Tag Archives: Henry S Campbell

July 16, 2011 · 10:12 am

Having something to look forward to matters more to seniors

We didn’t take many family vacations when I was a kid.  In the picture above, we’re getting in two cars – that’s Dad’s Corvair Monza – to drive from Maryland to the West Coast where we would board the S.S. Lurline to Hawaii, where Dad would begin a new tour of duty.

Dad at 44 had lots to look forward to: an exciting new phase in his career, the opportunity to live in Honolulu, maybe a trip to take his children hunting in Eastern Washington when he visited his mother there.  And then there were our milestones to anticipate within a few years: brother Scott’s graduation from college and Bruce’s from Punahou.  My milestones?  I think my Mom was just hoping I’d stop clinging and learn to ride my bike (for the record, that didn’t happen until we moved to Seattle two years later).

I think one of the hardest things about being in your 90s must be that you don’t naturally have positive milestones to anticipate.  It’s not likely you’re going to  hunt and fish more, entertain friends more, or take up that hobby you’ve always been meaning to try.  A few do, but they have the rare gift of resilient energy and decent health.  For most, just getting up, dressed, shaved and showered is hard work.

I had big ideas when Dad moved to Sacramento that we would do lots of field trips – taste Zinfandel wines in the foothills, for example.  But regular outings have proven impractical.  Dad worries about being away from a john if he’s in the car for long, and he says he’s lost his taste for wine.

I therefore turned to planning periodic 3-day trips.  My brothers and I have taken Dad on several fishing trips: two on the Feather River, and last summer on the Williamson River near Klamath Falls, Oregon.  For his fall birthday last year, I took him to the Monterey Plaza where we enjoyed lots of room service breakfasts overlooking the ocean, and visited the Monterey Aquarium.

Wednesday we leave for our biggest trip yet: a 2-day visit to Seattle and 3 days in Suncadia near Cle Elum, Washington. Seattle was once home, so no doubt we’ll drive by the old family homestead on 11th Avenue East.  We’ll have the chance to connect with some old friends, my Dad’s niece, my brothers, and some grandchildren.

Dad’s gotten in the habit of asking, “So what’s coming up in the future?”  Just having an orientation to the future is remarkable.  My son, Tommy, recently interviewed a WWII Japanese Imperial Army veteran (now U.S. citizen) who is participating in a program called “Thrill of a Lifetime.”  Through the program, Eskaton, where the man lives, is trying to reunite the elderly man with his brother, who he hasn’t seen since 1951.  The goal of the program is to inspire each resident to live every day to its fullest.

Once upon a time, the days stretched ahead of my Dad full of opportunity.  Now his day-to-day world is confined, but it can be expanded by the anticipation that something good is ahead.  Let’s hope the trip lives up to its promise.

 

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July 10, 2011 · 4:42 pm

The consequences of Dad losing his “filter”

In most ways, my Dad has mellowed as he’s gotten older.  I’ve read that, when it comes to anger, older people – especially women — are less likely to let things make them mad.  They have better control of their emotions internally and externally.

Very old people, however, are less likely to “edit” when a thought crosses their mind that would be inappropriate or uncomfortable for those around them.

This can lead to awkward but hilarious situations, especially when the very old person in question has hearing problems and speaks a little louder than the average person.  Six or seven years ago, our house was on the market and we left to give the REALTOR a chance to show it to a couple who was interested.  They arrived in front as we left in back.  I couldn’t close the window fast enough to mute my Dad’s comment, “She certainly knows how to fill a pair of pants.”  And he didn’t mean that in a good way.  We did not get an offer from that couple.

Or there was the time my Dad commented while still within ear shot, “That must have been quite a hat… before she sat on it.”  Or, “She has a face like a pudding.”

I am a slow learner when it comes to asking if my Dad likes the dinner I’ve prepared.  Occasionally I get a thumbs up, but I am equally likely to get the “so-so” fluttering hand signal.  And once he offered this little gem, “It looks like the dog’s breakfast.”

