Annual Letter: Recent Family Events

In recent years our extended family experienced a roller-coaster series of events sad and sublime. Like many of you, our friends, we lost our oldest generation, and their collective experience. And we greeted a whole millennial crop of little folks. First, my stepdad Lorenzo was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in May of 1999. He began treatment just before my cousin spent a 17 day stint in a Vegas ICU. It sounds like a bachelor party gone bad (especially knowing Boyd—the old Boyd, Tina, I swear!) but it was a missed diagnosis on a burst appendix that very nearly killed him. Boyd recuperated in time to limp west and join us at my sister Audra’s wedding to Andrew Houston in October. They had a beautiful ceremony at Mission Carmel, kneeling on the very grave of Father Serra, the founder of the California missions. Step lightly! The weather was perfect and the reception lively and warm. My stepfather (Audra’s natural father) was declining rapidly, despite treatment, but held on long enough to have the first dance with his youngest daughter and to give her away. He succumbed on Dec. 24th. I gave the eulogy at his funeral on New Year’s Eve, 1999. He had raised me since I was 4; and we had many stormy times, but he told me he was proud of me. He was often difficult, childlike in his anger and his joy; he was not very comfortable with the individual, but he held a strong belief in the potential of the human race. He was a 20th century man, an engineer, one who dreamed of great machines, grand formulas to explain the universe, and an awakening of humanity to its possibilities. He loathed the despots, large and small who plagued his times. A rural survivor of the Depression, he knew hunger and want, so he worked hard and kept an eye to the future, sure that we would all be better if we focused on our abilities and not our fears. He was always skeptical about God, always seeking some proof of His existence. In his last months he told me he had found it but I didn’t understand his explanation, though he seemed at peace with it. In the end, the dead leave those answers up to us.

My Mom had a tough time for a while, but made it through the grief. Four years later she married a long-time family friend, also widowed, and my former school principal, Bill Raines. There's no foooling this guy; he's known about my shenanigans for decades. Lately they have been enjoying Bill's new granddaughter, Jordan.

Four days after Lorenzo's funeral I was rear-ended in a hit-and-run auto accident and spent the next five weeks at home with Regis, Ripa, and my new friend Vicodin. Fortunately, no broken bones. Around the same time Uncle Bruce, my NY summer-time dad, also passed from cancer. He had volunteered in the Army at 16, rising to Lt.Colonel in the Air Force, and was a veteran of WWII and Korea, being a decorated pilot in the latter conflict. He once flew 97 missions in 97 days, so his later career as chauffer in New York City traffic came easy. He was raised in Eastern Tennessee but loved NY and knew it intimately, bestowing that affection on me, filtered through a keen southern wit. I miss him and his adopted hometown, and I miss him in it. Like many war veterans, he kept much about himself to himself. Something about family life didn't work for him, and we all suffered his absences, especially my aunt & cousin. Many folks give greatly to one thing in life and in doing so help many strangers, but they come home incapable of giving to those most needy, the ones that try to love them. He died alone, unwilling to be cared for and we grieve most for the lost opportunities. There are still a lot of vets around who have yet to win the last great battle of their lives, the campaign to open up and seek real solace among the living. Even though we will never really know what they saw and what they lost, we can listen, and learn more fully what we have all gained from them, if they find the last measure of courage to let us in.

The grim toll continued that winter of 2000 as we lost Andie’s great-grandmother Wilma and her grandmother Carol. These were women who loved Andie dearly, Carol having been indispensable to Anna when she was left by Carol’s son, and in our early years together when we were a young couple trying to work our way out of poverty and raise a toddler. Both lived long enough to be sure that Andie would be a happy & successful woman, but Carol especially died much too young and would miss so much of her many grandchildren’s lives. In March 2000 my father Jack suffered a heart attack. I spent a week in Seattle while he recuperated from bypass surgery. The anxiety my stepmom Delores and I experienced was relieved by hours filling me in on years of interesting dirt about Dad. He has made a full recovery, thank God, and is back to over-working himself again.

