The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [429]
Ninety minutes or so later, the doctors moved Kay to intensive care. “We’re really not sure what’s going to happen,” they said. Susie Jr. called her father and woke him up. She told him to get the family on the plane. Buffett had to call everyone and organize their departure.
A couple of hours later, when the NetJets plane taxied into Boise, Warren called Susie Jr. and said he didn’t feel he could come to the hospital. She told him that he had to come; Don was distraught and needed him to be there. Even if Kay was not conscious and couldn’t see him, she would be able to sense his presence. Reluctantly, he acquiesced.
When he got to the hospital, his daughter met him downstairs in the lobby. She knew he was so frightened that he would have to be coaxed. “You have to come upstairs,” she insisted. “You have to come.” She led him to intensive care, where Don Graham, red-faced from weeping, was sitting alone with his mother. Kay, drained of color and unconscious, lay connected to monitoring devices that blinked little lights and made tiny noises. There was an oxygen mask over her mouth. Warren and Don clung to each other, sobbing. Lally Weymouth, Kay’s oldest child and only daughter, arrived. Eventually, Susie Jr. took her father downstairs. There was nothing more they could do. As the rest of Kay’s children gathered in Boise, the Buffetts boarded a plane for a sad ride back to Omaha.27
Two days later, the call came that Kay had died. Warren had already told Lally that he wasn’t going to be able to speak at Kay’s service. He would be an usher along with Bill Gates. Astrid took care of him at home, and work consumed him at the office. When he wasn’t working, Sharon played bridge with him or he played helicopter, anything to distract himself from the many shocks and horror of Kay’s death. So sudden, on such a happy occasion; not being there when it happened; the ambulance, the helicopter, Susie Jr. calling about the surgery; sitting in the condo waiting, the phone call in the middle of the night, flying to Boise not knowing; going upstairs to see Kay lying so still and white, barely breathing; the normally controlled Don Graham so distraught; the terrible trip home away from Kay, whom he would never see again; the phone call with the news; no Big Susie to shepherd him through it all. No more Kay, no more Kay Parties, never again.
And yet, the day after Graham died, Buffett arrived, as scheduled, to speak to an audience of college students at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. He climbed onto the stage wearing his stiff gray suit and looking only a little more awkward than usual, his breathy voice grating slightly. “Testing, one million, two million, three million,” he said at the microphone. This line could always be counted on to get a laugh, and it did. He then launched into a couple of Nebraska football jokes but, out of character, rushed the punchline and got only chuckles from the audience.
Then he seemed to catch his rhythm. “People ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom they admire the most,” he said. He urged them not to waste their time and their life. “It’s crazy to take little in-between jobs just because they look good on your résumé. That’s like saving sex for your old age. Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you’ve given yourself the best chance in life you can.”
They asked him what mistakes he had made. Number one was Berkshire Hathaway, he said—spending twenty years trying to revive a failing textile mill. Second, US Air. Buffett spoke of his failure to call the Air-aholic hotline beforehand. Third, he said, had been buying the Sinclair gas station as a young man. That mistake, he reckoned, had cost him about $6 billion compared to what he could have earned on the money invested.
But his mistakes of omission—things he could have done and didn’t do—had plagued him most, he said. He mentioned only one—failing to buy FNMA