July, and their relatives either couldn’t be found or refused to pay for a funeral. The medical examiner, Dr. Nancy Jones, wants to donate such unclaimed bodies to science, both to fill the shortage of medical cadavers and save the county the $289 per coffin paid to Homewood. But there was a public outcry, and such donations have been temporarily suspended while she re-evaluates the procedures.
     The hole is shallow, about 3 feet. Homewood is built upon stone; anything deeper must be jackhammered out of rock. Illinois law requires only 18 inches of earth over a coffin; to comply, the soil is mounded on graves.
     Four gravediggers — Adam Springer, Michael Scott, Gregory Blackshire and Eli Martinez, who wears a kerchief over his face to ward off the smell — muscle the pine boxes down the ramp, aided by four students from the Worsham College of Mortuary Science, in Wheeling — Chris Nelson, Nikkia Brown, Addie Cassidy and Darrell Randolph, who wears a nice suit for this dirty job, which earns them extra credit. Some of the coffins are very heavy — corpses are fatter nowadays. The coffins in the truck are leaking.
     “We do wash it out and bleach it,” says Homewood’s Kelly McCarthy.
     The pine boxes squeak, dragged against each other, then rumble down the ramp, splintering as they go. As each is pulled off the truck, a number is read off a small round brass tag.
     “Two ninety-five, got it,” says McCarthy. “Oh yeah, he’s a heavy one,” grunts Scott. “He’s a biggie.”
     In 30 minutes the work is done. The grave diggers, the students, McCarthy, plus someone from the ME’s office, sent to keep an eye on things, gather by the grave containing the remains of 20 men and four women.
     Tim Kowalski, who teaches at Worsham, reads from a black binder.
     “Bless me God,” he begins, then recites the 23rd Psalm: “I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . ”
     “We commend to God the souls of these individuals whose mortal remains lie before us and to commit their bodies to the earth . . . ,” he continues. “We did not know these people. Many things about them will remain always a mystery to us. We do not know what were the circumstances of their lives . . . . Many may have died in poverty. Others might have simply outlived their families. Our beginnings do not know our ends. . . . We do not know any of these things, but one thing we do know, they were human beings, and at the end of their lives they deserve to be treated with respect. Our common humanity demands that these lives should not pass from the earth unremembered.”
     He asks for a moment of silence and, as if on cue, birds chirp. The 24 names and numbers are read aloud. Then we who are not dead return to our lives on this crisp, bright autumn day while the backhoe does its work.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 7, 2011

Flashback 1997: Here's the ugly truth about plastic surgery

"Janie" by Clarity Haynes (National Portrait Gallery)

     I had surgery Wednesday, and while I'm healing thought I'd share some of my surgical stories from over the years. If my surgeon finds himself reading this, rest assured that I have a far more positive view of the medical profession now that I'm carrying around a good-as-new spine, and hip and now, please God, shoulder.

