A final thank you from Terrence Cole

Not long after my twin brother learned about his diagnosis of stomach cancer in 2017, he found himself in a Half Price Books store in Chicago on our birthday.

“I got a great 1905 book on ambidexterity and a few others,” he wrote that night. That was just one of the day’s highlights. “A wonderful day all the way around. If this is my last birthday, it was a terrific one.”

His lifelong interest in ambidexterity, a dear friend told me, could be traced to his uncanny ability to write illegibly with both hands.

This skill required years of training. One of our shared memories of elementary school was that the Mother Superior in St. Isidore’s Catholic School in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. decided that as sixth-graders we should be punished and forced for a week to sit in on a first-grade classroom for instruction in cursive.

The miracle cure didn’t work. Despite the beauty of the Palmer Method, humiliation never translated into legibility, whether using the right or the left hand.

About a week before he died, my brother tried to tackle a big stack of “Thank You” cards that he wanted to send to people who had been kind to him. But he found that he couldn’t hold the pen, which broke his heart.

As a substitute, he dictated the cards and I wrote down what he said, substituting my scrawl for his. He told one friend that he was at a loss for any word to say, but “thanks.” He reminded another, Fairbanks writer Dan O’Neill, of their many sessions of what Terrence called the O’Neill Group, mimicking The McLaughlin Group.

His postscript to that card was a quote often barked by John McLaughlin, “Wrong!”

My brother ran out of energy after dictating about 15 cards and he said we could pick up the task when he felt stronger.

We never got that chance. He had wanted to send cards to dozens of former students, faculty members and friends from across the state, in the Lower 48 and several other countries. He had received more than 100 letters after he went on hospice care.

His correspondents mentioned his world-class collection of overhead transparencies, the time he pounded on the wall for some reason and kept teaching when the wall clock fell on his head, his ability to inspire and how he had shared the gift of curiosity.

As the summer turned to fall, he set personal goals for survival. After making it to Thanksgiving, he set his sights on Christmas. The lights and tree went up early, but he concluded in early December he would not make it. I didn’t believe him, which made his death Dec. 12 even harder.

In an introduction Terrence wrote to one of my books, he mentioned how much he had liked a piece I once wrote that quoted a Christmas column by the great Heywood Broun, “a story about a man’s struggle to be at peace in the world, to hear once more ‘the voice of the herald angels.’”

He said that if a writer does well, the reader recognizes ideas and emotions and the writer “can help us, at least once in a while, to hear the angels sing.”

The last thing my brother wrote with his own hand was a card to the staff of the J. Michael Carroll Cancer Center. He had been a regular visitor for much of the past three years, sometimes a couple of times a week.

On more than one occasion, he asked the nursing staff if he was going to get an award for the being the best patient of the day. He was proud of his two nieces in the nursing field—one on the job in Anchorage and another about to finish her degree—and kept the cancer center informed about their progress.

“To all the staff at FCC,” he wrote in a shaky hand in his final card.

I haven’t delivered the card to the cancer center yet, but I will. It has only one word that I can’t decipher.

“I can’t say how much your care and loving attention has meant to me the past 3 years,” he wrote. “I would have given up long ago without the (unintelligible) and other kindnesses you showered on me.”

Everyone I’ve shown this to in my family says the hard-to-read word was “love.”

Terrence Cole and his daughter Elizabeth.