Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [55]
Nancy and I continued to support each other emotionally, but our lives these days were far from the carefree frolic that I had expected when our three little ones had left the nest. Life for me these days largely boiled down to work, Lori and sleep.
Earlier in the spring, I had told my firm about Lori's problems. I had been forced by necessity to confront the issue with them much sooner than I had been ready to. Because Lori had already graduated from college, she was considered an independent adult, and no longer covered on my medical insurance. Her coverage had lapsed by only a few months when she was hospitalized. She had no insurance of her own, and her bills were mounting by the tens of thousands of dollars. The costs were more than I could comfortably handle on my own. So in March I wrote a memo to my firm, asking them to help me out.
The memo went to the board. I was a member of the board. That should have made things easier for me, but—emotionally at least—it made things harder.
I had spent years cultivating my hard-nosed, cost-conscious, demanding image. I was the guy who operated by the book, played by the rules, and didn't believe in special deals. I built my career on that philosophy. I helped build our firm on it. And here I was, Marvin Schiller, the macho manager, coming to my colleagues with hat in hand, saying, “Please guys, can you help me out?”
They asked me to leave the room while they deliberated. I stood outside the large room where our board meetings were usually held around the half dozen rectangular tables pushed together to make one huge square. I was usually inside making decisions. Now I was outside, waiting for a decision to be made about me.
After the better part of an hour they called me back in the room. They had dictated into the minutes of the meeting a series of stern little warnings, including one to other employees to plan more carefully for the health insurance needs of their children who no longer qualify for coverage. The firm can't be responsible for the coverage of dependents who no longer qualify, they said. But then, after a reminder that this was a one-time-only exception, they agreed to extend my coverage for long enough to cover half of Lori's bills.
Still, I continued to keep disclosure to a minimum. About a year earlier, just as Lori had left the hospital, my new secretary, Anne Schiff, had joined our firm. She must have quickly guessed the situation, for she always put Lori's calls through to me right away. But I never mentioned Lori's past, and Anne didn't ask. During the ordinary chitchat that precedes business, I would talk about my one son heading for college, and my other son heading for graduate school…and then I would talk about my daughter who “worked” in a hospital. I figured it was a play on words. After all, she was working hard at getting well and was in a hospital. I didn't see any point in being more explicit than that. It would just make people uncomfortable in situations where we were aiming at being relaxed.
With our friends, though, we dropped the charade. Once she had transferred from Payne Whitney to New York Hospital's branch in Westchester, we knew that this was no short-term thing that could be brushed into the background. With doctors at Payne Whitney telling us to give up hope, I realized that this was not something that she was going to shake in a few weeks, that this was a very serious, and probably a long-term illness. I never believed she wouldn't get better, but I was beginning to realize that the hills we had to climb on the way back were steeper and higher than we had hoped for.
So Nancy and I talked it over and agreed that we would be open with our closest friends. We