     For a while I was writing a lot of stories about medical procedures. I watched a heart transplant, which was thrilling, and a lung transplant, which was less so, since the patient died.
     I sat in on plastic surgeries: a nose job, a breast lift. I spent 10 hours at the Cook County medical examiner's office observing autopsies. When they brought the baby in, I decided to take a coffee break instead of watching, a decision I'm immensely grateful for today.
     For those eating their morning breakfasts, I'll spare you the details (though there will be some graphic images later, so you might want to finish your poached egg before continuing), other than to say that the procedures were pretty grim viewing.
     Particularly the nose job, which was more than grim, it was grisly. At one point I felt myself about to faint and wanted to retire from the room with my manly decorum intact. "My pen is running out," I lied, slipping toward the door. "I'll be right back; I've got another in my clothes" (I had changed into one of those green hospital scrub suits).
     "Oh, here," said a helpful anesthesiologist, pulling a pen from his pocket and waving it toward me, "you can use mine."
     "No, no, thank you," I said, backing out in to the hall, where I sat for five minutes with my head between my knees. "I need to use my own pen."
     Imagine the comment after I left: "Now there's a strict union for you."
     Of all the procedures I've witnessed — and I'm including the young student podiatrists from Dr. Scholl's College working on the stinking feet of the homeless in a closed room — nothing was as revulsive as a liposuction, a procedure brought back to mind last week by news of a California woman who died after liposuction surgery.
     The California case took place in March, but was just revealed recently. The doctor removed 20 pounds of fat from a woman, who bled to death while the surgeons allegedly did nothing.
     In the 15 years or so it has been performed in this country, liposuction has become an incredibly common procedure — it is the most common form of plastic surgery — and, in my view, testimony to the greed of the medical profession, since it is entirely unnecessary.
     During a liposuction, an aluminum probe — a cannula — is inserted through an incision in the skin into the fatty tissues, which are sucked out by a vacuum pump. It is a very high tech way to lose weight and as sensible as a dentist cleaning your teeth by removing them, scrubbing them down, then putting them back, surgically.
     The official party line on liposuction is that it is used for pockets of fat that can't be reduced through dieting. That's a lot of hooey. The woman whose liposuction I saw was zaftig. She was heavy. Not heavy in certain isolated pockets. Heavy all over. What she needed was to eat less and exercise.
      That's how you lose weight: eating less and exercising. It isn't easy, but it sure is preferable to going under the knife.
     The California woman who died was 150 pounds on a 5-foot-3-inch frame. That isn't isolated pockets. That's fat.
      Liposuction, as the surgeon I watched performing it noted, is "an indelicate procedure." The doctor got that cannula under the woman's skin and really worked it. The table shook. In my memory, the surgeon put his knee on the gurney to get better leverage, but that has to be a phantom of my general revulsion at the procedure.
     "Doesn't that damage nerves?" I asked the surgeon, as he worked up a sweat with the cannula. "Aren't they delicate?"
     "Nah," he said. "The nerves are tough — the cannula just pushes them out of the way."
     Right, I thought. Of course it does. Absolutely.
     I wish the patient could have been awake to see just what was being done to her — the plastic surgeon, laughing and joking as he worked. "This is the schmaltz," he said, holding up a jar of reddish-yellow sludge and using the Yiddish term for "fat."
     Anybody contemplating such surgery should, at the very least, watch it performed first. Don't be satisfied with a film. Get yourself into the operating room. Dieting will suddenly look very attractive. Exercise will take on an appeal it never had before. The pounds will fly off.
     Because I can promise you: Nothing will turn you off to plastic surgery as much as watching it will. A life of obesity seems positively jolly compared with the reality of liposuction. Any elective procedure should first be observed before being considered. I've got a good-size eggplant of a Jewish nose jutting out from my face, but after watching a nose lift, I can honestly say that I wouldn't go through a nose job if my wife and the assembled array of the world's womankind gathered with their arms linked and in unison begged me to.
     Every line I see in the mirror, every new wrinkle and sag, will be a welcome visitor compared with the alternative.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 7, 1997

Flashback 1994: Keeping a last promise.

Michael Thurson before surgery (Photo by Robert A. Davis; used with permission)

     I had rotator cuff surgery Wednesday afternoon, and will have my left arm in a sling for about the next six weeks. As for EGD, it doesn't seem a good idea to park myself in front of the computer right away, even to give you good folks something diverting to read, pecked out with my right hand, or dictated, if I can make that work. 

     Luckily, I have both a deep bench, and the ability to plan ahead. We're going to be reading chestnuts mined from the archive for a few days, and then some of my media pals will pinch hit. My apologies but, heck, you get what you pay for. 

    Regarding today's topic, naturally I first thought of surgery. This is from the days when I worked with the great photographer Robert A. Davis. I still remember the shock of standing in that operating room, learning ... well, you'll see. As for the end, that was all Bob, going the extra mile, a practice that has taken him very far.

