Remembering Bill Meadow - John Lantos

Dan Brudney

I'm Dan Bredny. I'm from the Philosophy Department in the MacLean Center. One of my colleagues in the Philosophy Department once wrote that a good life is a life lived in multiple communities. By that measure, Bill Meadow led a very good life. Susan, children and grandchildren, friends, music, neonatology, the MacLean Center, soccer, tennis, and other things. Many, many communities. I want to talk today about the two communities in which I knew Bill, soccer and the McLean Center. In each, he was a teacher, a teacher of the girls on the soccer team, of the fellows in Case Conference, and frankly, my own teacher. Now, when I say that Bill was a teacher, I mean something that might embarrass him, and he'd surely deny it with one of his characteristically pungent phrases, such as, bite me. I will get to my analysis of that phrase a little later. But in fact, Bill was a teacher in the old-fashioned German sense of Bildung. He helped people to grow, to become grown-ups.

Dan Brudney

All good things start with soccer, and that's where I first came to know him. In a sense, I'm talking to you here today because my daughter, Allie, Bill's daughter, Beanie, and John Lantos' daughter, Emma, were childhood friends and eventually became teammates on the Red Dogs, the traveling soccer team. Bill coached that team. He had earlier coached an AYSO soccer team until it became so successful, they were in effect the 1927 Yankees of Hyde Park AYSO, that the powers in charge urged Bill to do something else, specifically to start a traveling team. Now, some of you might know this. A middle school traveling soccer team is its own rather distinctive form of life. Sunday after Sunday, no matter what the weather, and God's arranged it so that the weather is always terrible, all games are played on cold, rainy, windswept days. Sunday after Sunday in abysmal weather, you go to Jackson Park and you try to navigate around the bird droppings and you try to calm the other team's parents who have come from the suburbs and are frozen with terror of the south side of Chicago and run to their minivans the moment the final whistle blows.

Dan Brudney

Or else you get in your own car and you drive. And you drive and you drive. You drive until you reach some well-begotten place like Tinley Park, or St. Charles, or Naperville, or Libertyville, or some other suburban ville. And of course there, the weather will be worse.

Dan Brudney

I learned things from being a soccer team dad that I might never otherwise have known. I learned what the off-sides rule is. I learned I could criticize the refs only so far. One dad got ejected from the sidelines and sent to the parking lot for being excessively vociferous. And I learned that Coach Bill was quite a good coach. So far as I could judge, he was a good tactical coach. He understood what our girls could and couldn't do. The team was weak offensively, but strong defensively. And so as soon as we got a lead, Bill would have everyone go into defensive mode, huddle on the back lines, control the ball, when in trouble, kick the ball out, and kick it out as far as you can so the time is killed while the ball is being retrieved. But Bill also taught the kids to grow up. He had a few phrases that were legendary within the team, and it's worth looking at them a moment. One was a phrase that all of you from Case Conference have heard. That's the, I love you, but phrase. As you know, the but is inevitably followed by some very mild criticism, such as in Case Conference, that's the stupidest thing anyone has ever said in the history of the world.

Dan Brudney

In soccer, what followed the but would be something such as, don't you ever, ever again make that kick with your left foot. In soccer, and I think most of the time in case conference, Bill was correct.

Dan Brudney

That kick should not have been made with a left foot. But of course, the main thing is that the sentence started with, I love you. Even on those woe-begone suburban fields in that awful weather, I'm convinced that the girls heard that in his voice. Bill really did care for them. He showed it in trivial ways, such as buying them ice cream after the games, but mostly he showed it in how attentive he was. He was remarkably there and focused. And his focus was on teaching the girls not just this or that soccer skill, but on how to play together, how to watch out for one another on the field, that is, how to become more menschlich. Bill called various other things from the sideline, but the one that stuck with me was calmly, calmly. Calmly, calmly. He'd say it in the heat of the game as the girls were either back on their heels against a more powerful opponent or getting themselves together to pressure a weaker one. Either way, and the life lesson is obvious, calmly, calmly is the right way to proceed. It's a pretty good mantra. As should be clear, I'm invoking the traditional conceit that team sports build character. Now, with some teams and some coaches, this is plainly false. With Bill and the Red Dogs, I think, It was really quite true. I don't want to overstate characters built by a thousand small steps. Still, they have to be the right steps. And some steps are more important than others. Excuse me, I'm very, very glad that Bill was my daughter's coach.

