Category: Milo and Sarah

Just one more Grandma Sarah story (I cannot help myself). Aunt Julia sent me a chunk of an old instant message she sent me sometime last year. It reminded us that one of Grandma Sarah’s greatest qualities was her boundless kindness and efforts to help “the least of these.”

From Aunt Julia:

I just found this except on a messenger string between Ken and I on 8/4/2015. Mom was feeding a guy named Mike who used to sit at her table. He could still kind of feed himself but Mom would help him because he struggled so much. This is after she had recovered from her surgery but before she got C-dif.

“Mom helps them spoon feed people when they can’t get to everyone. I wish I would have had my camera today, it was very sweet but painfully slow since she can’t see. She would pick up a bite and push it in his direction and he would lean in a bit and she would stretch out a bit and he would lean a little more and so on until the fork reached his mouth… then I would heave a sigh of relief and the whole process would start again It took about 30 minutes for them to get through half of his plate with neither of them getting impatient or losing interest. I just about lost my mind!!!”

My brother, Uncle Doug, my sisters, Aunts Julia and Jean and I all feel good about the arrangements for Grandma Sarah’s funeral. In particular, we feel good about making sure Grandpa Milo gets what he needs. In addition to our plans to make sure someone is checking in on Grandpa Milo now in the short term, but also through the holidays and later on when things settle down after the funeral in January. The sheer number of family and close friends who have reached out to us is testament not only to those friends, but to the lifetime of good will  Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah built up over many years.

There was a period of emotionally charged frenetic activity following Grandma Sarah’s death the transitioned into, for me anyway, a couple of days of phone calls with friends and family to thank people for their kindness–family, family with no blood relation (you know who you are), especially people who met in Grandpa Milo’s and Grandma Sarah’s living room for church meetings every Sunday morning or Wednesday meeting for decades and special friends of every stripe.

There are many things for which I am thankful going through these events. One of those is that I have truly loving siblings. They have been absolute champions in every way. They have honorably, selflessly and humbly done everything within their power to not only preserve the dignity of everyone involved, but they have done it at great cost to themselves. I love them and am very thankful for them.

Now, I am just about all cried out–at least for awhile. It is sad that Grandma Sarah is gone, but she had a great live. She loved much and was much loved. Next weekend, the family will help Grandpa Milo get some closure and in January we will look forward to saying a more formal goodbye. We will all miss her, but I can honestly say that the greatest gift she gave all of us is that “it is well with her soul.”

The photo to the left is of Grandma Sarah picking beans with her twin sister Janet’s second son Neil. It is pretty descriptive of a lot of my upbringing. Neil and I were both second sons of about the same age and spent a lot of time together at Grandma Jenkins’s (Grandma Sarah’s mom) and Aunt Janet’s house together for overnight stays and the like. More importantly though, it is a reminder that my generation and the generation before that grew up as a family that harvested crops by hand as manual laborers on farms. In my case, it was mostly beans and strawberries, but a lot of other crops in the previous generation (cherries, hops, etc.). Grandpa Milo’s family worked as migrant farm workers every summer during the harvest seasons of his youth. Grandma Sarah picked strawberries and beans in the summers of her college years (and before) to help pay her way through pharmacy school.

I probably should not tell this story in public, but it is so iconic in terms of how I think about my mother, I just cannot help myself. Both Grandma Sarah and I graduated from Oregon State University. In 1973, I moved into a student co-op directly across the street from where Grandma Sarah lived when she started at Oregon State in 1948. I wrote about that place and its connection with Ted Bundy the serial killer in a previous post on this blog. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah lived in Newberg when I started school and I often caught a ride with friends to go back home for weekends. Grandma Sarah would then drive me the 60 miles back to Corvallis on Sunday afternoon after church. We would always stop in Monmouth on the way to eat lunch. I have been at that J’s Family Restaurant a lot of times not only for this, but because it is the same restaurant where our dear friend, Susan Rodriguez worked while she was getting her degree at what is now Western Oregon University as well as a good place to eat on the way to watch a Beavers game.

I need to give this story a little context now to diminish the trouble this will cause me. Grandma Sarah had a wonderful uncle who always went to her house for Christmas while she was growing up as a young girl. He smoked cigars and she associated the smell of those cigars with some wonderful memories she had as a child. So, when the mood struck us, we would buy a couple of REALLY cheap cigars (Swisher Sweets) and smoke them together while we finished our drive to Corvallis. She would get that twinkle in her eye that everyone who really knew her has seen when she was about to say something or do something just for the sheer joy of it even though it might be a little bit off in the eyes of those who were a little to uptight or ungracious. I LOVED those trips. They were our thing. I was talking to Aunt Julia last night and she reminded me that she had actually been there one time with us and we bought THREE cigars. I am glad she was there and can confirm my story because I think there are a lot of people who might not believe it if I did not come from someone with a little more credibility than myself.

