Death in a Family: A Beautiful Last Christmas

A beloved Senator, Philip A. Hart of Michigan, bids goodbye to his wife, Janey, and their eight children

The Washington Star, December 27, 1976. For the family of Senator Philip A. Hart, D-Mich., this Christmas, they say, was the most beautiful, the most meaningful they have ever had. Hart, 64, who had been stricken with cancer a year and a half ago, died in his Washington home yesterday at 1:03 p.m., his hand held tightly by his wife, Janey.

Throughout the day, as every day in the past couple of months, one or more of Hart’s eight children were in his bedroom, accompanying him as far as they could go on his last journey. Clyde, 22, and Cammie, 28, were there as he died. “Cammie was consoling him,” Clyde said. “She told him we loved him. We feel and hope he was aware.”

The family is certain Hart was aware of them all on Christmas Day. Though he could no longer speak and had been receiving drugs for pain, he followed each of them with his eyes and, once in the evening, he smiled.

There had been gift-giving around the Christmas tree in the living room in the morning. It was a large gathering, including Cammie’s husband, Peter Conserva, their son Philip, 3, and their infant daughter, Katie; Clyde’s friend, Betsy Dayrell; Walter Hart, 26, and his friend, Lisa Groves; the Harts’ other daughters, Laura, 19, and her friend Bob Cole, and May (Mary), 20, and Ann, 29; and sons, Michael, 24, and James, 25, and his friend Kimball Wheeler. And a few close family friends.

There was a small cowboy shirt for Philip Conserva, with a card, “From Granddad.” Philip put on the shirt and ran in and gave Hart a big kiss. There was a turkey dinner, cooked by a family friend, and in the evening there were Christmas carols by The Northwest Quartet, a professional group.

The quartet was formed this fall when Kimball Wheeler left school in Brussels, Belgium, to join James, who with the other farflung Hart children had come home to be with his father during the Senator’s last days. The singers included Wheeler and Ann Hart, both mezzo sopranos, and Wayne Jones and Steve Cordle.

At about a quarter to seven Christmas evening, everyone assembled in Hart’s room for the carols — “Coventry Carol,” “Good King Wencelas” and “Ding Dong Merrily on High.”

“We weren’t sure how he’d react,” Wheeler said. “We thought the noise might bother him.” But it didn’t. Hart smiled. “Everybody burst out crying but there was always someone to hold onto. It was a wonderful way to say goodbye.” The singing was brief, over by seven.

“We had such a lovely Christmas,” Janey Hart said. “He held my hand the whole time they were singing.” Phil, she told him afterwards, “I love you. All is well. Laura is here. She passed her math exam (Laura is a premed at Brandeis University). If you understand me, squeeze my hand.”

PhilIp Hart squeezed his wife’s hand.

A family friend said, “He looked at his children. A tear came out of his eye and on his cheek. I remember Janey wiping it away. We all felt after that at peace. He knew everyone there loved him. He was not alone.”

Yesterday Janey Hart was on the phone, notifying people and listening to condolences. Friends of Hart have been calling. Like most of them, President Gerald Ford asked Janey Hart, “Is there anything I can do?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “There is just one thing I wish you would do and that is to give amnesty to the Vietnam protestors, deserters, and draft evaders.” It was, she said later, “the last thing Phil in his last weeks wished he could get through.”

“Well,” President Ford answered Mrs. Hart, “I’ll give it another hard look.”

During the day Janey Hart was also making arrangements. “It’s almost a macabre scene now,” she said. Hart was lying, wrapped in a sheet, in a pine coffin in their “garden-room”- -a plant-filled, many-windowed room off the living and dining rooms. After Hart died, she said, “his sons picked him up and carried him down the hall and put him in the coffin.”

Three weeks before, Mrs. Hart had called Father William Wendt, rector of St. Stephens of the Incarnation Episcopal Church, with whom she had been “arrested and convicted for trying to make peace” at a prayer-protest against the Vietnam war at the Pentagon in 1970.

She told him, “We’ll be needing a coffin.” Wendt, she knew, had a carpenter who made pine coffins averaging about $150 in price. When she had investigated the possibility of obtaining a pine coffin, she learned, “They only have them for Jewish funerals for about $800.” Hart, she said, had always deplored “the absurdity” of high-priced funerals.

Used to visiting their father, the Hart children spent yesterday going in and out of the garden room where he lay in the open coffin. (Today, for an invitation-only wake, the coffin is closed.)

There they talked about “little things,” James said, like the days when “we were running around playing Indians when we were supposed to be in bed.”

Death is not disguised in the Hart house. Even little Philip knows what has happened. “Granddad is dead,” he told Ann Hart. “Yes, I know,” his young aunt replied. “He knew it was solemn,” a family friend said, “but he knew it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t terrible. It was sad, it was a shock, but it wasn’t terrible.”

This month, Rolling Stone magazine had a story on Phil Hart entitled, “The Saint of the Senate.” It was a title he would have shrugged off, probably with amusement but possibly with a rare burst of anger. “He never wanted praise,” Walter said, “He objected to it because people would try to canonize him. He did not think his selflessness, his giving heart, was extraordinary. We can’t dismiss him as a saint and then dismiss our own responsibility for living because we’re ordinary.

“His mind and his heart weren’t at odds. Although he loved and worked for the ideal, he could accept and love reality, too.”

Hart was a realist. One of his aides noted that he had felt his most significant contribution in the Senate was as floor manager of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This was the act that struck down the literacy tests the South had as a requirement to qualify people to vote. Four years later he was reminding an audience, “We shouldn’t forget when civil rights progress was getting a white man to say he wouldn’t mind living next door to Ralph Bunche.”

Michael remembers Hart’s graciousness. “It was never a question of misunderstanding us even in more difficult moments. He was always trying to understand.”

Clyde said that the most important thing he had learned from his father was that “the evolution of civilization is a task that takes great compassion and patience.” Months ago, the Hart children told him they wished they could do something for him. He told them that he knew they loved him and that was enough. “It’s been a tough time,” Walter said, “But we’ve been really lucky.

“He was just a man, a good man. He was a happy man.”

On Wednesday, Janey Hart, her children, and Mrs. Oner Lee, her housekeeper for 27 years, will take Hart’s cremated remains on an Air Force plane to Mackinac Island, the family’s Michigan home. There, after a final service conducted by the Rev. Joseph Francis, Hart will be buried in St. Anne’s Catholic cemetery near the grave of his first child, a son who drowned when he was 2.

PhilIp Hart’s death brought his grown children together for a brief intense time during which every member gained something while sustaining an enormous loss. Now they will begin to go their own ways again, several with companions of their own. In June, Janey Hart is likely to be on her way across the Pacific, sailing with her friend Ann Bronfman in the Meander II. The sailboat has private quarters originally designed to accommodate Phil Hart, too. But he won’t be coming along, except in memories.