I shouldn’t be surprised that my Dad complains when he has to return to his assisted living community.  He hates it there.  It’s a good enough place, and he probably would like it if it wasn’t compared on a weekly basis to life at my house.

My house is, well, a house.  With a family that he’s part of.  With lots of room to move around, and people who bring you coffee and wine, serve up three square meals a day and talk to you.  His experience at his assisted living community simply can’t compete with that.

So why is it so painful to me when he complains that returning to the “hacienda” (as he calls it) is like going to prison?  Or that he’s in a drought when he’s there for a few days?  Or that he can’t get the temperature right at night and it’s like an oven (although he was wearing a wool sweater when I picked him up)?

He can no longer filter his comments, and his short term memory loss means that he will keep feeling and commenting on the same anxiety about returning to his apartment, over and over.  It’s the perfect recipe for my guilt.

It isn’t that different than when I had to drop my son or daughter off at day care, and they didn’t want to be there.  They might cling or cry, but I reassured myself that they would get caught up with activities once I left the scene.  I go through a similar exercise when it’s time for Dad to return to his apartment.  He doesn’t cling or cry, but he can’t help repeating his distress about returning.

At least I knew my children would move on to a new developmental phase.  With Dad, I  have to comfort myself.  He won’t outgrow it.

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July 6, 2011 · 11:10 pm

The hole in my father’s heart that only my mother filled

Saturday would have been my mother’s 94th birthday.  She meant to be that old – maybe older – because she saw herself in the mold of “Han Han,” her grandmother who died well into her 90s.  Han Han always said of illness, “Just make up your mind and throw it off by morning.”  That advice worked for my Mom throughout most of her years, but not against the dementia and lung cancer that led to her death in 1999.

It is because of my mother’s death that I am so conscious of my time with my father.  But to think about my father without my mother is to consider the unimaginable.  From 1939 on, Hank and Eileen were an item.

Every couple has its stories.  My Mom and Dad had the story of their meeting, the story of their first big row, and the story of the marriage proposal.  “That first day, she walked into Dr. Pedelford’s Browning class, dressed to the nines, on Brooke Fink’s arm,” my Dad would recount.  “Two weeks later, she walked out on mine.”   Getting ready for a Gamma Phi dance, my Mom learned from a visitor that Dad still had his fraternity pin on a girl in Yakima.  When Dad arrived to collect her, she handed him $5 for train fare and told him not to return without it.  And then there was Eileen’s cable in 1941 that said she had received Dad’s marriage proposal and was headed East by train with her mother so that they could be married.  Only my father swears he never asked her.  “She married me,” Dad always says.

My mother was a force of nature, not given to feeling sorry for herself or others.  She would have made a great litigator, and wanted to pursue law, but her attorney-father declared that there would be no female barristers in the family.  She took what life threw at her as the wife of a Marine, through the separation of war, and her daughter’s three year battle with leukemia.

On her birthday, what I remembered most was not her formidable strength, but her passion for my father — or rather, the passion they had for each other.

They had the kind of relationship that was a universe unto itself, the world of Hank-and-Eileen, a union forged with heat, strong and impermeable.  In the days after my mother died, my father recalled some of their intimate moments like movie images, how she looked with the glow of moonlight on her body.

My father often said, smiling, that he fought for his pants every day of their marriage.  My mother wasn’t one to back down in a fight, and their fights were loud.  They faced off like two cowboys following a common code of honor.  I never heard them insult one another, or dump pent-up resentments.  And when the fight was over, it was over.

Whether it was grief, illness or anger, my mother moved on.  If she worried, it didn’t show.  To the best of my knowledge, she wasn’t one to dwell on what she couldn’t fix.  She let things go.

But she never let go the fierce passion that she felt for my father.  It’s still evident in the photo above, taken after their 50th wedding anniversary party.  Mom didn’t just look at Dad; her eyes locked on to his.

