An American Son: A Memoir (41 page)

We got a little good news the second week of July. Rasmussen released a new poll that showed I had reclaimed the lead. It was a very small lead, but a lead nonetheless. More good news came four days later, when we announced our fund-raising total for the quarter. We had raised $4.5 million, exceeding Crist’s record-breaking total and even the seemingly unrealistic expectations his campaign had tried to set for me.

Other new polls still gave Crist the lead. He had raised $1.8 million for the quarter—less than us but more than he had raised the previous quarter. The press saw it as further evidence he was back in control of the race. But I wasn’t worried. Once the Democrats chose their nominee, political gravity would set in. Crist and Kendrick Meek would fight over the half of the Florida electorate that approved of the direction of the country, and I would claim the half that didn’t. We budgeted to begin our television advertising right after the Democratic primary.

Even before our TV push, the numbers started to shift. Rasmussen released another poll that had me ahead. So did Mason-Dixon. Others followed. A few still gave Crist a lead, but we were confident momentum was shifting our way again.

Jeanette and I did a quick fly-around of the state the day before the Republican primary on August 24. There wasn’t any doubt I would win the nomination. I had only token opposition after Crist pulled out of the primary. But we thought we could use the primary to reengage the media’s interest in our campaign and as the launching pad for our final push.

I voted for myself early the next morning, then stopped by the Biltmore Hotel, where my top donors were spending the day making finance calls for me. After lunch I went to my sister’s house to check on my father. He had deteriorated over the summer and was now bedridden. My nephew Danny opened the door with a grin on his face. I asked him what was so funny, and he told me to come in and see for myself. I walked to the back of the house and found my father sitting in the living room, fully dressed. It was the first time he had been out of bed in a month. He wanted to attend my victory party that night. A few days before, he had filled out and mailed his
absentee ballot. He had voted to send his son to the United States Senate, and now he felt strong enough to celebrate. He would have to go in a wheelchair, and he couldn’t stay long. But it was the best news of the day.

I left for an afternoon Mass and then went home to change for the party. We arrived at the Doubletree Miami Hotel at six that evening and waited in a holding room behind the stage, where my nephew informed me that my dad wouldn’t be coming. He had become weaker that afternoon and didn’t have enough strength to join us. He had wanted to be there. He had wanted to make one final sacrifice for his son—one last selfless act in a lifetime of selfless acts. But it was not to be. And soon it would be time to say good-bye, forever.

A
S EXPECTED, KENDRICK MEEK WON THE DEMOCRATIC primary, and he got a short-term bounce in the polls. But he didn’t have much money, and few observers believed he could win the general election. Our path to victory required a viable Democratic nominee to compete with Crist for Democratic votes. In a three-way race, I would only need to hold the Republican base and win a decent share of the independent vote. I wouldn’t be pressured to move to the left. I could run as who I was: a fiscal and social conservative. But as we began the fall campaign, we worried that a three-way contest might be effectively reduced to two. If Kendrick became irrelevant—he was underfinanced and a distant third in all the polls—Crist would become the de facto Democratic nominee. Democrats would embrace him as their best hope to defeat me. We couldn’t let that happen.

We discussed what we could do to help keep Kendrick viable. He didn’t have the money to finance an effective television ad campaign. We needed to help him get free airtime. Debates were the best way to do that. And so, two days after the Democratic primary, we agreed to seven televised debates. Some Republican observers questioned why we would agree to so many debates, particularly after we regained a lead in the polls. But they served their purpose. They kept Kendrick in the news and relevant. Thanks in large part to Kendrick’s effectiveness as a debater, Crist never had a clear field to court Democratic votes.

The seven debates served as a regular reminder that there was an actual Democrat in the race. Kendrick performed very well in all of them. I thought he won at least two of them. He certainly surpassed the low expectations people had set for him. I never understood why people expected so little of him. He was smart, quick on his feet, an agile campaigner and very likable. Those qualities came across quite well in the debates.

We began our TV ad campaign the same day we agreed to the debates. The first ad was designed to establish who I was and why I believed what I did. It was shot in black and white, purposely designed to look and feel very different from the attack ads voters had been inundated with during the primary. We wanted to assure voters our campaign was about big things, not petty politics.

My parents, especially my father, were featured in the spot. I remember one image in particular: an old photograph of my father bartending on Miami Beach in his crisp white uniform. The ad was very effective, and we saw its impact in our internal tracking polls. Everywhere I went, people mentioned it to me, sometimes with tears in their eyes. They told me my story was their story.

Our first debate was scheduled for Sunday, September 5, on
Meet the Press
. Crist had decided not to participate, but Kendrick was all in, which was the only thing that mattered to us at the time. I had planned to devote as much time to debate prep as I had before the Fox News debate with Crist. We were in the middle of a prep session when I received a phone call from Barbara’s mother in law, who lived with her. She called to tell me my father was struggling to breathe and had become very agitated.

I left debate prep and drove to Barbara’s house, where I found my dad sitting up in bed in a panic. He couldn’t catch his breath, and the low dose of morphine drops wasn’t helping him. I gave him a nebulizer treatment to open up his lungs, but he yanked off the mask and asked to be taken to the hospital. I argued against it. They’ll only do the same thing we’re doing here, I told him, and send you right back. But he was insistent, so I gave in and called 911. The paramedics arrived, and within minutes, he was on a gurney. One of the paramedics was Chris Boulos, Veronica’s boyfriend and future husband. He hadn’t been on call, but rushed to the house when he heard my father’s name. As Chris and the other paramedic lifted him into the ambulance, my father said out loud, “
De aquí al cementerio
.” From here to the cemetery.

