When I first encountered Professor Frederick Holliday last fall in Reflections of American Society on Stage and Screen, his boundless energy grabbed my attention. He was wonderful. He treated his students with respect, as equal partners in the learning process.
When the semester finished, I kept in sporadic touch with Professor Holliday. Then I heard from one of my friends that my former professor had fallen sick. I later learned Professor Holliday had Stage 4 metastatic kidney cancer.
Over the next several months, I followed updates on Professor Holliday’s condition, provided by his wife. Regina Holliday fulfilled the role of caretaker; while continuing to look after their two sons, she fought for her husband’s care as they went in and out of five different hospitals, dealing with the confusion of botched records transfers, pain management, and treatments. By May, he entered hospice care; by June they moved him home. There, on June 17, 2009, Professor Frederick A. Holliday died at age 39, surrounded by family and friends.
Professor Holliday taught me what a truly energetic teacher looks like, and what it means to be really passionate about a subject. More than that, though, his experiences with the U.S. health care system at the end of his life showed me the full extent of the need for real reform.
Since her husband’s death, Regina Holliday has used her gifts for art and advocacy by painting murals in D.C., depicting the need for health care reform. She painted her husband in his hospital bed, surrounded by his children, a nurse with her hands tied, and other symbolic figures representing problems in the current health care system.
The mural has caught some significant public attention as the debate over health care has ramped up in recent weeks. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asked Mrs. Holliday to speak at a press conference for health care reform. Several national media outlets featured the Hollidays’ story over the summer.
Every time another news outlet tells the story, Mrs. Holliday notes this specifically: before AU hired her husband, the two of them worked five jobs between them to support their family. None of these jobs offered health benefits, and even their combined income was not enough to afford family health insurance. As a result, Professor Holliday had not been able to see a primary care doctor, so the symptoms of the cancer went unobserved by a medical professional. Had he been regularly receiving primary care, Mrs. Holliday maintains that doctors may have caught the cancer before it reached Stage 4.
The Hollidays’ tragedy of health care deprived AU of an excellent professor, as well as a family of a loving husband and father.
A responsible government owes its citizens the chance to be healthy without going broke. We need to reduce costs and radically expand coverage.
In the meantime, the debate will go forward. Professor Holliday would have liked that, I think — his classes always included lively discussion on a range of issues and his wife is already actively participating in the current discourse. Civil discussion is the lifeblood of a good education as well as of a functional democracy. That’s just one more thing I learned from the Hollidays.
Carolyn Capern Junior, School of Public Affairs