When my Dad quotes Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra on her barge, I always imagine that he sees my mother in his mind’s eye:  “For her own person/It beggar’d all description: she did lie/In her pavilion — cloth-of-gold of tissue–/O’er-picturing that Venus where we see/The fancy outwork nature….”

He was fascinated by her, but under no illusions that she was perfect.  I also thought that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 brought to mind my mother for him:  “I love to hear her speak, yet well I know/That music hath a far more pleasing sound:/I grant I never saw a goddess go,/My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:/And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,/As any she belied with false compare.”

My father’s love for my mother held the conflicting elements of her personality — her thorniness and her love — in perfect homeostasis.

I once asked my father if he had ever strayed outside their marriage, since no doubt he had the opportunity with unaccompanied tours of duty.  He said, “It was never worth the cost.”

I miss my mother.  But my father misses her more.

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June 19, 2011 · 5:01 pm

The Zen of Dad

Dad meets Maddie, 3 weeks old

I’ve never been much good at meditation, or at clearing my mind during the breathing exercises at the end of yoga.  No sooner than I tell myself to “just be present,” my mind is ping-ponging in another direction.

Before I stopped working, it was really bad.  Dad would come for extended visits and I would take time off or walk with him during a break in my telecommuting day.  As we walked along the bike trail in Davis, my mind was busy ticking off what needed to be done for the kids, Todd, work, the house, Dad or friends and organizations.  I used to memorize a list by associating each task with a finger.  By the time I returned, at least all of the fingers on one hand had been assigned a reminder to be transferred to my “to do” list.

I grew up expecting that my father would not be in my life for as long as most people have their fathers in theirs.  His big heart attack when I was five was a startling awakening to the realization that parents are mortal.  My grandmother Nana, who had lived with us, had died the prior year, but Nana was old.  Dad was muscular, purposeful and vigorous, the guy who held me on his shoulders in the ocean waves.  Dads are supposed to be invulnerable.

Awareness of his mortality stayed with me through the years, always in the back of my mind.  Would he see me graduate from high school, college?  Would he be there to give me away at my wedding?  Would he meet my first child?  I certainly never expected that he would see me turn 50, or that I would celebrate his 95th birthday with him, as I plan to do this October 24.

Walking with Dad now, I have become far more conscious not only of what we are doing, and the daily changes along our three regular paths, but of my relationship with my father, this transient time with him.

Listening to Natasha Bedingfield’s anthem for the young and angsty, “Unwritten,” the chorus spoke to me as a reminder that this moment – every moment – with my father will not come again.  So I freeze the pictures in my mind, and try to remember them by associating them with the fingers of my hand.

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten

 

 

 

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June 15, 2011 · 12:00 pm

As good as a homemade present: my birthday call from Dad

Remember when your child brought you home a lop-sided ceramic dish or a woven key fob?  Those were always the most beautiful gifts you received because you knew how much effort went into them.  (Although I will say that the fill-in-the-blank interview that my then-preschool-aged daughter completed for Mother’s Day fell a bit flat when she completed the sentence, “My mother likes to spend time…” with, “on the toilet.”)

At 8 a.m. this morning, the phone rang.  After answering it, my husband, Todd, brought me the handset.  “Good morning, Bets,” said my Dad in his gravelly voice.  “I just wanted to say happy birthday.”

My Dad doesn’t really use the phone anymore, except to call when he hasn’t received his pills on time at his assisted living facility.  It took a big effort to think about calling, then find my number, make the call, and speak clearly.  It was a very brief, bittersweet moment.  In recent days, he had mentioned several times that he wanted to give me something for my birthday.  But, since I’m his gift-buyer, how would he arrange a surprise of some kind since he no longer drives and doesn’t know how to shop online?  His call was a wonderful gift.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with my father, how it has changed over the years, and, even more, how it has evolved since he first became a father in 1942.

