Last spring, after cancer had spread from her
breast to her bones, Patricia Clink applied for Social Security
disability benefits. She had no doubt that she was eligible. After
all, she’d been paying into the system since the age of 15,
when she got her first job, at an Illinois State Fair concession
stand. Her disability was equally verifiable: Months
earlier, tests had shown cancer in Patricia’s liver, lungs,
and pelvis. The illness had forced her to quit her job as a nurse
at St. John’s Hospital, where she had spent 27 years caring
for heart patients. Now, her insurance was about to run out; she
needed Medicare to take care of her medical bills. The response came quickly: Her claim was
denied — not because of any question of her disability but
because the Social Security Administration questioned her
citizenship. The daughter of an American soldier and a
Polish labor-camp survivor, Patricia was born in Schweinfurt,
Germany, where her dad was stationed in 1950. She came to
the United States in 1952 aboard the USNS Gen. Harry Taylor (in her
passport photo, she’s a cherubic toddler) and had lived here ever
since. Patricia belonged to a family of patriots.
Her father, John T. Fagan Jr., served 20 years in the Army. Her
mother, Stefania Horoschiefska Fagan, was featured in the newspaper
enjoying cookies and punch with the Springfield Women’s Club
after being sworn in as a U.S. citizen in 1958. Patricia’s
older brother, Johnny — also born in Germany — served
in the tank corps with U.S. forces in Vietnam. Patricia was no less patriotic. She would
often take her son, Matthew, with her to the polls on Election Day.
She kept up with politics and sometimes voiced her conservative
viewpoint (always politely) on Internet forums or talk radio shows.
When President George W. Bush deployed American forces to Iraq in
2003, Patricia was the first on her block to plant a “Support
Our Troops” sign in her yard. The letter from the Social Security
Administration suggesting that she wasn’t a true American hit her
like a punch in the belly. “She cried,” says her sister
Nanette Valenti. “She sat there and cried with me.”
Patricia knew that she was a U.S. citizen. As
she had once written to her online cancer support group,
“I’m 100 percent American.” But proving this
simple fact turned out to be more of a struggle than she or her
sister ever imagined.
The problem dated back to 1947.
That’s the year Patricia’s parents married, according
to family lore as well as newspaper notices of their birthdays and
deaths. Nanette distinctly remembers her parents celebrating their
30th wedding anniversary just as she graduated from high school, in
1977. But there was always a tinge of mystery
around family history. The kids never knew where vital records were
kept. Indeed, when Johnny enlisted in the Army, his parents claimed that he had no birth certificate (the
Army shipped him to Vietnam anyway). A few years after their mother
died, their father finally managed to tell them the truth. “This was a story that my parents never
wanted us to know,” Nanette says. “This was stuff that
we had to almost force my dad to talk about. It was a source of
embarrassment for him and my mother.” They had met in Karlsruhe, Germany, shortly
after American forces liberated the Nazi labor camp where Stefania
Horoschiefska was imprisoned. Steffi, as she was called, showed up
at the military mess hall where John Fagan was a cook, and she made
quite an impression. “The only story I remember hearing was
that the first meal when she was there, she ate a dozen
eggs,” Nanette recalls. “Fried eggs. With all the
trimmings. She was just that hungry.” She didn’t speak English; the cook
didn’t speak German. Mutual attraction motivated them to
learn each other’s language, and before long, they decided to
wed. Steffi, though, lacked the proper papers, and
U.S. military officials wouldn’t sanction her marriage to
John. The couple found housing off base and started a family. “To everybody else, they were
married,” Nanette says. John T. Fagan III, or “Johnny,”
was born in 1948; Patricia was born Jan. 5, 1950. Before their
dad’s tour of duty ended, he filed papers with the U.S. High
Commissioner for Germany claiming paternity of both children. When
his tour of duty ended in 1952, he was able to bring his young
family to the United States. They arrived in New York on March 2
and married — officially — three months later. They
settled in Fagan’s hometown, Springfield. In 1958, in a Chicago ceremony conducted by
U.S. District Judge Charles G. Briggle, Steffi became a naturalized
citizen. By law, her children under the age of 16 automatically
became citizens along with her. Johnny and Patricia — just 10
and 8, respectively, at the time — qualified. They also had a
little sister, Brenda, born here in 1953. Nanette was born in 1959.
Steffi never lost her thick Polish accent.
