A Death In The Family

[HAP]

Dear friends,

Two days ago, I had two nieces and a nephew. Monday night my niece Stephanie died of a heroin overdose. She had been fighting drug addiction for two decades. I just got an email from my sister Wendy, who was Stephanie's mother.

Stephanie had three children, the eldest of whom my sister adopted several years ago. The other two are currently in foster care. I've met the two older girls, but they have a young brother none of us--other than my sister, maybe--knew about until this Christmas. I know that were Jane still alive, we would be talking about adopting one--or both--of those children, even though uprooting them from the Seattle area would be difficult. As a practical matter, that is not really an option at this point, I suspect. But it is still something I will need to think about.

I'm waiting to hear about funeral arrangements. And I have passed along information about the parent grief group here.

We've all expected this news for a long time. But it does not ease the shock of it. There really isn't anything we can say that will make my sister feel any better. All we can do is hold her hand and be there for her, now and in the future.

Peace,

Harry

[MartyT]

I am so sorry to learn this tragic news, dear Harry, and of course our heartfelt condolences go out to you and your family at this sad time. Please know that we are thinking of you and holding you close.

Addiction is a monster that has led to serious injury, tragedy and death in my own family, too. My heart hurts for all of you . . . ♥

[enna]

Harry, I am so sorry to hear this sad news about your niece. Keeping you and the family in my prayers. Anne

[feralfae]

Dear Harry,

I am so very sorry to hear about your niece. Addictions are a terrible burden and illness not only to the addict, but to the family and community. I wish we had better, more effective ways to help addicts heal their hearts so they would not need drugs. It seems such a terrible way to live a life, not belonging to self, but to some drug or other addiction.

I know you will do all you can to open your heart. remember to make time and space for your own healing from this tragic loss. I am holding you and your family in my heart today. This is just terribly sad. I am so sorry.

fae

[mfh]

Harry, I am so sorry for you and your sister and family. This is so tragic. You are all in my thoughts.

[HAP]

Dear friends,

Thank you for your kind words, thoughts and prayers.

My father has had a significant stroke over night. One of my brothers called this morning just before 6 a.m. from the hospital. The bleed is significant and they have intubated him and induced a light coma. It's too deep to do anything about surgically, so mostly this is a wait and see situation. He is scheduled for another scan in the next hour or so and my brother will call once we have the results. He says there is no point to me being there at this point, but I will check into how to get there over the course of the day.

Too quote one of my mother's favorite adages, "It never rains but it pours."

Peace,

Harry

[MartyT]

Harry, my dear, I can only repeat what we've said already. Please keep us posted, as you are able , , , ♥

[mfh]

Harry, I am so sorry to hear this and yes, your mom and my mom and probably most mom's have said things about the rain and pouring. Breathe your way through the day. We are thinking of you and your dad.

Mary

[Queeniemary]

Harry, thinking about you and your family in this very difficult time. Know that we are all here for you. You are very right, it never rains but it pours, my Mom said it also.

QMary

[kayc]

Harry, it seems there are no words at a time like this, I am just so sorry for your sister, the children, you, the whole family. I know you will come to the best decision for all involved, it's a lot to consider and ponder on. Is there any way you can find out about how the children's current living situation is? Foster homes do vary a great deal.

[feralfae]

Dear Harry,

Yes, it does seem to be raining on your family right now.

I am holding you in prayer, and hope that you can find time to meditate, or a way that works for you, to ease the stress and pain of these days.

Much Love,

fae

[HAP]

Dear friends,

As I write this, I am on my way to Seattle--somewhere over the midwest. I have had two further conversations with my brother since this morning.

The results of the MRI this morning showed a continuing and massive bleed in my father’s brain that will prove fatal in the very near term. I decided at that point not to delay going west until later tonight or early tomorrow and arranged to catch the first available flight that would get me to Seattle quickly. Normally, I would fly out of Providence, but flying out of Boston, while more complicated, proved to be both quicker and cheaper. I took the train in from Quincy, where a friend had dropped me off. It is a quicker trip by subway from there than it is by car.

