October 26, 2026
To: Conor McKeirnan, Atlanta, GA
Dear Conor,
When I was 17, my mother, Gail, said, “You have two choices ahead of you, either to be a doctor or a lawyer.”
I had other ideas. By 17, I had won a number of national and local writing awards and was determined to be a poet.
No small wonder. Our house was incredibly literary. Dad, the roguish romantic, would recite poetry from memory at the dinner table. He was a surgeon and an artist and bigger than life. Mom was a talented pianist and a would-be artist. Both of them were incredibly well read…and wickedly smart.
Being a writer was a natural outgrowth of all of that creative energy…or so I thought. So, despite having a full writing scholarship to the University of Dallas, I went instead to Colgate, mom’s choice, which in the later 70s was pumping its share of pre-med and pre-law students.
Once at Colgate I never wrote another poem. She won the battle.
My parents met on July 1,1958 at a dance at the Pavilion at Thousand Island Park. As the story goes, it was dad and his twin Jim’s birthday. They spotted my mother and flipped a coin for her. My dad won.
That night began a summer romance which ended in my conception and their somewhat rushed marriage in early October. Dad was in his last year of college and my mother left Skidmore before her sophomore year to be a pregnant, married woman living in Ilion, NY with her in-laws.
I was born the weekend Dad graduated from college- and that fall, the three of us went to Montreal so that dad could start medical school. Within three years, they had three children.
Most relationships are hard. My parents had a powerful, tumultuous relationship. They had the added stress of my father, a Navy doctor, being stationed on a ship in the early sixties and then later deployed to Vietnam, with the 1st Marine Division outside of Da Nang. Dad was at war. Mom was now raising four children on her own.
During that time, they wrote each other countless letters and some poems. Regan found the collection after they had both passed and put them in a book for each one of us. A copy sits next to my bed at Comfort.
You found it one day, Conor, while working in the room. You told me that you read the first poem and broke down in tears. “This is the kind of love that I want in my life,” you said to me.
Here’s that poem my mother wrote to my father.
There are times
When you can smile in such a way
That I’d forget a ten-year war
and lie down in your shadow’s shadow
and live on sounds your stomach makes.
In these brief times
I could die against your side
and never make a warning sound
content to suffocate
within the circle of your back-
GWB
When they were together, they were a stunning, dynamic couple. I held them in awe.
After 31 years of love and sadness and infidelities and recriminations and reconciliations, my mother finally left the relationship. She was lighter. My father was crushed.
But within the year, she was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.
So she returned home.
I don’t know all of the details about their relationship. They didn’t overshare with their children like we do now.
I do know that after everything, on the morning of April 22, 1991, when she died at home, he held her in his arms.
Stephen