Nanette recalls how her mother constantly confused her W’s
and V’s, calling odd people “vierdos.” But aside
from occasional stories of Christmas Mass in Poland and a
pronounced pride in Pope John Paul II, the kids were given a
distinctly American upbringing. “That’s why our names are Johnny,
Pat, Brenda, and Nanette. Our names are very American,”
Nanette says. “My mother was extremely proud of being an
American — extremely, because of all she went through and all
her family went through. She would always tell people, ‘This
is the best place for you to be. You might have problems, but you
have more opportunities here. You’re free.’ ”
Gary Compton met Patricia in
1969, on his return from Vietnam. His then-wife and Patricia had
become close friends while working together as hospital aides.
Patricia married Ed Clink in 1974, and the two couples enjoyed
barbecuing and taking trips together. When the Comptons divorced,
Patricia stayed friends with both. “She didn’t take sides,”
Compton says. “She was just Pat, a good friend to
anybody.” Doris Schaddel was a nurse at St.
John’s when Patricia came to work there as an R.N. in 1978.
They worked the night shift together for about a decade, and
Schaddel says that Patricia’s personality suited her
profession, especially work on the hospital’s
coronary-pulmonary floor. Located down the hall from the
intensive-care unit, the patients in this section were usually
recovering from open-heart surgery or cardiac arrest. “It was a very intense
department,” Schaddel says. “You didn’t sit; you
were busy.” The nurses’ station had telemetry
screens showing each patient’s EKG data, and Patricia could
spot changes quickly. “She was very smart, very on top of
it,” Schaddel says. “She was a diligent worker and a
very good person. That was her nature — very comforting. A
perfect nurse.” Patricia’s priorities shifted slightly
in 1990, when son Matthew was born. He became, by all accounts, the
center of her life. “When she became a mother, she became
100 percent devoted to motherhood,” Compton recalls.
“Everything she did was with her child in mind —
everything.” Patricia’s response to her original
cancer diagnosis was really a testament to her concern for Matthew,
Compton says. Without hesitation, Patricia underwent a mastectomy
and chemotherapy, fighting off the disease in the best way she knew
how. “Her main wish was to survive long enough to raise her
child,” Compton says. Matthew, who was 4 at the time, only
remembers his mom explaining why she was losing her hair. After treatment, Patricia was pronounced
cured, and life went back to normal. Separated from her husband,
she took Matthew on fishing and camping trips and made him come
along when she volunteered to stack sandbags during the Beardstown
and Riverton floods. She enrolled him in the Boy Scouts and signed
him up for band. She didn’t seem to mind when he played his
electric guitar — really loudly — because, he says, she
was “cool.” Her own hobbies were quieter —
quilting, reading, volunteering at New Salem, collecting teapots
and cookbooks, puttering around the kitchen. She joined an online
support group for cancer patients and their families and quickly
became a respected “elder” of the group. Tina Collette, one of the founders of the
support network, describes Patricia as “smart, loving and
tolerant,” a contributor known for her good humor and
compassion. “She would share her personal phone
number with a member when they were particularly hurting,”
Collette says. “We all know that is an Internet no-no, but
her compassion outweighed her concern for personal
safety.” One of Patricia’s earliest posts,
written in 1999, was an impromptu homage to her mother, who had
died in 1984. “I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot
today. What a remarkable woman she was,” Patricia wrote. She went on to describe how Steffi — a
Catholic — was enslaved during World War II. In her hometown
of Lwów, Poland, Nazi soldiers rounded up laborers by
demanding one member from each family. The soldiers wanted to take
Steffi’s older sister, but she had just had a baby. So
Steffi, then 16, volunteered to go in her place. “Oddly enough, that selfless gesture
probably saved her life,” Patricia wrote. Steffi spent
several years working under “the most horrible conditions
imaginable” but later learned that her parents and siblings
had been killed when the Nazis had caught the family hiding a Jew. In a later post, involving an exchange of
Norwegian recipes, she gave another brief version of her
family’s history. “I’m 100 percent American,”
she wrote. “Born in Germany. Irish on my father’s side
and Polish/Ukrainian on my mother’s . . . .” When Bush sent troops to Iraq, the cancer
group’s online discussion turned political, and Patricia
weighed in. “You have the right to dissent,”
she wrote in March 2003. “In fact, you have a duty to dissent
if you think that the government is wrong. BTW, you can thank a
soldier for that. However, you have to accept . . . the fact that
many Americans will consider you unpatriotic for protesting at a
time when this nation is at war, her sons and daughters are in
harm’s way in an attempt to liberate an oppressed people
. . . ” But as the discussion grew more heated over
the next few days, she reminded members that their criticism could
hurt anyone who had a friend or relative deployed overseas. “This list is about
support,” she wrote. “That includes support for those
people who are concerned about their loved ones who are at this
moment in harm’s way. People who are not only fighting cancer
but also having to deal with worrying about loved ones in the
military do not need to read negative statements about the military
or the government of the United States. We need to support and
comfort these people just as we support and comfort those with
cancer.”