I followed the ambulance in my car and arrived at the hospital at the same time. They gave him oxygen and several more nebulizer treatments, and then transferred him to a hospital room. My nephew Danny spent the night with him. The next day I kept my schedule, which consisted mostly of debate prep, while Veronica and Barbara took turns staying with my father. When I finished, I went home for dinner and helped put the kids to bed before I headed to the hospital, where I planned to spend the night. When I arrived there, Barbara told me he had eaten his dinner and had had a pretty good day, joking with the nurses who’d come in to check on him. Barbara had been there most of the day, and was tired. I told her to go home, and I settled down on the roll-away bed next to his bed.

I turned on the television, and like we had so many times over the years, my father and I watched a Miami Dolphins game together. As the evening wore on, I noticed a change in my father’s behavior. He became increasingly disoriented. He thought we were in a kitchen, and asked me to put the dishes in the cupboard. He started calling me Papo, his brother’s name. Soon he became agitated. He tried to climb out of bed, though he didn’t have the strength to do it. He began shouting his brother’s name, asking him to help him. He begged for air. His eyes became glassy. I finally called for a nurse.

She gave him an injection of antianxiety medication. It worked for a half hour, and then he became agitated again. He asked me to hand him a blanket he thought he saw hanging on the wall. He wanted me to fan him to help him get air. They administered the antianxiety drug several more times, but it didn’t calm him. He was overcome by anxiety. He was suffering.

My father was becoming hypoxic. His damaged lungs could no longer process enough oxygen to his brain, causing hallucinations and the terrifying sensation he was running out of air. I had researched my father’s condition after he had been diagnosed as terminal, and I knew he would enter the last phase of his life when he became hypoxic. In the early-morning hours of September 3, I knew that moment had arrived.

There was only one way to relieve his suffering and make him comfortable. He would have to be placed on a morphine drip. The nurse advised me that once he was started on the drip, he would slip into a comalike state, from which he would probably never awaken. I worried that it was too soon. We had seen him deteriorate before, only to improve the next day. I
worried that if I ordered the morphine that night, my mother and sisters would never have another chance to tell him they loved him, and say good-bye.

I stood in the doorway of his room and watched him. He was twisting and turning in his bed, calling to his brothers, Papo and Emilio, “
Ayúdame! Ayúdame!
” Help me. Help me. I turned to his nurse and told her, “Do it.”

He calmed down quickly after the morphine drip began. In a brief moment of lucidity, he told me, “
Yo sé que te estoy molestando mucho
”—I know I’m bothering you a lot. A few minutes later, he fell asleep. I would never see him open his eyes again.

The next morning, I texted my siblings and Jeanette the details of what had occurred overnight, and everyone came to the hospital immediately. I still held out hope he would wake up at some point that morning. But as the morning wore on, it became apparent he would not. We canceled the
Meet the Press
debate. Kendrick Meek called to express his concerns. He was brief but very gracious, and I appreciated it very much. Politics can be an ugly business, though. Some Meek and Crist supporters expressed skepticism on Twitter and Facebook about the family emergency that had caused me to cancel the debate. They claimed I was afraid to debate Kendrick and had made up an excuse to get out of it. I didn’t hold Kendrick and Charlie responsible for their behavior. We all have supporters who say unfortunate and sometimes cruel things. But it did show the lengths that some people will go, especially since the advent of the Internet and the social media age, to disparage and even dehumanize their political opponents.

It was a long Friday waiting for my father to die. My mother, my brother and sisters, my nephews, my aunt Georgina, my uncle Alberto and aunt Marta, Jeanette and I kept vigil. We never left his side. We watched for any sign of a change in his condition. We knew it was a matter of time, but how long? Hours? Days? None of us knew.

A steady stream of visitors came to pay their last respects. They all grieved for my father and for my mother. My father held on; his breathing was slow but even paced. Friday night we slept in his room, or tried to.

When Saturday morning arrived, my father was still breathing—but barely. In my mind, I was transported twenty-six years into my past, when I was a teenager keeping vigil at my dying grandfather’s bedside. I was afraid to leave my father’s side for a minute for fear I would miss his final breath. I was
afraid to go downstairs to get something to eat or go home to take a shower. So I stayed and watched the life drain out of my father. Nothing else mattered.

We passed the hours by reminiscing about my father. There were moments of laughter and tears. Everyone had something to add about the man who had meant so much to us. At one point, my mother sat next to his bed, stroked his hand and cried. She kept asking him to wake up. They had been married for sixty-one years. It was more than her heart could bear.

They say people on their deathbed often cling to life to spare their loved ones the pain of their loss. If that is true, my father would have surely been one of those people. Knowing we were hurting would have affected him greatly, but knowing my mother was suffering would have been too much for him to bear. He adored her and protected her fiercely. We believed he wouldn’t let go until she let him go, and so we asked her to say good-bye and give him permission to depart this life. She resisted at first. But by the afternoon she relented. She caressed his head, told him how much she loved him, and encouraged him to let go. I think that was the hardest thing she ever had to do. She had spent a lifetime by my father’s side, and now, at seventy-nine, she faced her remaining years alone.

Early Saturday evening, he began his final transition from life to death. Within a few hours, my father’s breathing pattern began to change, as did his physical appearance. He didn’t even look like my father anymore. I don’t know if that made it harder or easier. The man lying in that bed was not at all like the man I remembered. His face was gaunt and pale. His frame had withered. His false teeth had been removed.