Gift for dying husband: Mom induces labor so he can hold child

He held his newborn baby for less than an hour before he died.

Mark Aulger, 52, had been diagnosed with colon cancer, and months of chemotherapy had left his lungs badly damaged -- so damaged that by mid-January he only had a few days left to live. Doctors suggested that Aulger's wife, who was eight months' pregnant and due Jan. 29, induce labor. 

“Mark said, 'I'd like to see the baby,' " Diane Aulger, 31, told the Associated Press.

 She gave birth to Savannah Aulger on Jan. 18.

Hospital staff arranged for the Aulgers to share a large labor and delivery room. “Our beds were side by side,” Diane Aulger said.

After the baby was born, Diane Aulger passed the infant to her husband. "He got to be the first one to hold her, [and he] held her for 45 minutes," Diane Aulger told WFAA.

But during the next few days, she said, her husband was so tired he could only hold the baby for minutes at a time. Three days after Savannah was born, Mark Aulger slipped into a coma. Two days later, he died.

“I brought her home the night before he fell into the coma,” Diane Aulger told the Associated Press. “It was just me and Savannah when he passed away.”

Savannah is the couple's third child together, and Diane has two other children from another relationship. The family lives in The Colony, about 25 miles north of Dallas.

“We're living day-to-day as if Dad's still here,” she said. “We know Dad is here with us.”

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Photo: In this Jan. 18 photo, Mark Aulger, 52, holds newborn daughter Savannah for the first time, surrounded by his wife, Diane Aulger, and their other children. Credit: Diane Aulger / Associated Press

Philadelphia cardinal Bevilacqua dies; tenure marred by sex abuse

Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, the former head of the Philadelphia archdiocese who was accused during his 15-year tenure of ignoring sexual abuse of children by hundreds of priests, has died. The diocese announced that Bevilacqua, 88, died in his sleep Tuesday night in his apartment at a seminary in a Philadelphia suburb.

Bevilacqua, known for his regular press-the-flesh visits to all 302 parishes in the archdiocese and for his strong stands against racism and anti-Semitism, was also sharply critical of homosexuals and refused for several years to close Catholic churches and schools to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

In a statement Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI praised Bevilacqua’s "longstanding commitment to social justice and pastoral care of immigrants and his expert contribution of the revision of the church’s law in the years following the Second Vatican Council."

Bevilacqua, the son of an Italian immigrant bricklayer in Brooklyn who spoke little English, championed the rights of immigrants. In 1998, he asked Pennsylvania’s governor to fund food stamps for the state’s legal immigrants. The following year, he urged local businesses to help find work for welfare recipients whose benefits had been reduced.

Bevilacqua also set up a Spanish-language radio show and instituted service centers for Latino and African American Catholics.

"We don’t help people because they are Catholic," he often said. "We help them because we are Catholic."

Bevilacqua seemed to revel in his frequent public meetings with congregants, visiting schools and nursing homes while posing for photos. He sometimes tossed his zucchetto, or skull cap, like a Frisbee into delighted crowds and even placed his bishop’s hat on children’s heads, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

But Bevilacqua’s tenure was marred by clergy sexual-abuse revelations that rocked the Philadelphia archdiocese in 2002, as the scandal was erupting nationwide and in Europe.

In 2005, after a 40-month grand jury investigation, a report by the Philadelphia district attorney’s office harshly criticized Bevilacqua and his predecessor, Cardinal John Krol, for failing to protect children from years of rapes and sexual abuse by priests.

"Sexually abusive priests were left quietly in place or 'recycled' to unsuspecting new parishes -- vastly expanding the number of children who were abused," the report said.

Bevilacqua did not respond to the report. His successor, Cardinal Justin Rigali, said the report was "very unfair" for not addressing sexual abuse in other denominations or public institutions.

Bevilacqua condemned homosexuality, saying homosexual men were unfit to be priests. He said the Catholic Church considers homosexuality an "aberration, a moral evil."

Born in Brooklyn in 1923 and raised in Queens, Bevilacqua graduated from a seminary at age 26 and was ordained in 1949.  He earned advanced degrees in canon law, civil law and political science.

Pope John Paul II named Bevilacqua archbishop of the Philadelphia archdiocese in late 1987.  He retired in 2003.   

A day before his death, a Philadelphia judge ruled that Bevilacqua, who suffered from dementia, was competent and could testify in the upcoming trial of a Philadelphia priest accused of failing to protect two children from sexual abuse by a priest under his supervision.

In 1998, the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper, reported that Bevilacqua had secretly spent approximately $5 million to renovate a mansion that served as his residence and to renovate a seaside villa used as a vacation home by Bevilacqua and retired priests.

