THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED !!!

[Daanyeer]

source: http://www.intellectualconservative.com ... rld-ended/
by Rachel Alexander | June 21st, 2009

How harassment over child custody and child support eventually killed my brother who had preleukemia. It is a sad Father's Day this year.

May 24, 2009 was the day my older brother Nathan finally succumbed to leukemia. I felt like my world had ended. Nathan was a larger-than-life one-of-a-kind; the epitome of what a fun, charismatic, witty older brother should be. He was always happy, alternating between intellectual pontifications and mischievous joking. He understood my sense of humor better than anyone, and the emails flew back and forth between us sometimes 10 times a day. He frequently took humorous breaking news articles and inserted our friends' names into them, sending them out in official looking emails to mutual friends. Nathan and I remained close over the years, not having a significant other to confide in.

When Nathan was in high school, he became interested in politics, which included poking fun at the political oddballs in society. He made fun of left-wing hippies by imitating them and saying "peace." He dressed up as Fidel Castro for Halloween one year in high school, and even wore the costume to work at a grocery store. He continued this sense of humor right up until the end, when he would besiege me with emails saying little more than "peace." He would end our phone conversations with "peace, out." Nathan was an immensely popular kid, and I idolized him growing up. In high school he told me not to talk to him at school unless I washed all the makeup off my face! He was editor of the student newspaper, The Knight Times, and he took that paper to a new level it had never known before, making up fake writers and fake interviews with "stoners" and other controversial figures around the school. In the Knight Times staff picture from the school annual, he's wearing a hippy wig. He would draw "legendary" (as he'd describe them) pictures of hippies, which I will add to this article shortly.

Nathan attended college at the University of Washington, where I later went, majoring in Comparative History of Ideas. He did well, maintaining a 3.7 GPA, and spent his junior year abroad at Oxford University in England. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa, he was accepted into Harvard's History Graduate School, where he spent several years getting his PhD in French intellectual history. An ex-girlfriend of his told us that Nathan was a standout even at Harvard, and another peer of his said that Nathan was always one of the most popular teachers, winning numerous teaching awards. But we never knew any of this until now, Nathan never bragged about himself. Due to Nathan's intellectual prowess, in 2001 I thought I would start a website and name it the presumptuous Intellectual Conservative. Humble as always, Nathan objected to the name!

But when Nathan was 22, his immune system became greatly weakened. In fifth grade, doctors noticed that his body wasn't producing as many white blood cells as it should. It wasn't clear at the time what it was, myelodysplasia, also known as preleukemia. Somehow the condition never worsened until he was 22. Although he had less strength growing up than his peers – he was forced to quit the high school football team as a freshman because of it – he seemed alright. He entered the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, one of the best hospitals in the country at the time for bone marrow transplants. The doctors told him that his chances of surviving a bone marrow transplant at that time, 1990, were only about 30%. Immediately prior to the transplant, the elders of our church prayed over Nathan. The day of the transplant, the doctors tested Nathan's bone marrow one final time. To their surprise, the cancerous cells had mysteriously disappeared! We knew it was a miracle and God had healed Nathan. The doctor didn't know how to remove the catheter from Nathan's chest, nothing like this had ever happened before, normally it was supposed to remain there until after the transplant, when it would dissolve.

Over the years since then, Nathan had several more brief bouts of dangerously low white blood cell counts, returning him to the hospital for a few days at a time. During those times, I conducted some of my greatest pranks to humor him. Some of them will have to remain family secrets, because they made some of our friends really mad.

Nathan's daughter Elisa was born in 1999. Nathan never got along well with her mother, who took him to court repeatedly to reduce his visitation. I always felt she held a vendetta against him and used the legal system to punish him continuously. She insisted on the maximum amount of child support from him, $750/month, which was difficult for him to pay, having $45,000 in student loans and living on around $30,000 annually from Harvard as a Teaching Fellow and Lecturer.



My younger brother, an attorney, and I did hundreds of hours of free legal work for him, but it was difficult because we didn't live in the same state so we could not represent him, and we were not experienced in family law. The legal pleadings never ended, and made Nathan's life very difficult. I watched one hearing where the mother of his child told the court that Nathan had been tardy driving his daughter to school 10 times. The mother had moved an hour and a half away from Nathan, and so it was difficult to get the girl to school across Boston's rush hour traffic. What the mother, a high school graduate, didn't tell the court was that she had also been tardy 10 times taking the girl to school. Nevertheless, the judge denounced Nathan for "not caring about education" and reduced his visitation even further. Now, instead of having his daughter overnight one night during the week, he would have two hours with her three times a week with three hours of exhausting driving time each trip – not enough time to do anything productive like give her piano lessons or even drive home.

But Nathan was always kind. He never spoke ill of the mother of his child, even though the rest of us were furious with her. We saw the toll it was taking on his health. With his weak immune system, he didn't have the stamina to fight her, deal with the onerous requirements of the visitation schedule, work on his book, and teach honors classes at Harvard, which has the highest teaching standards in the country. He suffered from numerous ailments all over his body due to his body's inability to fight them off, such as warts covering his hands, but he bore them all with a smile and never showed any sign of embarrassment.