     Eloise Heatherly made a promise.
     A registered nurse at Wyler Children's Hospital, she became friends with Michael Thurson, a slight 15-year-old boy with cystic fibrosis, struggling to breathe and looking forward to a better life with a new set of lungs.
     We'll toast with champagne, Heatherly said, when you turn 16.
     Michael was a kid who needed a promise, a reason to look ahead.
     Dragging an oxygen bottle around St. Francis de Sales High
     School, lying on a board while his mother pounded his back to loosen the phlegm that was suffocating him, his average day wasn't a cakewalk.
     It was a long wait for lungs — at 4 feet 6 inches tall and 71 pounds, not many pairs would fit his narrow chest.
     He was already sick, taking treatments at Wyler, when lungs became available after an accident.
     Around midnight Jan. 29, Michael was awakened by a nurse who asked him what his greatest wish was.
     "I want to see Jordan," said the sleepy boy.
     The nurse told him that no, Michael Jordan wasn't here. But his new lungs were on the way.
     "One out of two ain't bad," he said.
     The operation did not go as smoothly as it could have. The lungs were caught in traffic.
     "Where are they now?" a surgeon asked. "Naperville," somebody holding a telephone replied. Two nurses gasped in unison: "Naperville!?!"
     "We probably opened the chest too soon," Dr. Alvaro Montoya said afterward. "We should have waited two more hours."
     But Michael survived the surgery. He clung to life for 10 days.
     "I'm going to wait until I heal, then work out a lot, so I can get better at basketball," he had said.
     Michael Thurson died Feb. 9 from complications following the surgery. He never got the chance to improve his basketball.
     When the news hit his school, students were so upset that classes were dismissed early. The basketball team, for whom Michael was a scorekeeper, wore black bands on their jerseys and headbands reading "Mikey" for the rest of the season.
     Saturday, Michael would have been 16. Heatherly kept her promise.
     Heatherly, Michael's mother, his sisters and a few friends gathered at his grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Calumet City. They took birthday balloons, flowers and, yes, champagne, the good stuff.
     Michael would have loved it.
             — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 30, 1994

A root canal AND rotator cuff surgery? Lucky me.

     My dentist's office called after a routine cleaning and x-ray. Could I, they wondered, come back? Tomorrow. I got the sense if I said, "I can rush over now," they'd have replied. "Good, hurry." It was a matter of tone.
     The news was bad. An enormous cavity, growing hidden beside my upper right wisdom tooth. Maybe even invading the jaw bone. Requiring a root canal and crown. Probably lose the wisdom tooth too.
     "I like how you're so grim," I told the dentist, after he explained the situation. "It shows you care."
     Off to the endodontist. Two hours in the chair for the root canal. Honestly, it didn't hurt — well, my left arm did, quite a lot, fallout from my ripped-up left shoulder. Holding it still for so long. I'd occasionally extend it, taking care not to upset a tray of tools or grope the dental hygienist.
     Then there was the enforced silence. Although, being me, I still tried to speak, with a dental dam plus dental instruments in my mouth. I wanted to tell the endodontist how important Chicago is to the history of fluoridation. The initial experiments held in Evanston in 1946, with Oak Park as the control. Because he's a tooth guy. He'd be interested. Shutting up is an art form I struggle to master.
     But that isn't the most embarrassing part.
     The root canal was the first act. My next step was back to the dentist, to create a crown to go over the afflicted tooth, shaved down to a stump.
     More than three hours in that chair, including the wait while the crown was being sculpted by a high-tech medical printer. When I could speak again, this is what I said:
     "You know what I was thinking for the past two hours? And this will sound like I'm blowing smoke ... but I was thinking about how lucky I am to have access to high quality medical care like this."
     I really said that. And I meant it. Some 100 million Americans don't routinely see a dentist, usually because of the cost. Half the world's population suffers from untreated oral diseases, according to the World Health Organization.
     A reminder. You know what's much worse than a root canal? Not having a root canal.
     Honestly, the root canal/crown was plenty to hone my medical gratitude. But life has a way of laying it on. A couple weeks later, I went to get an MRI on the shoulder that has hurt me since I tripped and fell on a train platform in Portugal. I was hoping the doctor would say it was strained, perhaps prescribe warm healing oils be massaged into the area while listening to whale song.
     Badly torn rotator cuff. Which I could ignore, going to physical therapy, building up the muscles around the torn and useless muscle.
     Or I could have repaired by arthroscopic surgery. Cut a few holes in my arm, poke in a camera, set some anchors in the bone, sew the muscle back in place, out in an hour. Not even a night's stay in the hospital.