The improvements were carried out at roughly the same time that Bevilacqua approved the closing or merging of inner-city parishes and schools because they had budget deficits and suffered from low attendance, the newspaper reported. Those closings were met with outrage by some parishioners and social activists, who accused the archdiocese of racism.

Bevilacqua was "surprised and embarrassed" by the reaction, the Inquirer reported. He set up a process in which local priests and members of the lay community took the lead in deciding whether or how to close or merge parishes.

While bishop of the Pittsburgh diocese in the early 1980s, Bevilacqua ended his predecessor’s practice of including women in the traditional Holy Thursday foot-washing ceremony.  Bevilacqua said Jesus had washed only the feet of his male apostles.

After protesters demonstrated against the decision, Bevilacqua consulted the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which concluded that including women in the ceremony was proper. Bevilacqua relented, saying local priests could make their own decisions on the matter.

Bevilacqua also backed down from his refusal to allow Catholic churches and schools to close for the King holiday. In 1998, he announced that the holiday could be honored.

Later that year, Bevilacqua wrote a pastoral letter condemning racism as "an evil that violates Christ’s command to love your neighbor as yourself."

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Photo: Philadelphia Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, shown in this Dec. 2, 2000, file photo, served as head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for more than 15 years. Credit: H. Rumph Jr. / Associated Press

Katharine Hepburn estate? Being bought by Obamas? Um, no

Some rumors won't die. But why anyone would believe for a nanosecond that President Obama had $18 million to buy a house that once belonged to Katharine Hepburn, of all famous people, in Connecticut, of all places, in an election year, of all years?

Such a purchase would so put Obama squarely in the camp of 1%-ers -- not a popular move at a time when the 99% are supposed to go to the polls in November to elect a president. Plus, there is no evidence he has that kind of money.

That said, such a rumor circulated last week.

It first appeared as speculation reported by longtime gossip columnist Liz Smith, who knew and wrote about Hepburn. The rumor then was followed by a report in the Hearst Newspapers — and in no time was rampant on Twitter. Neither Smith nor Hearst and certainly not the tweeters cited sources, according to the Hartford Courant.

The White House made it clear the rumor was baseless: "It's not true," was the adamant denial to reporters.

But the agent representing the Hepburn estate, when asked by the Courant whether the Obamas were buying the house, mysteriously responded only with: "We can't offer a comment on that matter."

Even Smith, who started the rumor, characterized it as "absurd" for political reasons.

Frank J. Sciame, a Manhattan-based developer and his wife, Barbara, initially bought the home for $6 million, completed a massive, multimillion-dollar renovation and put the site on the market last year. The asking price: $28 million for the house and the surrounding 3½ acres on the shore of Long Island Sound — or $18 million for a buyer not interested in the entire property.

The estate, on the Fenwick waterfront near Old Saybrook, had been in Hepburn's family; she retired there before dying in 2003 at age 96.

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Photo: Katharine Hepburn in 1992 in the garden at Fenwick, her country home in the Connecticut town of the same name. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Texas teen dies on Christmas, leaves online message [video]

He tells his story with note cards.

Ben Breedlove died on Christmas, leaving behind a wordless, two-part YouTube video message about chronic illness, death and the afterlife viewed more than 450,000 times as of Wednesday. 

In the first part of the video, posted Dec. 18, the teen starts out smiling, brown hair neatly parted, staring into the camera and holding up the first card, written in blue marker. The only sound is instrumental music playing in the background, Gary Jules' "Mad World."

"Hello, I'm Ben Breedlove," the card says.

"All my life I've had a heart condition."

Breedlove, 18, of Austin, Texas, suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a thickening of the heart muscle that worsened over time and eventually contributed to his death from a heart attack. 

"As I grew older, I learned more that it is dangerous," he said in one of his note cards, followed by:

"It has scared me a lot, and I hate that feelling."

Before his death, he had started his own YouTube channel, Breedlovetv, where he sat behind a microphone, anchor-style, and talked about his best friend, his two younger siblings, his first date, his spirituality and his heart condition.

"I still get to do most of the stuff I want to do, like, wake boarding," he said in one video. "It's not a big problem."

But the message of his final two videos, titled "This is my story," was different.

Christopher Hitchens has died: Fighter, doubter, provocateur

Christopher Hitchens has died at age 62. From around the Web, notes on the death of Hitchens, essayist, provocateur, American:

David Frum:

A friend of theirs once took Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue to dinner at Palm Beach’s Everglades Club, notorious for its exclusion of Jews.

“You will behave, won’t you?” Carol anxiously asked Christopher on the way into the club. 

No dice. When the headwaiter approached, Christopher demanded: “Do you have a kosher menu?”