My mother and father married the day after Christmas, 1941, less than three weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  My father had been commissioned as a second lieutenant with the Marine Corps Fifth Reserve Officers Commission class, and had been asked to stay on at Quantico as an instructor.  U.S. forces had been stretched to the limit across Europe, North Africa and the Pacific.  My oldest brother was born on the day that the Japanese Imperial Army launched its final attempt to regain control of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.  Around the time my brother turned one, my father shipped out with the 4th Marine Division to take Kwajalein, an atoll in the Marshall Islands, landing on Roi-Namur in February 1944.

I came along 15 years after my older brother.  All of our relationships with my mother and father have been shaped by context.  My oldest brother’s, certainly, by the distraction and separation of the war.  My middle brother was born in 1947, a time when people refocused on family in the peace following the war.  He was also born with medical challenges that required multiple facial surgeries beginning when he was just a few months old.  Next came my sister, who was diagnosed with leukemia when she was one year old, and succumbed three years later, despite the efforts of my hematologist-oncologist uncle Ed.  My mother learned she was pregnant with my youngest brother when Midge’s last remission ended.  Navy physicians advised her to abort the baby, as they feared it would be too traumatic for her to have a baby during a period of such psychological distress.

And I’m “the girl who lived,” born three years after my brother.  My father only recently admitted that I was not planned.

My Dad says that he feels as if he has lived several lives: childhood-through-college, the war years, the period before Midge’s death, the period after, and the period after his forced retirement from the Marine Corps following his massive heart attack.  He has also had several distinct “fatherhoods.”  There is the father of the war, the father before Midge died, and the father after.

Although people will point to my Dad’s bronze medals as a symbol of his accomplishments, I think his greatest success was his evolution into a good father, a better father than the one who raised him.  To put it bluntly, his father was a … well, he wasn’t a nice guy (I just edited what I was going to say, recognizing that grandchildren or great grandchildren may read this).  He had most likely been abused before running away from home on a mean farm in Kentucky, later to bully my grandmother, and bully his sons.  Neither of my Dad’s brothers escaped that legacy, but my Dad did.

Over the years, my Dad evolved, and softened.  Fathers and daughters do have a different kind of relationship than fathers and sons, although my Dad raised me to be able to take are of myself and held me accountable, just as he did my brothers.  In the years since my mother has died, I have become his female confidante even as I have become his caregiver.

But I’ll admit it: I probably saw the softer side of Dad more often than my brothers did.  And today, my birthday, I am grateful for all of the events that converged to give me the time that I have with my Dad, now.  And grateful for this morning’s phone call.

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June 13, 2011 · 5:44 pm

My Dad makes progress word by word

Dad used to think short pants were the ultimate indignity

This morning my Dad has his fifth outpatient visit with a speech therapist since his small stroke three weeks ago.  Lynn asked him how he felt about continuing.  Did he feel that he would benefit from more sessions?  Did he want to continue?

Dad answered her question with his own, “What is the expected outcome?”

She told him that he had improved a lot since she began working with him, but that he wasn’t quite where she thought he might be at this point, and that he might benefit from some additional sessions.

He repeated, “What is the expected outcome?”

A light bulb seemed to go off for Lynn and she said, “Here, let me show you.”  She wrote on the page of Dad’s workbook:

“We started out practicing saying words slowly and exaggeratedly.  Then we moved on to sentences and reading out loud.  Today we’ve been working on making sure that your responses to questions can be understood.  Next is conversation, and finally comes recitation.”

In showing Dad the ladder he’s climbing, she helped him to feel that he can improve, and, maybe, re-establish some control over a difficult situation.

I appreciated the dignity with which she treated him.  She seemed to recognize that, to my Dad, quality of life has a great deal to do with being able to summon up and recite passages from his beloved poems and plays.

