| Loss of a fine gentleman |
[Jun. 17th, 2009|08:57 pm] |
I've known it was coming for most of a month now, and known it was imminent all weekend. My mother's Uncle John passed away today at about 11:30 am.
When I try to think of how to best describe my Great Uncle John, the word "gentleman" floats to the top. He was a gentleman through and through, even after he lost his mind to altizmers, he was polite as pie to the nurses and staff who cared for him. I remember visiting his nursing home one time about a year after he'd arrived. He took me aside and said, "Can you please help me to get out of here. The doctor said it would only be a few days until he had me checked out so I could go home, but I've been here more than a week now and I really need to go."
Polite but increasingly firm, never rude even though he'd been told "no" a thousand times and *really* wanted out of there, with an urgency that would drive some to violence.
He wanted to go home. But home isn't a location, it's a state of mind. A place where everything makes sense. Where people you love are recognizable as such. He is home now.
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Thoughts floating by... I wish I could write coherently like ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ricevermicelli or zogathon about these things to amuse, delight, and touch my friends, but this writing is what it is and I don't mind if anyone skims or skips it. It's for me.
...
My earliest memories of Great Uncle Johnny are of staying at his house as a child. He lived 10 minutes away from Disneyland and had two guest bedrooms. My parents stayed in the one with the queen bed, and my brother and I stayed with Great-Grandma Arnold in the other room with two twins. The rooms had matching red crochet 70's style bedspreads. They were still there when I last visited him at his place around 1998 when Jon and I were down for Kevin and Stephanie's wedding.
By that time I was an adult, and my Jon and I got a hotel room of our own, yet we still stopped by to visit while we were in the area. We offered to take him out to dinner, but like all of my older generation, he insisted on picking up the tab. It was that visit when I first realized his mind was slipping. The three of us joked with the host about what name to put down while we waited for a table, "Jon" or "John" so we decided on "Beth." Yet when they called my name, he couldn't remember having made the joke. He was quite surprised and more confused than I might have expected for the situation.
Shortly after that visit, I talked to my mom about him. She and her brothers and sisters all thought he was just fine by himself back then (he never married or had a partner) but they did start checking on him more regularly. When things did go down hill later, my mom and aunts knew his neighbors and were able to effect a smooth transition. Or as smooth as these things can go. It's never easy to assist an elderly beloved one out of their home. In early 2005 he drove his truck "around the corner to visit a friend in the hospital" and wound up out of gas on the freeway in Visalia 3 hours away several days later. Even after being properly fed and cared for, it was clear he wasn't mentally up to the task of living alone. The nieces and nephew discussed getting a live-in nurse for him, but he was clear that he didn't want anyone living in his house. Assisted living was the best available option.
But back to the happy parts. As a kid my family lived on the east coast, and my grandparents on my father's side lived in Sacramento. We traveled to CA once every other year for Christmas and usually had 3 days to see my mom's side of the family in CA. We'd drive down to Bakersfield, swing by Taft to pick up great-grandma Arnold, and continue on to Uncle Johnny's house. He had a rowing machine that would amuse my brother and I for hours. Right outside the door of his condo there was a playground with a rocket ship that consumed the rest of the hours until we could go to bed for the night before Disneyland.
Disneyland was a special treat my family did for a single day once every other year growing up. That's the only real vacation we ever took, other than moving across country several times and one camping trip up the CA coast before 7th grade. According to my mother, the year I was two, I was quite the terror. I'd just finished 10 days of being on my best behavior in Sacramento, and I let it all explode down at Uncle Johnny's house. Apparently he and Grandmop were amazingly tolerant. "I hate you!" "That's ok, she's just tired." "I never want to see you again!" "That's ok, she's just tired." "I don't want to be here, I want to go home!" "That's ok, she's just tired."
I like to hope the same tolerance could rub off on me, it clearly did on my mother. She was so patient with him through his final years. At first, she was sometimes able to distract him by getting him to tell stories of the old days, of fighting and flying in the Korean war, of working for Boeing, of how he got his cat. I need to ask her to write all those down.
Uncle Johnny always had a cat when I was little. Except that he didn't. "That's not my cat. That's the neighbor's cat." He just fed it, and gave it water, and in his later years after the neighbors moved away, let it sleep in his house. He had a real row boat in his back patio that the cats liked to hide in. He was amazingly strong. He had spring loaded grippers that I could barely get to move a centimeter with two 8-year-old hands, yet he could pound out 20 reps in one hand without even blinking.
Uncle Johnny liked to watch TV, the kinds of shows my parents would never watch. Game shows and cop shows and sometimes movies. I remember one year as a teenager when we were trying to find something everyone could agree on. While flipping through the channels we saw Arnold Schwarzenegger and stopped to watch. Everything looked fine for a few moments even though it looked like an older movie. Then he opened his mouth. Wow. It was DUBBED! When he was famous it was bizarre to see Arnold's body but someone else's voice.
I remember watching it through the bars on the stairs because there wasn't much sitting room where the TV was. Those stairs would terrify me now, because they were the kind that didn't have verticals and a baby could roll between them.
Uncle Johnny's house was always the same every visit, decade after decade. That never struck me as odd for a place I saw for 2 days every 600, but now I know most people rearrange more than that. I suppose he got it the way he liked it, and then left it that way. When you first enter the front door, there's a big oil painting of John Wayne on the right hand wall, and another of cowboys straight ahead. In the downstairs bathroom, there was a tall stretched bottle of 7-up with 3 brightly colored large 70's fake flowers in it. Once I asked him about it, and he told me he'd stretched it himself by using a match. He strung me along for a good 5 minutes before my mom let me in that he was pulling my leg.
I really need to go to bed now. Maybe I'll feel like writing more in the comments later. But now I've written enough to get the images out of my head and onto the computer so that I can sleep well tonight. I loved him.
--Beth |
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