Nathan started writing reviews of books on the Vietnam War for Intellectual Conservative. He wrote so many we set up a special section on the site for his book reviews. Nathan's favorite topic was the Vietnam War, and he became a favorite of Vietnam veterans all around the country. Nathan was a far better writer than I will ever be, writing at a level most of us barely understood. He was frequently published in prestigious publications like Judaism. He would occasionally respond to the feedback we received at the website, which I loved because he would hands-down intellectually surpass those attacking our viewpoints. He kept a journal at Caring Bridge all during his hospital stay, which was lighthearted and witty.

Intellectual Conservative turned into a family venture, with Dad posting sermons on the site, Mom writing book reviews, Andrew as co-editor handling our writers' submissions, even Sarah writing an article (which immediately prompted a legal threat from a Canadian). We set up a section on the website called "IC Classics" to immortalize our sense of humor. At the top is the IC mascot, a funny looking lemur with red eyes because it is high on millipedes seeds. I think we got it from Nathan's friend Jim, who was always sending him ridiculous looking pictures of weird animals. There is a snuggly looking picture of Al Sharpton, who Nathan found endlessly amusing. I'd post that picture of Sharpton next to our writers' articles whenever I could justify it, until our writers started complaining. There is a really funny looking picture of a monkey, which I frequently post next to our writers' articles about evolution and creationism. Nathan would email us those pictures over and over again. There is an article by the ridiculously pretentious sounding Claude-Yves Villiers-de-L'isle-Adam III, a name Nathan made up. Posted next to the article is a picture of Howard Stern's late sidekick Hank the Drunk Dwarf in a pink bunny suit, which Nathan instructed me to attach. Nathan made up a bio for the fake writer: "Claude-Eves Villiers-de-L'isle-Adam III is a chef with a maitre de philosophie from Vincennes-Saint Denis. A lifelong resident of Paris, he recently moved to Butte, Montana, where he participates in philanthropic activity including Médecins Sans Frontières." (you'd never guess our family is of French heritage the way Nathan teased the French) And be sure to read the dry humor email exchange about L. Goldner's website, a Marxist friend of Nathan's. Nathan always got along with everyone, including those of diametrical political views because he respected their intelligence, and he never had any enemies.

Nathan left Harvard a few years ago to take a position as an Assistant Professor in History at Troy University in Alabama. He tried in vain to get a position at a college near Boston in order to remain near his daughter, but faculty positions in his area of expertise are few and far between. He was quite popular at the Troy University gym, as a white professor who would play basketball with the mostly black students.

The legal battles with the mother of his child continued, as she was able to further reduce his visitation since he had moved out of the state. She added difficult restrictions to their daughter visiting him in Alabama, and refused to adjust the weeks Elisa would visit to accommodate his teaching schedule. He tried to take on teaching a fourth class in order to afford his child support, but he could not keep it up for long. Even fully healthy professors find taking on a fourth class exhausting. Nathan never did finish his book. Last year, he began losing blood, not only white blood cells but red blood cells. After multiple blood transfusions, he took leave from Troy and entered the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance hospital, near our parents. We spent last Christmas with him in the hospital. Even though it was clear he was probably dying, the mother of his child would not permit Elisa to be with us over Christmas, because it wasn't part of the official minimal visitation she had to give him, which had been reduced to a few days a year due to his relocation to Troy. My parents spent virtually every day with him at the hospital, and were there when he rededicated his life to the Lord.


Right up until the end, the mother of his child refused to let Elisa (a very bright girl turning 10 years old in August) fly on a plane by herself, even though airlines allow children to fly alone on nonstop planes as young as five years old. This put undue strain and financial expense on our family. For those of you who know us, we've never had any extra money, if you've seen our furniture or the cars we drove!

Due to the terrible time he had dealing with the mother of his child, Nathan always wanted to co-write a book with me on how fathers can win custody of their children. I started to write it but the subject matter was too painful to continue. Now, it has become exponentially more painful. Nathan, I hate to disappoint you but I know you will understand, I'm not as tough as you.

The Sunday my parents told me my brother was in heaven, I lay in bed asking God for an answer. After a few hours of crying, I got up and walked outside. Amazingly, a dove had appeared on the light outside my door, where it had built a nest! I'd never seen a bird alight there before; with the bulb sticking up it's not a surface that looks easy to rest upon. The dove looked very peaceful, not scared at all. As I lay in bed, I'd hear it cooing every 20 minutes or so. I didn't hear any other birds, which was unusual because usually there are multiple noisy birds in the palm trees around my house. The next couple of mornings before I left for Seattle, I left my noisemaker fan off, which I always have on to block out the sound of the birds which start in chirping loudly every morning at dawn. There was no sound those mornings, except the dove cooing every few minutes. When I returned to Phoenix, two eggs hatched, and two little doves grew up and left the nest. Now, I hear them in the palm trees around my house cooing. I know it was Nathan sending me a message from heaven; a dual message telling me to be at peace and comforting me by myself in Phoenix, while also making fun of hippies. See you in heaven, Nathan you huge pete. Peace, out.