Dan Brudney

Now, Soccer Bill was Coach Bill. The team families bought him a jacket with that name on the back. He often wore it to case conference. The traveling team ended more than a decade ago. But Bill and John and I and a few other dads, I don't know, is Joel Roth in the audience? Did Joel come? We've continued to meet for dinner every few months. It was a big part of our lives, that team. So soccer is what led me to the McLean Center. A dozen years ago, our girls were playing winter soccer at an indoor rink down in Dalton. And in case you don't know about this sort of activity, indoor soccer is roller derby without skates, played on green painted concrete. It's a sport only an orthopedic surgeon could love.

Dan Brudney

So one day in Dalton, between games, Bill and John asked me if I wanted to join the McLean Center. A couple of days later, I spoke with Mark, who agreed that it'd be worth a try. So that's how I started attending Case Conference, and that's how I came to know Bill in a different community. At case conference, Bill, as always, was a teacher. He knew when to remind the fellows that a case was exemplary in the sense that it represented a type of case, a type of ethical dilemma they were likely to come across often in their careers, so he would make the case a teaching moment. He also taught them that clinical ethics is about much more than applying the rules of some reigning ethical model. Slow code, so all of you remember this, was part of that kind of teaching. Somebody's grandfather is dying. The family is having a hard time accepting that fact. They want the grandfather to be a full code. A full code would be futile and cruel. What do you do? In case conference, someone would say that we should let the family know that if grandpa arrests, a code will not be done. Bill would look at that person with a kind of, really? That's what you think look? And he'd say, this family is having a very bad day. Why do you want to make it worse? He'd urge that the family be told something like, we'll do everything we can, everything that seems appropriate, and then if the patient arrests, you do a slow code. Initially, I was aghast at this. Eventually, I came around. I came to see that for Bill, the issue was, what does the family need? That was the lesson he was trying to get across. So that brings me to the building in Case Conference. Teaching the fellows to think more broadly about the family is not just giving them another item on their clinical checklist. It's part of deepening them as human beings who happen to be medical clinicians. At Kay's conference, Bill often described himself as a consequentialist. Now, I'm a philosophy professor. I regularly teach undergraduates about the philosophical doctrine of consequentialism. In fact, Bill was very much not a consequentialist. Consequentialism is the moral theory that says that the right thing to do is to produce the best consequences overall and generally. It's true that Bill cared about consequences. That part is accurate. But he couldn't have cared less about the overall and generally. What he cared about was the thoroughly local and particular. He cared about this family in front of him. The education he was trying to give the fellows, and since I was at the table, who was trying to teach me as well, was to become the kind of person who cared about this family here and now.

Dan Brudney

When Bill got sick four years ago, he couldn't come to case conference. But then he started to get better. Gradually, he got stronger and started attending again. We would sit next to one another at the back end of the room. Like middle school students, we'd whisper to one another. Initially, his voice was weak and he didn't say much. But as he got stronger, Bill's speak came back. He began to say his usual, I love you, but, followed by, you know, the most imbecile remark, et cetera, clause. I knew, however, that he was back when in response to what he took to be an especially unfamily-centered assertion, he blurted out, sort of full voice, then ricocheting around the room, bite me. Bill said bite me more than once in case conference. These two were teaching moments. Each fall, I watched as the new fellow's head snapped to attention. There we'd be, 20 or so people seated at a conference room talking about someone else's tragedy. Bite Me meant stop it. It meant grow up, become a grown up. Stop talking abstractly about medical ethics. Focus on what this family here and now needs.

Dan Brudney

Now Bill would probably say something profane, and guess what he'd say, if he heard me put things in the following way. But he taught me that what's important in moral philosophy is what's important in just about every human interaction. The philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach wrote that in being a philosopher, you need to be a human being among human beings. Ein Mensch mit Menschen. Clinical ethics is applied moral philosophy. I think, bite me, was the injunction that if you're going to be a clinician, you also need to be a human being among human beings. That's what Bill was always trying to teach people, whether in soccer or in case conference, how to be a human being among human beings. Over the last few years after case conference, Bill and I would walk back across campus. He was wonderfully and completely there, full of piss and vinegar. It was one of the high points of my week. Wednesday nights, my wife would ask, how's Bill? And I'd recount what we talked about. I miss him. Thank you.