My parents had expected that something was wrong, but they had not imagined this. Finally my father asked, “What’s the next step? How do we treat her?”

As she began to answer, Dr. Wyvell’s eyes filled with tears. She was not only my parents’ doctor; in close-knit Midland, she was also a friend. “There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “She probably has only a few weeks left. You should take her home and make her as comfortable as you can.”

My father could not accept that there was no hope to save his little girl. He went home and called his mother’s brother Dr. John Walker at Memorial Sloan Kettering, the best cancer hospital in New York. His uncle told him about some recent advances in treatment that might help Robin. He also confirmed what Dr. Wyvell had told them: Childhood leukemia had no cure.

My parents took Robin to New York. They knew the odds were long, but they refused to give up on their daughter. As Dr. Walker told my father, “You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you don’t try to treat her.”

My parents never really told me what was going on. They just said that Robin was sick and that she and Mother were going to New York to see Uncle John so that she could get better. My father shuttled back and forth between New York and Midland. Sometimes Robin’s cancer would go into remission, and she would come home for a few weeks. Then she would suffer a setback, and they would fly back to New York. When my parents were gone, they left me and my brother Jeb, who had been born a few months earlier, with Midland friends and neighbors. They became our surrogate parents without a second thought.

My parents approached Robin’s illness differently. My father was a whirlwind of activity. When he was in New York, he was meeting with doctors, checking test results, and asking about new treatments. In Texas, he raced out of the house early in the morning, stopped at church to pray for Robin, and then threw himself into his work. Looking back on it, I can see that the frantic activity was his way of coping with the helplessness he felt. George Bush, the Navy pilot who swam to the life raft and paddled away from death, must have found it unbearable not to be able to do anything to help the girl he loved.

In contrast to my father’s constant motion, Mother spent almost every waking hour at Robin’s bedside, playing with her, reading to her, and trying to keep her spirits high. She stayed with the Walkers in New York, and family members would drop by the hospital to offer support. My great-grandfather, gruff old G.H. Walker—who at age seventy-eight was in the final year of his own life—spent hours teaching Robin how to play gin rummy. She called the game “Gin Poppy,” the nickname the family used for my dad.

Robin’s treatment was painful. The chemotherapy and blood transfusions drained her strength. Mother imposed a rule: No crying in front of Robin. My father had a hard time abiding. Mother sat stoically by her side, comforting her daughter as she suffered and slipped away. As the biographer Richard Ben Cramer described my mother’s character in those days, “It was beyond strength—it was heroic, an act of will and love.”

One day when Robin was resting, Mother went to visit Dad’s parents in Greenwich, Connecticut. My grandfather Prescott Bush, who had just been elected to the U.S. Senate, took her for a long walk through Greenwich’s Putnam Cemetery. There he showed her the burial plot that he and my grandmother had selected as their final resting place. There was room for an extra headstone. That was his gentle way of telling my mother that they would take care of Robin when the time came, and that he wanted his granddaughter to be at his side. (Decades later, my parents moved Robin’s grave to the plot where their graves will be at Dad’s presidential library in College Station, Texas.)

The end arrived on October 11, 1953. Robin died peacefully after battling for seven months. In one of her final moments with my father, Robin looked up at him with her beautiful blue eyes and said, “I love you more than tongue can tell.” Dad would repeat those words for the rest of his life.

—

I HAVE A vivid memory of the day my parents told me that Robin had died. One of my teachers at Sam Houston Elementary School had asked me and one of my classmates to carry a record player to another wing of the school. As we walked outside, I saw my parents pull up in their pea-green Oldsmobile. I had no idea why they had shown up at school in the middle of the day. As I sprinted over to the car, I thought that I saw Robin’s blond curls in the backseat. I was so excited that she had come home. But when I got to the car, she wasn’t there. Mother hugged me tight and told me that she was gone. On the drive home, I saw my parents cry for the first time.

After Robin’s death, my parents switched roles. My father became the strong one, dealing with the funeral planning and logistics. One of their first decisions was to donate Robin’s body to Memorial Sloan Kettering. The doctors told them that they could learn from studying her disease, and my parents hoped that Robin’s death might lead to some benefit for other suffering children. Childhood cancer research became a lifelong cause for them. Today the childhood cancer clinic at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center bears Robin’s name.

After seven months of staying strong, Mother cratered. She suffered bouts of depression that would plague her periodically. At twenty-eight years old, her dark brown hair started to turn white.

While I was too young to fully understand Robin’s death, I sensed that Mother was hurting. She later told me that I stopped playing with my friends so that I could stay inside and try to cheer her up with jokes. My father found ways to lift her spirits, too. He planned visits with friends and gently helped my mother to move forward with life. Instead of focusing on Robin’s loss, they gave thanks for the years they were able to spend with her.

Robin’s death did not drive my parents apart, unlike many couples who find their relationships broken after losing a child. In their case, the shared pain brought them together, and their marriage emerged stronger. When they needed each other most, they were both willing to go three-quarters of the way.

—

MY FATHER NEVER talked much about losing Robin. Back in that era, people didn’t really discuss topics like that. A few years after Robin died, Dad wrote his mother a touching letter about how lonely he felt. “We need some soft blond hair to offset those crew cuts. We need a doll house to stand firm against our forts and rackets and thousand baseball cards,” he wrote. “We need a girl.” His prayer was answered when my sister Dorothy was born in 1959. When he first saw her in the hospital, he pressed his face against the nursery glass and sobbed.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, a journalist asked my father whether he had ever faced any “personal difficulty.” The subtext of the question was whether someone with a life as comfortable as George Bush’s could relate to ordinary people.

My father could have mentioned that he’d been shot down by enemy fire in World War II, or that he had almost died of a staph infection in high school. Instead he stared at the reporter and asked, “Have you ever sat and watched your child die?”

The journalist said no.

“I did, for six months,” Dad said.

That ended the interview. Anyone who had ever lost a child knew exactly what he meant.

My father never stopped thinking about his daughter. For as long as I can remember, he has kept a three-by-five framed photo of her on the desk in his office. Late in his life, as he contemplated his own mortality, Dad asked his minister whether he would meet Robin and his mother in heaven. It was telling that those were the two people who he wanted to see. He asked whether Robin would still look like a child, or whether she would have “grown up” over the sixty years since her death. That’s part of the great mystery. But I think Dad knows in his heart that he will see his daughter again.