But I also realized that she was giving him was a way of measuring progress, of validating for himself that he was improving.  It’s like having a personal trainer comment that you can now perform an exercise (or number of repetitions) that would have defeated you when you first began.

What she was giving Dad wasn’t hope, exactly, nor was she just cajoling him to be optimistic.  With her clinical skills, she was giving him a path for improving, and he could see that he had already come part of the way.

More importantly, she was helping to keep my Dad’s world from shrinking even further.  He can no longer drive, and he has difficulty following and retaining ideas the way one must to tackle full-length books.  He can’t hear in situations with more than a few people present, even though he’s a very social person.

But he’s still him, and he wants to be part of the conversation.  He wants to be able to share a story, or make a witty remark, or discuss the state of world affairs, or express appreciation.  All of these depend on being understandable.

I’m grateful that Lynn of Sutter VNA is helping him to retain his fundamental “Henry-ness.”

 

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June 12, 2011 · 5:41 pm

Riding the waves of my Dad’s memories

You never know what’s going to trigger a memory.  For me this afternoon, it was strawberry ice cream.  Not just any ice cream, but my Grandmother’s strawberry ice cream.  I made a batch for our Norwegian cousins last week and finished it off today.  It took me right back to sharing Independence Day with the Lukens clan in Seattle, when we hand-cranked a behemoth ice cream freezer for the better part of a day.  (Of course, it’s a lot easier to make it with a little electric appliance I have now.)

It’s very frustrating for my Dad – any of us, really – not to be able to access memory on demand.  With my Dad, it’s usually not that the memory is gone, it’s just not within reach when he wants it.

Instead, his memories seem to float up out of the depths like flotsam, submerge again, only to return again the next day.  It’s as if a recirculating pump brings them back time and time again, until the pattern shifts and it’s a new set of memories that begins their rotation.

For the past month or so, Dad has been remembering me riding on his shoulders in the waves at Barber’s Point on Oahu.  Dad was stationed at CINCPac in Honolulu, and I was five.  I loved the water but I couldn’t swim, and Barber’s Point had a notorious riptide.  The moment he remembers may have been the day before, even the day of, his massive heart attack.  Back in the early 60s, no one knew if you would recover from a big cardiac event.  At some point, it dawned on him that he could just as easily have had that heart attack while jouncing me in the waves.  Perhaps that’s why that particular day is so firmly etched in his mind.

Sometimes I think his memories are things he’s trying to work through.  He often asks me, “Do we have any business left?”  It’s his way of asking if his affairs are in order, recognizing that he doesn’t have forever.

Not long after my mother died in 1999, he perserverated on the memory of my sister’s death from leukemia.  He remembered her calling out to him, “Daddy, help me,” and his deep feeling of helplessness.  During another period, it was the bloody beach on Iwo Jima.  In recent months, many memories were of his father, with whom he did not have a warm relationship.  He wonders why his father didn’t take him fishing or have the interest in him that my father had in his sons.

Listening to some of his memories breaks my heart.  Others give me comfort, because I know that they bring him comfort.  Like today, when he remembered my brother older Dean at about age five, hands on hips, waiting for him in the driveway when he came home from work.  Dean was such a little man, even at that age.  Dad smiled.  And so did I.

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June 8, 2011 · 3:15 pm

What D-Day means to my Dad

Henry at the 23rd Marine’s base camp in Maui, 1945

Two weeks after my father’s recent (and, thankfully, small) stroke, we were in his internist’s office for a follow-up visit.  It was June 6, D-Day.  Dr. F. asked him, “So where were you on D-Day?”

I knew what was going through my Dad’s mind.  Which D-Day?  D-Day for my Dad was February 19, 1945, the invasion of Iwo Jima.  For most Americans, D-Day is Normandy, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers.

