Timely Snow

My father died this morning. It was far from unexpected—he had been going through some kind of dementia process for more than 5 years, and his health had taken a major turn for the worse at the end of the summer. Still, there’s something unexpected about it actually happening.

My father’s life was deeply influenced by the demands and opportunities that characterized American history in the latter three-quarters of the 20th century.

He was born in Herkimer, New Yori and his family moved to Binghamton, New York in 1933 where he grew up. I remember him telling a story about walking a cow from Herkimer to Binghamton as part of the move, which was part of the general disruption associated with the Great Depression. His father was a skilled craftsman who made lasts (the models around which shoes are made) in a shoe-making factory. My father finished high school and went into a tool-and-diemaking apprenticeship at IBM. He was drafted into the Army for World War II, but did well enough on an aptitude test that he was selected for a crash engineer-training program at the University of Santa Clara. That may well have saved his life, since the people he’d been training with were in the units that had horrendous casualty rates as they landed on the Normandy beaches during D-Day. He spent the war as a combat engineer, and the picture shows him at the site where he helped build a bridge over the Rhine during the invasion of Germany itself.

After the War, thanks to the G.I. Bill, he was able to go to college (no one in his family had ever gone to college, and neither of his older brothers did). Thus he fit into the cohort of younger WWII veterans that Glenn Elder has described—the G.I. Bill and the V.A. Mortgage system provided them with opportunities that their parents had not had available to them, and which men just a few years older often couldn’t take advantage of (because they already had children or other commitments).

He went to RPI and became a mechanical engineer, meeting my mother along the way (she was studying to become a nurse at St. Rose’s college in Albany). He went back to work for IBM (which counted the time he’d been in the army and later a student toward his seniority in their system), and worked on the manufacturing of the first modern mainframe computer family (the IBM System 360). Later we moved to Armonk, another IBM town, and he worked in personnel and various administrative jobs, ending his career working with the lawyers defending IBM in a huge antitrust case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The photo was taken in the summer of 2002, when we went to Europe to visit some of the places where he’d spent time during the war. This picture was taken near the ruins of the iron bridge across the Rhine at Wesel. The Germans destroyed the bridge, and my father’s group built a replacement. The current highway bridge seems to be at or near the site of that invasion bridge; the old one was never rebuilt.

His decline was frustrating to him, and in the early days seemed to clearly consist of an aphasia wherein he couldn’t express ideas that he certainly had. It isn’t clear exactly what it was, because he continued to be very sharp in some areas (giving excellent directions when I was driving) and very impaired in others (particularly basic physical routines) and language. There are multiple possible causes—he’d played college football in the leather helmet era and had at least one serious concussion, he’d had a serious bicycle accident as a child where he’d lost consciousness, and he had a problem with sleep apnea bad enough to require CPAP assistance.

He spent this summer in a camp that he and my mother built in the Adirondacks, on the lake where she grew up. At the end of the summer he experienced seizures and spent several weeks in a hospital. He didn’t really improve, and so he was moved to a very nice nursing home in Connecticut near where my mother lives during the rest of the year. They took great care of him, but it seemed clear that he was going through the process of shutting things down and dying.

I’d always thought that dying was a matter of simply “stopping,” by my physician wife points out that it is, in fact, a lot of work. Every system in your body is geared toward keeping you alive, and shutting them down is not a simple nor a quick process.

We went out to see him during the Thanksgiving break, and I was glad to see him settled into what turned out to be his final home. The funeral is going to be on Saturday in the Adirondacks (although they don’t actually bury people there until the Spring thaw), and we’ll drive out for that.

And then the processes of family readjustments begin. A change like this, you don’t get used to all at once.

UPDATE: My brother Brian wrote a more detaile obituary, which can be read here:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 7:47 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.