I thought it would be good to explain the funeral arrangements we are making to say goodbye to Grandma Sarah because they are a little bit out of the ordinary. Doug, Julia and Jean who are very close to the situation and after a lot thought have decided the best way to handle this to accommodate Grandpa Milo’s capabilities would be to do this in two steps. I completely concur with what was decided as it was a kind solution and what the family feels is a fitting way to say goodbye respectfully given the circumstances. Since it was Grandma Sarah wish to be cremated we have more time than we would otherwise. In that light, this is our plan:

Step One. Many know that Grandpa Milo has Alzheimer’s disease and is not as able as in the past. It was felt that in the short term, based on Grandpa Milo’s capabilities and all of our need for some closure it would be good to do something in a much smaller, more controlled venue. To that end, we will have a small family-only dinner in the next week or so to remember Grandma Sarah and disperse the ashes in the rose garden by the pond Grandpa Milo built like they had planned.

Step Two. All of us wanted to have a traditional funeral so all the family and friends Grandma Sarah loved so much and who loved her back can say goodbye, too. Because we have time and due to a number of considerations including the upcoming holidays when it is hard to plan travel, the family thought it would be easier if we did the funeral after the first of the year. It seemed odd to us to wait so long, but someone remembered that was the way it was handled with our dear friend Beth Bellam and it not only went well, but allowed more people to make plans to be there. The next consideration was that Special Meeting rounds start right after the first of the year and end on January 15. Mom’s birthday is on January 18th and we thought that might be a good time to have the funeral and celebrate her life. We talked to our ministers and they thought that would be just fine if that is what the family wanted. We are not sure it will happen exactly on January 18th, but if not, it will be within a few days of that date. We will keep everyone posted.

Mom (Grandma Sarah) died last night. She was with Aunts Julia and Jean, Uncle Doug and two of her grandchildren, Amy and Charlie. I flew out from Texas to Seattle last weekend and was able to drive down to Portland on Saturday with Kelly to say goodbye in person. She recognized us and was able to say one or two words and squeeze our hand to answer questions while we were there. Kelly and I took turns reading the Bible to her, Psalm 23, Matthew 5-7 and the three epistles of John. Then we sang some hymns with the help of Grandpa Milo. Grandma Sarah, Kelly and I held hands and we each prayed for her. After that, she lost focus so we kissed her and said goodbye. We knew it would be the last time and were very thankful we had the chance to tell her we loved her and say goodbye.

Mom was a faithful woman who always looked out for “the least of these.” She had a great love for Jesus and He was what her life was about. It was sad to see her go, but she is in a better place.

Day 486 of 1000

My parents are getting older.  Lately, my brother, sisters, and I have worked hard on getting Dad and Mom out of their rented house into assisted living.  Mom has fairly normal old age dementia. Dad, on the other hand, has a fairly odd malady.  It was odd enough that his neurologist has asked that he donate his brain to OHSU for further study after he is gone.  At first they thought it was Alzheimer’s disease.  After that, they thought it was Frontal Lobe Temporal Dementia (FTD).  The PET scan showed that it was both and neither.  His brain scan manifests something that is somewhat less than Alzheimer’s and something less than FTD.  But the both of them together are something that is fairly rare.  That is pretty much the story of Dad’s life.  Both Dad and Mom have long term memories that are intact.  In light of that diagnosis, I have decided to try to do some interviews to document their amazing lives.

Mom is one of the first women to graduate with a four year degree in pharmacy from Oregon State University.  There was one woman in the year before her and she graduated with one other woman.  There were other women who graduated before that, but that was well before her time when pharmacy was a two year program.  She worked with one or two women who graduated from the two year program at OSU as early as 1917.  It will be fun to interview her about her memories of these topics.  In additon to that, she attended OSU with the first black man that graduated that ever graduated from there with a pharmacy degree.

For his part, Dad had a wildly improbable life.  He saw the first two hydrogen bombs go off when he was a cook on Eniwetok in the army.  He is journey to that position is a story onto itself.  Before that, as a five or six year old child, he traveled to Portland on a bus on his own so the Dornbecker hospital could operate on a growth on his throat.  He was the prime mover in a business that grew to be the largest producers of doll house kits in the world, selling to store chains such as Walmart, Home Depot, Sears, Lowes, and many others.

I hope to be able to get some interesting interviews on these topics as well as their upbringing in rural Oregon.  They are a product of the logging/sawmill culture that is truly unique to Oregon.  I am very much looking forward to these interviews and hope that time and health permits me to do this work over the coming few years.  I took a new job specifically to be able to spend time in Oregon with my parent for this purpose.  If they are willing and have the time, my siblings might add a guest post to this effort as they have made the effort to get a scanner to accumulate old photos and have memories of their own.