VCC Magazine Summer 2018

V irginia C apitol C onnections , S ummer 2018 23 B ERNIE H ENDERSON Chief Executive Officer Funeral Celebrant 1771 North Parham Road Richmond, Virginia 23229 Phone: (804) 545-7251 Bernard.Henderson@dignitymemorial.com Best Seat in the House Book review By Bonnie Atwood If you’ve traveled in Virginia politics the past few decades, you know John Hager. You also likely know that he has worked hard in many prominent roles from a wheelchair, and that his paralysis was caused by an extremely unlikely contact with the polio virus. We don’t admire John Hager because he contracted polio. We admire him for how he responded to it. In this honest and detailed book, “The Best Seat in the House,” we get the full story. We hold our breath as he takes us on a long journey from a happy childhood, to his fast track in the tobacco business, to his starting a beautiful family with the feisty Maggie Chase Hager and a bouncing baby boy named Jack. Hager was healthy and fit—a runner, even—when he collapsed one day for no apparent reason, and his life was never the same. For 100 days of paralysis and pain, Hager was forced to wonder, “What happened?” Doctors were stumped. After this excruciating period, he learned that he had contracted polio from coming into contact with the baby’s diaper the night after Jack was given the polio vaccine. A lesser man would have given up. Indeed, Hager was advised to take it easy and to “take naps.” That’s when his fighting spirit kicked in. He didn’t take naps. He didn’t take it easy. He took to politics, joined every group in the city, and worked his way up to Lieutenant Governor, assistant to the governor for Homeland Security, and a federal job at the top of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services (OSERS) at the U.S. Department of Education. Reading this book takes one back, first, to “old” Richmond. Not “RVA” and breweries, but the annual Tobacco Parade, the Country Club of Virginia, and familiar names of the past and the present. The reader finds himself wanting some little juicier tidbits about Elizabeth Taylor, when she was married to our Virginia Senator John Warner, and maybe a little more about the romance, now marriage, between Hager’s son Henry, and that most interesting Bush daughter, Jenna. We do read a lot about Maggie, who always seems the perfect wife for Hager. She fights for him during his convalescence, she won’t take “no” for an answer, she socializes with the best of them, and she shakes hands, as Princess Diana once said, “til the cows come home.” She is the model political wife, the model fighter, and the model mother. This book is the story of hard work. It is a combination memoir, history book, and motivational speech. John Hager’s story is one of triumph. Bonnie Atwood, a freelance writer with Tall Poppies Freelance Writing LLC, is the winner of 30 national and state writing awards, and represents legislative clients with David Bailey Associates. She can be reached at BonAtwood@verizon.net . All rights reserved by Bonnie Atwood. My Journey Through Eldercare Book Review By Judith B. Bailey Bonnie Atwood’s book My Journey Through Eldercare: The Search for Peace and Meaning is a refreshingly honest and thoughtful insight into an undertaking that most people do not choose—caring for one’s parents at home instead of placing them in a nursing home. Caregiving is difficult, she says, “It is hard.” It is also what was expected in her family as each generation cared for their parents. It was what families do. And the result is the peace of knowing she did what she could, with no regrets after the death of her mother at 102 years. She writes, “Sometimes I have felt sorry for myself. Sometimes I have felt pure joy.” Organized into ten chapters that include subjects on “What is Old”, “Burden or Blessing” “Empowerment”, “Zen and the art of Caregiving,” “Sometimes I am someone else, ”and “Celebrate,” Atwood offers a provocative approach to questions of the meaning of life, love and family. She clearly states that hers is not to be interpreted as a “how to” book or a book of “tips” on caregiving—but rather the book about “how - how to psychologically make it through each day; how to be happy, and how to make my loved ones happy; how to stay myself and not become some resentful shell of my former self; how to stay engaged in my community instead of becoming isolated in a world of applesauce, laxatives and dirty laundry.” Bonnie Atwood provides the alternative choice to that of families described by Atul Gawande who may favor “safety” over the ease and wishes of their parents. Most elders would prefer to age in their homes with their familiar routines than to be in an environment where life is structured around the schedules of the professionals who care for them ( Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, 2014 ). Bonnie’s mother, Dee Atwood, was a very fortunate person. I highly recommend this very readable and thought-provoking book. The Rev. Judith Bledsoe Bailey, Ph.D. is the author of Strength for the Journey. She is a retired pastor and Baptist Campus Minister at the University of Richmond. V V