Christopher was never a man to back away from a confrontation on behalf of what he considered basic decency. Yet it would be wrong to remember only the confrontational side.

Christopher was also a man of exquisite sensitivity and courtesy, dispensed without regard to age or station. On one of the last occasions I saw him, my wife and I came to drop some food –- lamb tagine -– to sustain a family with more on its mind than cooking. Christopher, though weary and sick, insisted on painfully lifting himself from his chair to perform the rites of hospitality. He might have cancer, but we were still guests -– and as guests, we must have champagne.

Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair:

He was a man of insatiable appetites — for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. ...

Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone. And as a result many readers felt they knew him. Walking with him down the street in New York or through an airplane terminal was like escorting a movie star through the throngs.

Benjamin Schwarz, the Atlantic:

I met Christopher (never Chris) in 1997. Perry Anderson, a mutual friend, had invited us to debate the wisdom of American intervention in the Balkans. We were, unsurprisingly, on opposing sides -- a position that all his friends have experienced, formally or informally.  Hitch's friends were comrades always; but allies only occasionally -- that was a role impossible to hold consistently.

Hitch, an idealist committed to protecting human rights and to putting thugs in their place, embraced a muscular internationalism consistent with the stand he'd taken on the Falklands war (in 1982, Christopher, a then-uncompromising socialist, was at one with Mrs. Thatcher) and that he would take on the two wars against Saddam Hussein. I held to my usual parsimonious view of the national interest, and so our debate fell into a well-worn groove.

Early on I made a smart-sounding point, using a recondite historical analogy, which the audience -- largely anti-interventionist -- liked. But 10 minutes later, although the argument had moved on, it dawned on me that I'd scored a cheap shot, and I said so, explaining why my facile analogy didn't hold water. Christopher held me in his gaze, touched his right hand to his chest (one of his characteristic gestures), and gave me an almost imperceptible bow. That was it for us. I had passed the only test that mattered to him, one in which he touchingly, anachronistically conflated intellectual honesty with a decidedly masculine, martial sense of honor.

Richard Lea, the Guardian:

The reactions to Hitchens's illness from his intellectual opponents –- which ranged from undisguised glee to offers of prayers -– testified to his stature as one of the leading voices of secularism since the publication in 2007 of his anti-religious polemic God is Not Great. The reaction from the author himself, who after a lifetime of "burning the candle of both ends" described his illness as "something so predictable and banal that it bores even me", testified to the sharpness of his wit and the clarity of his thinking under fire, as he dissected the discourse of "struggle" that surrounds cancer, paid tribute to the medical staff who looked after him and resolved to "resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice".

Matt Labash, the Weekly Standard:

As the Iraq War kicked off in 2003, I was holed up in the Kuwait City Hilton — home to unembedded reporters looking to make their way in. While I’d only briefly met Hitchens once before, word had spread through mutual friends that my hotel room was the last cantina in town. Since the border being sealed meant the black market hooch supply had dried up, we smuggled our amber past customs officials in Listerine bottles. So when Hitchens showed up at my door early one morning kitted for battle with nothing more than his black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a half-smoked pack of Rothman’s (he refused to bring Kevlar, saying it made him feel  “like a counterfeit”), I offered him a welcome-to-the-war shot of “Listerine,” just to be hospitable.

“I don’t usually start this early,” he said, his glass already gratefully extended, “but holding yourself to a drinking schedule is always the first sign of alcoholism.”

Douglas Wilson, Christianity Today:

G. K. Chesterton once pointed to the salutary effect that the great agnostics had on him — that effect being that of "arousing doubts deeper than their own." Christopher was an heir of the Enlightenment tradition, and would have felt right at home in the 18th-century salons of Paris. He wanted to carry on the grand tradition of doubting what had been inherited from Christendom, and to take great delight in doubting it. This worked well, or appeared to, for a time. But skepticism is a universal solvent, and once applied, it does not stop just because Christendom is gone. "I think, therefore I am. I think." We pulled out the stopper of faith, and the bathwater of reason appeared undisturbed for a time. But modernism slowly receded and now postmodernism is circling the drain. Our intelligentsia needs to figure out how to do more than sit in an empty tub and reminisce about the days when Voltaire knew how to keep the water hot. ...

We have no indication that Christopher ever called on the Lord before he died, and if he did not, then Scriptures plainly teach that he is lost forever. But we do have every indication that Christ died for sinners, men and women just like Christopher. We know that the Lord has more than once hired workers for his vineyard when the sun was almost down (Matt. 20:6).