Until Dad was in his early 80s, about the time my Mom died, he never talked about the war.  When he did begin to describe it, interrupted by long buried tears, he often began by describing the long, narrow beach at Iwo Jima where anti-aircraft guns rained fire from their unobstructed vantage points above.  I wrote notes as we sat on the couch in my parents’ home in Tacoma:

When we pulled in offshore, the light was growing.  You’re up on the deck and you see this ungodly, ghostly tower rising 600 to 700 feet in the air.  It was a volcanic spire — the goddamnedest thing I ever saw.  Scary.

On the night of D+2, he described sitting in a Japanese pillbox that had become the 23rd Marines first command post:

There was a tremendous concussion over my head. Sand came raining down.  I think a round bounced off (the pillbox).  The next night, the Japanese fired 240 mm mortars, as big as a trash can.  You’d see it go up, but you wouldn’t know where it would come down.  They dropped one about 30 yards outside the pillbox.  Afterwards there was just a crater where 15 or 16 people had been standing.  Just like that, they were gone.

The American victory at Iwo Jima was a crushing blow to the Empire of Japan.  Despite the superior numbers of the American forces — roughly 70,000 battle-hardened Marines to 22,000 Japanese — winning the island and its two strategically located airfields took more than seven weeks to win.  The topography of the island, and the preparation of the Japanese with thousands of bunkers, hidden artillery and a warren of underground tunnels, made it the Marine’s toughest challenge of the War of the Pacific.

What everyone remembers is the famous photo of the American colors being raised on Mt. Suribachi.  And Dr. F. asked about that, too.  Years ago, I asked Dad that same question:

What you saw in the picture was the second time they put up the flag.  One officer had a flag in his back pocket.  When they took the hill, they ran the flag up.  Later, they sent in a full-sized holiday flag.

As I listened to my Dad, I couldn’t imagine how he had the guts to face the enemy fire that they did on Iwo Jima.  At 28, he was just a few years older than my daughter is now.  I asked him how he did it.  Wasn’t he afraid to go ashore?  “You did it for the guy next to you,” he said.

Like many WWII vets, my Dad is always a little surprised when people thank him for his service or call him a hero.  He was twice decorated, the second time for his efforts as operations officer for the 23rd Regiment, 4th Marine Division, during the Iwo Jima campaign.  But when he thinks “heroes,” he thinks of moments like this:

The island was shaped like a pork chop – a volcanic mound with steep sides, honeycombed with caves. It overlooked the beaches we landed on — perfect visibility.  Down at the far end was another escarpment looking the other way.  We had one fine officer who took a posthumous award for scooping up men without leaders and taking the key point.  They got all shot up.

As for his own moments of fear, he tended to make light of them:

Some days later, maybe D+4, we were in reserve because we’d  lost about a third of our troops by then.  My job was to prepare to take over and I needed to know where everyone was, their weaponry, etc.  So I went down to Division HQ.  Enough of the island had been taken by then that you could move around.  I had to walk about one mile to the other end of the island.  The shooting had died off.  The map was surrounded by officers and I couldn’t see anything.  Then, the Japanese started firing high velocity rounds from their position on a cliff.  Division HQ staff bailed out and I took all of the information I needed and walked out.

But Monday, as we talked with my Dad’s physician, it saddened me to think that most people no longer see “the Colonel.”  They may see a 94 year old man with a number of chronic conditions and assume he is frail.  They may hear a gravelly voice and assume he’s crotchety.  They may take his hearing loss — “too many bombs,” he says — to mean that he is stupid when he cannot understand them. Or they may not see him at all, and just treat him as invisible.

When my father was being discharged from Sutter General two weeks ago, two staff members made the mistake of discussing Dad — three feet away — without involving him in the conversation.  He said:

I am not a defective person.  Why are you not addressing me?

He may not look like the Major that he was in 1945, much less the Colonel, but he still knows how to command.

For more first-hand reports from Marines who served at Iwo Jima, here’s a source I recently found when looking for news of Dad’s friend, Col. Shelton Scales.

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