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Willis wall covering

     Downtown Chicago is rich in public art. You don't need me to tell you that. The instantly-beloved "Bean" — okay, "Cloud Gate" for you sticklers. Anish Kapoor's mirrored blob of stainless steel in Millennium Park. The artwork it supplanted in Chicago's heart, the rusty baboon/praying mantis — okay, it's really a woman — in Daley Plaza, the only large-scale sculpture by Pablo Picasso, called by locals, with a Chicago directness, "The Picasso."
     Plus all sorts of lesser lights — the orange "Flamingo" in Federal Plaza, which Calder thought was put in the wrong place (he wanted it further from the building). "Miro's Chicago," which also goes by a popular name, versus its official mouthful "The Sun, the Moon and One Star," jammed into a gap between the Cook County Administration Building and the Chicago Temple (and directly across the street from the Picasso — I imagine many lock their eyes on the Picasso and never even notice the Miro). The Chagall mosaics, "Four Seasons" at Chase Tower Plaza.
     So many, I feel fairly confident the above might be new to you.
     It's called "Atmospheric Wave Wall, 2020." Honestly, I walked past it half a dozen times, registering its presence, not being particularly impressed, until I noticed the plaque and saw who created it: Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.
     EGD readers met him in 2020, when I reposted a 2009 column outlining what I called "The Curator Effect." Museum of Contemporary Art director Madeleine Grynsztejn had walked me through their Eliasson exhibit. I'd been impressed, but also wondered if I could recommend it to readers, who would not have the benefit of the MCA director walking them through the challenging artworks — moss stuck to a stone wall; various rooms of light and color. Would they also be impressed?
     I haven't decided what I think of this piece, made of stainless steel tiles coated with enamel. The typical artist's statement on the piece's web page doesn't add much light.
     "Motion is the central principle behind this public artwork, planned especially for Willis Tower," it begins. "The dynamic pattern on the wall is activated by the motion of people walking, driving, or biking past; by the motion of the earth in relation to the sun as light moves across it; and by changes in the season and weather."
     The Sun-Times never mentioned the installation. The Tribune did so in 2022, with the slightest reference in a larger story about Willis Tower's $500 million renovation.
     Have you seen it? What do you think? Valuable addition to Chicago's public art landscape? Or textured wallpaper gone berserk?

    

One bad Apple (update) can spoil the whole week

 

     Apple sneaks into your living room at night and rearranges the furniture.
     In the morning, you come downstairs and see the couch is not where it belongs, the chairs turned facing the wall, the hutch, askew. You go to put your everything back in place, and can't.  The couch is too heavy. The chairs, somehow bolted to the floor. The knicknacks are missing.
     So you call Apple. Together, virtually, you push furniture this way and that. For nearly an hour. But when you're done, the living room is somehow still not right. You could live with it this way. But why should you have to? You want it the way it was.
     Welcome to my week with Apple, a company I've been patronizing with canine devotion for nearly 25 years, since the first sleek lozenge of a iPod came out. You could store lots of music on it. "This makes me proud to be a human being," I'd tell friends, showing it off.

     I own a Macbook Pro, an iPad, two iPod Pros, one old and tinny, one brand new, a iPhone 17. I have two 24-inch iMacs, the one the paper issued me 18 years ago, and a new one, since you can't have one that old. Bought last January. Paid for the extra memory.