I talked with my brother again on my way into Boston. He told me he had spoken with a neurologist, who concurred with the original prognosis but said he thought there was a better chance I might get there before my father dies than the first doctor said. We’ll see. But I do not want them keeping his body going just so I can get there. That will be the topic of my next conversation with my brother if I have time between flights to talk with him.

Thank you all for your kind thoughts and support over the course of the day. I am not sure at this point how long I will be on this pilgrimage. This week is another reminder of how fleeting our time on this earth is—and how important it is to make good use of the time we are given.

That is not to say that that I will not be taking some time off at some point in the near future for my own purposes and relaxation. Even Gandalf attended the occasional party—and truly enjoyed the odd fireworks display, a pipe of Longbottom Leaf, and a good cup of ale at the Prancing Pony. When this is over, I need to do the same.

Be well, all of you.

Pax et lux,

Harry

[enna]

Prayers for you and the family, dear friend. You know we are here for you. And I think we will all hold you to attending "an occasional party" even as Gandalf did. Peace on your journey. Anne

[MartyT]

Vaya con Dios, Harry ♥

[mfh]

Thinking of you as your travel and as you grieve, Harry.

[Queeniemary]

Thinking of you Harry, as you travel. We hold you close in our hearts during this tragic time in your family.

QMary

[kayc]

Harry,

It's hard to comprehend so much happening at once, dear friend, you are in my prayers as you travel to Seattle to be with your dad. God be with you and your family.

[HAP]

Dear friends,

My Dad's body died about four hours before I landed in Seattle. I was on the first flight with the earliest arrival time I could really make. It wasn't meant to be. And the truth is, the part of him that made him who he was was long gone even before my brother's first phone call, though he had no way of knowing that at the time.

I'm dealing with a lot of things today. Suddenly, I am the oldest member of my immediate family. I don't know how I feel about that. My brother who has been my father's primary caregiver since my mother died--and even before that, truth be told, has taken on most of the planning for the memorial and notifying what few friends of my father's are still alive. Part of me bridles at that, but logically, he is the one most in need of something to do. In terms of his work and his character, he and my father were the most alike and saw more of each other than the rest of us. It is what he needs to do. As Jane said to me before she died, funerals are about the needs of the living, not of the dead. I said that to my brother last night, and I meant it. The planning and notification piece is clearly what he needs to do.

My younger sister is planning a family gathering for tomorrow at her home. She also wants to get to my father's house today to start cleaning. My older sister has the double difficulty of piecing together her daughter's memorial while dealing emotionally with that and my dad's death. I can't imagine what she is dealing with this week.

The family dynamics are fascinating--and I feel somehow like an interloper. I have been largely out of the picture for the last 40 years since they all came West when I was in college. I may be the oldest but I feel completely out of place here--an alien among my kin. My relationship with my father was very different from theirs. Most of my experience was pre-reform--though I had a front row seat for the majority of the changes my parents' brief separation wrought in him because we lived together for several months when I first started college. They all saw the maturation of those changes over the intervening 40 years. I didn't. And they also saw how he dealt with my mother's Alzheimer's far more closely than I did.

The man they remember is not the man I remember. I have enormous respect for my father. But before Jane died, we had very little in common--and very little real liking for each other. There was a time as a child and as a young man, that I hated him. I hated the way he treated my mother, how he treated me, how he treated any of his children who strayed from a very narrowly defined path. He was a violent man with his children. Today, he would have been locked up. In those days, he was--if not the norm--at least safely within a tradition.

We respected each other--that was all--and for many years, we did not even have that. After Jane died--and we agreed to stop talking politics--we discovered we both had a fascination with knowledge and how it applied to a wide variety of different things. We didn't argue about physics and biology and music and literature--we discussed them--and found in each other a very different person than we thought we knew.

My father told me once that the day he began to change his mind about me was in my early 30s. I'd gone out west to visit to celebrate my parents' un-anniversary--to this day none of us know the date they got married, only that it took place well after my conception. I did not know how to dive and spent one afternoon teaching myself to do so in my parents' pool. I dove for six hours--belly flop after belly flop. But I was going to get it right. I never truly did--but my father saw a determination in me that day he had never seen before--or so he said. My mother had seen it when I was 17 and went to a road race, determined to medal or die trying. I got the medal--and about killed myself doing so. My father had been at the race--my mother hadn't been. How she saw it then and he didn't I have no idea. But there you are.