Eventually, Patricia’s
disease returned. She had been healthy for eight years — or
maybe not quite that long. Looking back, her sister Nanette says
that Patricia occasionally complained of back and neck pain but
always blamed it on muscle strain. Besides, they were preoccupied
with taking care of their father, whose health began to deteriorate
in 2002. Only after his death in February 2004 did Patricia take
time to consult a doctor. By then, the cancer had spread throughout
her body. She underwent chemotherapy, which obliterated
the spot on her lung and significantly reduced the cancer in her
liver. “They knew it wasn’t anything curable,”
Nanette says, “but they made us believe that she would be
around to see Matthew graduate from high school.” He was 14 at the time. “She didn’t tell me a lot, just
that it was back,” he says. By October 2004, though, Patricia was forced
to stop working. She become so frail that Nanette and her family
moved into Patricia’s house to take care of her and Matthew.
Yet Patricia maintained her sense of humor. When cancer cells
clouded her eyes, altering her color perception, she entertained
the family with descriptions of what she could see. “Yellow looked pink, so construction
signs looked pink, and she said school buses looked awfully
funny,” Nanette recalls. Tina Collette, who had a virtual sisterhood
with Patricia through the online cancer-support group, called to
check on her friend because she hadn’t posted in a while. “She had a happy lilt-song quality to
her voice,” Collette says. When asked how she was doing,
Patricia said not so good. “She explained that the cancer was
back and she could not see. She did not dwell on the
negative,” Collette says, “although I had a huge lump
in my throat and wanted to cry. She continued on her bubbly way,
talking about how Matthew was and telling me about all their
animals and pets, that her sister had moved in with them and how
thankful she was for that. She always looked on the bright side of
things.” In the spring of 2005, Patricia realized that
her insurance coverage was due to lapse. She needed Medicare. On
June 10, she applied for Social Security disability and soon found
out that the government needed proof of her citizenship. The family
was surprised but certain that this was just a bureaucratic
paperwork snafu. “We were joking with her, telling her
she might get deported back to Germany. She loved hearing
that,” Matthew recalls. Brother-in-law Jim Clink suggested that she
would qualify for German social security. The idea that Patricia
was anything other than American seemed amusingly absurd. But after she submitted more family records,
she received another statement of denial from Social Security.
“After reviewing the information and contacting our regional
office for further guidance, we have determined the information
submitted is not sufficient enough for our office to determine your
citizenship status,” the field-office manager wrote on July
15. “The District Court in Springfield, IL, was able to show
that your mother’s naturalization date was May 19, 1958, but
they could not state your name was on this certificate. You will
need to contact the Immigration and Naturalization Service in
Chicago IL for a determination.” She sought the help of her congressman, U.S.
Rep. Ray LaHood, whose staff assistant, Judy Hinds, has 10 years
experience sorting out bureaucratic bungles. Patricia provided a
newspaper article with the headline “35 Foreign Born Made
U.S. Citizens” and a picture of her mother, dressed in her
Sunday best, having punch at a reception. “The article gave me a start,”
Hinds says. “The part she gave me, someone had just torn it
from a newspaper.” She called the National Archives, and
“two nice clerks” located Stefania Horoschiefska
Fagan’s citizenship petition and mailed her daughter Patricia
an archival copy — complete with a red satin ribbon and gold
seal. Patricia’s name and birth information —
“Patricia(f)1/5/50–Germany” — is clearly
visible on the first page. The day that document arrived, Nanette says,
she cooked hot dogs and apple pie to celebrate: “We had a
very American meal, to symbolize her citizenship. We thought for
sure these papers proved that she was a citizen.” LaHood’s assistant, Hinds, thought so,
too. “Yes, I did, because Patricia’s name was in the
papers. It had John and Patricia and Brenda,” she says.