John Podhoretz, Commentary:

There is no question in my mind that Christopher Hitchens was the bravest ideologically driven writer since — well, I’ll say it — my father, Norman Podhoretz. The bravery he displayed was not in taking unyielding positions and holding to them even when the outcome appeared bleak, as was the case with his support for the war in Iraq — contrast Hitchens’s stalwartness with the unutterable cravenness of the self-righteously inconstant Andrew Sullivan, whose salivation at the Pavlov-like bell rung by the website clicks of the the anti-war left when he put his toe in the Bush-lied waters turned into an unslaking yearning for the rewards of that Internet traffic, and you get a sense of how things might have been different for Hitchens.

James Fenton, Slate:

In our Bohemian days, we were internationalist in politics and quite the opposite of patriotic. I hadn’t realized the need Christopher felt to belong to something. He was far too satirical to show it. But in the fullness of time he revealed that he really belonged in an America of his own choice. Last year, when he first fell ill, I read his little book about Tom Paine and thought how very much at home Christopher was in this subject, that century. I also felt that he hadn’t changed at all in spirit from when I first knew him. I shall miss that spirit dreadfully.  

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Photos: Christopher Hitchens. Credit: Christian Witkin TwelveBooks

Anne McCaffrey, 'Dragonriders' author, dies: 'The dragons mourn'

Anne McCaffrey, who gained legendary status in the sci-fi realm with her "Dragonriders of Pern" novels, has died at age 85.

Her publisher, Random House, announced that McCaffrey died Monday at home in Ireland after suffering a stroke. As fans mourned on Twitter on Wednesday, her family released this statement:

"Anne McCaffrey ended a long and enormously successful life early Monday evening, November 21, at her home in County Wicklow, Ireland. Surrounded by the reassuring presence of family and close friends, her passing was swift and without suffering. We, her children, are hugely comforted by the outpouring of sympathy flowing now from all over the world.

"Our Mother’s talent was known to countless fans. Yet her greatest gift to us all has to have been her enormous heart. That she was able to touch so many with her tender and loving heart is the greatest source of pride we will forever enjoy. Words cannot express how grateful we are to the universe of her admirers, whose heartfelt condolences beguile us in our grief, which pales beside the joy we know Anne McCaffrey brought to so many people."

Tweets on Wednesday quoted the author ("Your voice is sad and your hands are slow. And your eye meeting mine turns away," from "Dragonsong") and offered thanks for the years of enjoyment her books brought.

"Fairwell Anne, and thanks for Pern and all its wonders" (SocialDave).

"Do you hear? The dragons mourn. The First Queen has passed Between. #AnneMcCaffrey" (@Lynoth).

Meg Cabot, author of "The Princess Diaries" series, talked with the Los Angeles Times in July about her experience with McCaffrey's books, woven into her youth:

"Those books were amazing to me because the two main characters, Lessa and Menolly, were both social outcasts, just like I was at the time. And yet both women persevered in spite of tremendous hardships .... Those books really inspired me to stop feeling so sorry for myself. And when I did move back home and started high school, I used to pretend I was Menolly, and had fire dragons protecting me. God help me. Sometimes I still do it."

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GWAR guitarist Cory Smoot dies; a look at an unusual band

GWAR guitarist Cory Smoot died Thursday in the metal group's tour bus.

Smoot, who joined the satirical, science-fiction-inspired band in 2002 as Flattus Maximus, was found dead by his bandmates as they were crossing the border into Canada on their North American tour, news sites report.

The longtime band may be obscure to most Americans, but it had a devoted following and recently appeared on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" to plug its current tour. (See video below.)

That tour will go on, according to the Edmonton Journal, with the band performing in the city Friday. The Journal included this statement from band frontman David Brockie:

"Cory was found deceased this morning as the band prepared for a border crossing. There is no word as to the cause of death and the members of Gwar are completely shocked and devastated that this has occurred."

GWAR started in Richmond, Va., in the early 1980s.  The band is known for its wild, alien-themed  costumes, a stage show that incorporates plenty of fake blood and a creative bio that includes being banished to Earth billions of years ago and being responsible for killing the dinosaurs. In 2006, the band's costumes even spurred a gallery exhibit.  

In 1994, the Los Angeles Times interviewed the band as it was introducing a new album, "This Toilet Earth," and a full-length film, "Skullhead Face."

Besides the sonic musical onslaught, there's a stage full of outrageous costumes and props and lots of ugly people with sharp instruments. And blood -- lots of blood -- fake blood, to be sure, but don't stand too close to the stage. ... Whether GWAR is a menace to society with no redeeming social value or just another boys-will-be-boys band gone nuts is unclear, but the fellas do have fans. Lots of them.

Smoot's cause of death and age were unknown. He reportedly produced GWAR's last two albums, and Brockie called him "one of the most talented guitar players in metal today."

 

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Video: Hulu