I'm not sure any of my siblings saw the things I saw with the same recognition on either end of the spectrum. I was the oldest when we were young--and bore the brunt of his anger and disappointment. I was the only one of his children who truly understood the extent of his loss after my mother died because Jane died so soon after. They could see his loss, but they could not feel it in quite the same way because they had lost their mother, not their spouse--not the person who defined them.

My father was a great man. He had a hand in every major engineering feat of the second half of the 20th century. He invented a method of testing that has become a college major with an entire ongoing certification process. Listening to my siblings, he eventually became a good human being as well. I'm sorry I missed all but the very start and the very end of that transition. But I wonder to what extent my estrangement helped to cement the changes my mother's throwing him out began. The distance between us was more than physical--and was a direct result of his negative actions. That distance cost both of us a great deal. It cost me not only a father--and a mother--but the desire to be a father. It cost him his eldest son--and cost my brothers and sisters their oldest brother.

So I guess I've done what I had to do today in terms of processing things. Let my brother handle the arrangements. It's what he needs to do. He'll be the practical oldest sibling when I've gone back East--and he's earned the job far more than I have. I doubt I will be a frequent visitor to this end of the world after this in any event. My father was the reason to come here. Once his ashes are mixed with my mother's in my sister's garden I'll have little reason to visit. My siblings and I are largely strangers to one another. It is sad, but it is the fact.

Peace,

Harry

[Queeniemary]

So very sorry Harry, thinking of you, and wishing you comfort and peace.

QMary

[feralfae]

Oh, Harry,

What a beautiful sorting of your heart. Your thoughts and your synthesis of these twinned events is coherent and caring, without being more than it is. How every insightful you are of your own emotional patterns through all these threads of family.

What you have share here serves as your own semi-private eulogy for your Father, and in some ways for your Mother and your siblings. You see your place in this swirl of life and leaving, and you hold your own center, while having compassion for theirs, as well as for your own grief.

Thank you for a coherent sharing of your grief, your sen se of distance, your sense of loss, and how you see yourself in relation to this family unit—as well as how you see yourself outside of the unit in many significant ways.

My condolences for any unfinished business that you may be grieving, and my sympathy for the losses that are bruising your heart right now. I hope you have peace. Becoming the eldest in a family is a significant step along Life's journey, and you are doing so very well to find a place for yourself that honors your own emotional needs and the needs of others. Good for you.

namaste,

fae

[mfh]

Harry, I am so sorry and sorry that you did not get there before your Dad died even though as you said, he might not have been able to respond or perhaps even know it was you. Your plate is so full right now. Your post is amazing. You have sorted your feelings and let go of the preparations and plans. I hold you in my thoughts and prayers as you walk through this week. Mary

[enna]

I am so sorry to hear that your father passed away, Harry. What you have said in your post is beautiful. Thank you for sharing your thoughts here with us, your friends. It is never easy to lose a parent ~ they are the reason we exist. My prayers are with you and your family during this time. Anne

[kayc]

I am sorry, Harry. I know how complicated emotions can be when it comes to parents, particularly in situations like yours with your dad or mine with my mom. I wish you well getting through this and hope for a time of renewal and healing with your family...again, I know how hard this is. My prayers go with you.

[HAP]

This is the obituary I wrote for my father:

Edward Allen Proudfoot, one of the unsung figures in Project Apollo’s efforts to put a man on the moon, as well as one of the members of the team that investigated the Challenger explosion, died Thursday, August 14 in Everett, WA. He was 85.

In the early 1960s, Proudfoot was part of a team that contributed to the rapid evolution of non-destructive testing (NDT) for Avco in Lowell, MA. Initially, the method of using x-rays, ultra-sound and other techniques to test items without potentially harming them was used on re-entry vehicles for nuclear warheads on ICBMs.

But when NASA needed a way to make sure there were no defects in the Apollo heat shields to ensure astronauts could return to Earth from the moon safely, they turned to Proudfoot’s team. Every Apollo command module passed through the Lowell plant to have its heat shield installed and tested.