“But this did not satisfy Social Security.” The letter that came with the document
demanded further proof: “It appears . . . that Ms. Clink
derived United States citizenship through her mother’s
naturalization,” the director of congressional relations
wrote. “For official determination of her citizenship,
however, she must file the enclosed Form N-600, ‘Application
for Certificate of Citizenship.’ If her citizenship is
verified, she will be issued a certificate of citizenship, which
serves as evidence of her United States citizenship.”
Then Patricia found an easier way.
Someone at the Social Security office told her that instead of
using the Form N-600, she could apply for a passport and use it to
prove her citizenship. The passport process was supposed to be
faster, less cumbersome, and hundreds of dollars cheaper than the
Form N-600. Nanette now realizes that choice may have
been a mistake. But she was dealing with her “big
sister,” the same one who had babysat her and mentored her
all these years. “There were certain things I
didn’t try to do because I didn’t want to take control
away from her,” Nanette says. Besides, Nanette was more concerned with
Patricia’s health. She was finding excuses to postpone
appointments with her eye specialist and her oncologist. When
Nanette was finally able to coax her sister to see the doctor, he
ordered more tests. Patricia, however, persuaded him to let her
enjoy the approaching holidays. They scheduled a bone scan for
early January. “When I got home from the
doctor’s office that day, I told my husband,
‘Something’s up,’ ” Nanette recalls.
“She was just too insistent [about delaying the
tests].” As a nurse, Patricia knew more about her
condition than the average patient would. Some of her last messages
to her online support group contain bleak hints, artfully disguised
with good cheer. “I have a bunch of hospital scrubs I
can’t use anymore since I can’t work and they’re
too big for me now,” she wrote on Sept. 3, in a message to
support group members near Houston. “I know that there will
be nurses from the Hurricane [Katrina] area who are in Texas now
and will need changes of clothing . . . . If I send you my scrubs,
can you get them to where they are needed?” Gary Compton, her friend of more than 30
years, noticed the same realistic but upbeat attitude in Patricia.
“She understood that it was probably
terminal. She was trying to make her friends feel better,” he
says. “She’d say, ‘It’s OK. I’m not
afraid. I understand what’s going on; I just want to make
sure everything’s done for Matthew.’ She accepted it
with a lot of grace.” In December, Jim Clink went with her to the
county courthouse to submit paperwork for a passport. “We sat
up there for an hour and half, filling out the forms, getting all
this stuff ready to go to the federal government — and she
was really weak then,” he recalls. Less than two weeks later, on Dec. 30,
Nanette took Patricia to the hospital. Tests showed that the cancer
had taken over Patricia’s liver and spread to her brain. A nurse realized that Patricia had never
gotten the traditional retirement party when her illness forced her
to leave her job at St. John’s. Because Patricia collected
teapots, the nurse organized a tea party. The hospital provided
cookies, and more than a dozen people joined Patricia for tea in
her hospital room. Doris Schaddel, the nurse who had shared the
night shift with Patricia for decades, says that the fete was timed
perfectly. “It was very nice,” she says.
“Thank God they did it when they did.” After little more than a week in the
hospital, Patricia moved to a hospice. Three days later, on Jan.
16, she died. On Jan. 19, Nanette received a letter from
the Chicago Passport Agency, requesting still more proof of
Patricia’s citizenship. “Please submit your original
Certificate of Naturalization, which will be returned to you with
your completed passport,” the letter demands. “This
application is denied unless you adequately address the
requirements stated above . . .” Nanette finds this bureaucratic paper chase
infuriating. “They want her original naturalization papers?
They already have those papers!” she exclaims. “My
mother was able to collect her Social Security before she died. Why
can’t my sister?” LaHood’s office is still trying to help
because, Hinds says, this case “kinda tears me up.”
“You hate to get attached to people,
but you can’t help it,” she says. “Patricia was
just a special, super-nice lady.” Her remains now rest in Oak Ridge Cemetery in
a plot shadowed — literally — by Lincoln’s tomb.
“She liked that,” Nanette chuckles. So it’s too
late for Patricia or even her son to receive funds; only her
long-estranged husband would benefit. “I’m not doing any of this for
the money. None of us would get the money,” Nanette says.
“I’m doing it to prove that my sister was a
citizen.”
This article appears in Mar 9-15, 2006.