These sudden losses and frightening experiences had us reeling but new lives were joining us as well. In April 2000 Lucy Roberts was born to Anna’s sister Jen & her husband Tim, followed by the googley blue eyes of Miriam in Dec.2002. We were all overjoyed when Tim accepted a family physician’s position in a clinic in Grants Pass, Oregon; still not next door to us but far better than Minnesota! In late 2000 my cousin Boyd and his lovely new wife Tina held a reception in Tampa, Florida, so we trooped east to celebrate. The kids had their first jet ride and it was quite the thrill to fly all the way across the US. Florida was fun but the weather was freaky; ice at Disney World while it was 62 back home in Eureka. It was also the first time that I was able to join my mother and my Aunt for Christmas since 1966. Audra spent the holiday eating for two and in May 2001 produced Candace, making me an Uncle again. Tina & Boyd, despite busy professional careers found time to deliver smilin' Liam, two months early but doing fine and justifying his grandma Rosemary’s move to Florida (which put my family’s NY connection into past tense). Had enough babies? No? Bring ‘em on! (Hey! Somebody else is changing the diapers finally!) For Xmas 2001 Anna’s brother Chris imported from Ohio his fiancé Jade and her two sweet daughters Sierra and Desiree. We were present as all three girls had an exciting dip in the Pacific, their first contact with an ocean. Last December, Jade produced a third baby daughter to completely estrogenize daddy Chris. In March 2001 Anna’s cousin Josh and his wife Kathy brought happy Jack into the world, just 2 weeks after the passing of the matriarch of our family, Anna’s paternal grandmother Marian (they passed each other on the trip from heaven!).

I was very privileged to get to know this venerable and always cheerful lady, who was a very positive influence on us. For Marion's 90th birthday (Jan ’99) the whole family chartered a yacht for a sunny cruise around San Francisco Bay. Four generations enjoyed each other’s company and the view, sailing under the great bridges that were just dreams when this woman, wizened now but still hale, was already in adulthood. It was marvelous to think that one person had brought some of us into being and all of us together, safe at the end of an astounding century she had witnessed unfold nearly in its entirety. Long enough to greet little faces that never saw the 20th century and have a darn good chance of making it into the 22nd. Each long life is a bridge between civilizations and a vessel of wisdom from one to the other, though it is tragic how little of that wisdom we end up incorporating. I think of Marian's horse-powered childhood, riding unafraid with her big brother on acreage that is now the Santa Ana Civic Center. Life on the ranch was a life of hard, but liberating personal responsibility, in a world practically alien from ours, before the Depression & the Greatest Generation made their mark; before the term "World War" was heard, and long before they were numbered. Yet it was, of course, a world with miseries and terror. That seems to be always with us, but she lived a life that kept it at bay from her own family. My own grandmother, who died 10 years ago, was an ardent anti-communist who liked to point out that she lived to see the creation and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I remember the joy I felt as the Berlin Wall came down; like a great thaw of the human spirit taking place, ending a world trapped in a 50-year ideological deep freeze. We all watched the people pour through the openings, their faces giddy with excitement, fear, and desire. What next, they wondered, even as they enjoyed the moment. What next?

The world where order is maintained at gunpoint is giving way to a world of numbers, borderless entities, and some perilous new anxieties as the tribal collides with the global, but it also becoming a world of openness & personal responsibility that can harness for good the best strengths of the human spirit... if fear doesn't blockade. When symbols fall and the walls come down, when emotions & desires, idealism and cynicism crowd and mix chaotically, there is no sure prediction it will all go well - but there never was. Some things come together, some just collide. Old rusty systems are swept away without any concrete plans for something new and we quail at the uncertain prospects, but was being frozen better? Are inaction & gray certitude the ideals we really want to live by? When we tear down the walls around us and in us, the ones that keep us trapped & isolated in a faithless notion of "safety", who knows what may come creeping in, yet who knows what may come soaring out? We all need to be vigilant and resolute enough to guard against the former while still optimistic enough to look for the latter, and we need to instill these qualities in those around us. Marion stayed hopeful through a century of horror and terror, not with her head in the sand but doing what she could to bring comfort and peace to those around her, with pleasure and confidence, and lived to see a sunny 90th birthday surrounded by love and admiration, and still appreciating the wonders of all we have achieved, great and small. Hope matters, and it matters most when we live it.
....to be continued...