When the first group of American astronauts came back from orbiting the moon in 1968, Proudfoot’s family watched the return with particular interest. The heat shields did their job on every Apollo mission.

But as the ship began to enter Earth’s atmosphere on that first moon mission, one of his sons remembers his father saying, “You do know that if that thing burns up on re-entry, I will never work again.”

Born In January 1929 to the late Byron and the late Martha Proudfoot in New Castle, PA , Proudfoot spent much of his early life on the family farm in Frizzleburg, PA. He attended a local one-room school house and helped build the family’s house with his father and brothers. Her hired himself out to local farmers during the summer to help with the haying and other farming tasks.

After graduating from high school, he attended Slippery Rock State College (now Slippery Rock University), receiving a bachelor of science in education in 1951. His plan was to go into teaching science, but Westinghouse recruited him to work at their Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory where they were building the reactor for the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear powered vessel of any kind.

Proudfoot worked in quality assurance on that project. In trying to figure out how to improve the quality of the parts the machinists were creating, he began to chart the work of each machinist.

“I was just trying to collect data—and I needed a way to visualize it,” he told one of his sons years later. “So I made these big charts. The wall facing the shop floor was glass, so the back wall was the only place I could put them up. and look at them.”

The men on the floor could also see the charts, but did not know why they were there. But because they could see their progress and take pride in it, they worked even harder to improve their work. The better machinists shared what they were doing with the other men, and soon the entire group was producing better work than the best men had been doing originally.

It was a lesson in the combined power of competition and cooperation he never forgot.

He left Westinghouse when the project was finished for US Steel where he did research in metal fabrication that led to improved armor plating for tanks and other military vehicles, among other things. He also investigated explosive casting while there.

In 1960, he received a second bachelors degree, this one in metallurgical engineering from Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon University).He earned that degree in five years by taking classes at night while working full time to support his growing young family.

When the space program wound down in the early 1970s, Proudfoot took his NDT skills to the nuclear power industry, eventually returning to Westinghouse and moving to their facility in Richland, WA. There, he directed a number of research projects until his retirement in 1992.

Following the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, Proudfoot was asked by the late President Ronald Reagan to serve on the engineering committee that investigated the disaster. That group finally concluded the O-rings were the most likely cause of the explosion that killed all seven astronauts aboard, including science teacher Christa McAuliffe. ‎

Proudfoot authored and co-authored numerous scientific papers and talks on NDT and other engineering topics. He spoke at a NATO conference in 1970 about NDT methods and applications

Not long after his retirement, his wife Marthe (Watson) was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Together, they researched the disease and actively sought treatment. As his wife’s condition deteriorated, he became her primary lay-caregiver. She died February 18, 2010. They were married for nearly 60 years.

Proudfoot was living in Everett, WA at the time of his death.

Proudfoot was an avid hunter and enjoyed working on cars and woodworking. When his children were young, he designed and built furniture, dollhouses, and toys for them in his basement workshop. His love of science continued until his death.

He was the brother of Josephine (Proudfoot) Irwin of New Castle, PA, John Proudfoot of Youngstown, OH, Theodore Proudfoot of Phoenix, AR, Thomas Proudfoot of Eatonton, GA and of the late Quinton Proudfoot of Pulaski PA.

He is also survived by his six children: Harry Proudfoot of Fall River, MA, Andrew Proudfoot of Seattle WA, Wendy Watson of Covington, WA, Edward Proudfoot, jr. of Kingston WA, Mary Metz of Seattle, WA and David Proudfoot of Seattle, WA.

He had three grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made in Proudfoot’s name to one of his favorite charities: the Alzheimer's Association (www.alz.org); Cure Alzheimer's Fund (www.curealz.org); or Walking with Jane (www.walkingwithjane.org).

Family and close friends will attend a private memorial service in September.

[MartyT]

Now I feel as if I've met your father, Harry ~ and I have a better sense of who you are as his son. This is beautifully written, and I thank you for sharing it with all of us. Please know that we are sending our heartfelt condolences to you and your family at this sad time, and we look forward to your safe return to us.