     So when a little notice appears that it is time for the Tahoe 26.5.1 update, I do not feel a protective frisson of fear. There was no premonition. I didn't jerk my head to the right, as if hearing a sharp noise. These updates are necessary, for security.I have a brand spankin' new iMac I click my approval and go to bed.

      I awake to a changed world. My screen saver, for years a view of the Grand Canal in Venice, now replaced by some rock strewn aqua lake. The icons on my desktop are not in their familiar disarray, but assembled in neat rows, as if by some sociopath.

     But that isn't the bad part. The bad part is when I open my photos, I find 1,640. Not the 88,000 possessed the day before.

     No problem. Up into iCloud. There they all are. Whew. And I could leave it like that. But clouds blow away. Things happen. I paid extra for the terabyte of memory on my machine because I want the photos at hand, where I can edit them, which you can't do in the cloud. So I begin to download the photos.

     Only they won't go. I get to 10,000 or so, and the thing freezes up. I try various strategies, guided first by AI, then phoning, reaching a very realistic voice. We try this, then that ,then this again. Only it doesn't work. Nothing works.

     Eventually, I 'm passed along to an actual human. Very nice. We work together for another hour. No luck.

      Throughout it all, I tell myself: The photos are in the cloud. Human agency will get them out. On Day Four, another human has me download a new update, 26.5.2. I wonder if it has just been issued to address the nest of bugs caused by the last update.

     So I contact Apple media relations, and that is really why I'm writing this — well, that and to complain.

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This is the crucial moment

      Sure, I watched the president speak on Thursday night.
      How could you not? 

      "This is the historic moment," I told my wife.

      And I wasn't wrong. 

      Still, I haven't commented on it yet.
      And frankly, am not sure why I'm commenting on it now.
      What's there to say?

      It's painfully obvious.
      There's nothing new. 
      The same lies — he won the 2020 election, the Chinese, Joe Biden, blah blah blah. What a crybaby. 
      And argument so flimsy, so transparently fictional, that an ounce of thought puffs the whole thing away.
      But even to take the framework of fact — and I can't take credit for noticing this, but read it on social media and am happy to pass it along — Donald Trump is saying that the election of 2016, the one that took place when Barack Hussein Obama was president, was fair and fine. 

     And the 2024 election, the one that occurred when Joe Biden was in the White House, went off without a hitch.
      But that 2020 election, the one taking place when he, Donald Trump, was president, was utterly corrupt, influenced by Venezuela and China and Russia and the Club of Rome, that was thoroughly rigged. Right under his nose. Yet he, the guy who sat back and did nothing, apparently, in the dark while it occurred, oblivious, clueless, now wants to take full control of the process, ram through all sorts of unprecedented, extensive, illegal action in the four months between now and November to make sure it doesn't happen again.  

     Which, for the record, it can't — happen again — because it never happened in the first place.

     His solution? Throttling Americans' right to vote. Demanding proof of citizenship. Which, in case you don't know, is not on your driver's license. It's on your passport. If you have a passport. And 50 percent of Americans don't. It's on your birth certificate. If you can lay your hands on it.

     Tens of millions of Americans would be disenfranchisted.
     This is the line in the sand. The excess that cannot be ignored, cannot be tolerated, cannot be normalized. All the tariffs and executive orders and Qatari jets were child's play in comparison. This is where it ends. It's him or us. Trump or America. Trump will either be thwarted in his attempt to corrupt the 2026 election — either the states will resist — or democracy will die. Because if you can't vote because ICE thugs are roughing you up, or because you don't have documentation that you never needed before, then voting becomes merely symbolic, a gesture toward the country we once were and now only pretend to be. The traitor has shown his hand, completely. Which, as I said, is no big revelation, because he's been building up to this for years. For a chronic liar, he can be very candid. 

     Enough about him. It's up to us now to accept or reject what he plans to do to this country. But who will rally us? Where is Paul Revere when we need him? Maybe it'll have to be all of us, inspiring ourselves. The stakes couldn't be higher.