Monday, August 18, 2008

Grandma

This entry's a bit more personal--we've been dealing with our own end-of-life issues and trust administration in my family, with my grandmother dying this June. In addition to being a loving grandmother who always encouraged me, she was a great example of love and generosity to the community. She outlived almost all of her many friends, and her ability to volunteer at her Bethany Church in Sierra Madre (attending since 1948), and even her regular visitors from the church to pray with her didn't know her before they came to visit.

We sometimes wondered why she fought so hard to stay on Earth as long as she did, seeing as how life could be so difficult in her last years. She stayed optimistic until the end, and lucid and engaged until the end. The 24-hour caregivers required over the last year came to value her energy and optimism as much as the family did. I think she was hoping to be around for her fifth great-grandchild's birth, and she almost made it.

I also think she appreciated life quite a bit--she had a difficult childhood but I had no idea until hearing her stories much later as an adult. Instead of making her pessimistic and bitter, it made her stronger and more compassionate.

Below is the column my cousin Jeff Girod, her third grandchild, wrote shortly after her death.


09:42 PM PDT on Saturday, June 28, 2008
JEFF GIROD

Evelyn Margaret Millett Johnson saw the dawning of 90 winters, springs and summers -- longer than any of us had the right to ask for or imagine.

She far exceeded the expectations of even her own mother, who reflexively scoffed when Evelyn, still a child, asked, "Mommy, will I live to the year 2000?"

That's when Evelyn's mother, still reaching to put something in a cupboard, hesitated, turned and thoughtfully reconsidered.

Story continues below
Special to The Press-Enterprise
Columnist Jeff Girod helps his grandmother Eveyln Johnson celebrate her 90th Christmas last year.

"Well," she said. "Maybe."

There were very few "maybes" in Evelyn's long and steady life. She would either find a way or she'd make one.

Evelyn was a "women's libber" long before anyone thought to invent the term. She drove a taxi, led Bible classes at her church and ran the tightest of ships as the business manager of a local medical center.

It was about this time I met Evelyn, or "Grandma" as I started calling her, once I was old enough to form the word.

The bigger I grew, the smaller Grandma seemed. No longer was she the authoritarian and last-minute baby-sitter. Slowly she morphed into a smiling white tuft of hair crooked inside an arm in Christmas and graduation photographs.

Then, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, I made a point to visit her kitchen at least one hour every Saturday, taking advantage of "what little time we had left."

Find a way or make one.

Fifteen years, five more bouts with cancer and countless medical treatments later, I was still traveling every weekend to visit that kindly old face with the dancing blue eyes. And something unexpectedly wonderful happened along the way.

She wasn't just "Grandma" to me anymore. She was Evelyn, a funny, intelligent, insightful, spiritual, courageous, compassionate, beautiful, graceful woman and one of my closest and most cherished friends.

Every trip to see Evelyn was a journey through the 20th century. There was her first memory of her father, when she was just a toddler standing in the front yard, eyeing a weary serviceman, fresh from the Great War.

Or the 5-cent piece, melted and jagged, she saved all those years until recently, a memento from the night she found a 2-year-old stunned but unharmed, reaching distance from a short-circuited electrical outlet.

"I thought for sure that should've killed you," she said.

Granted, there were things we didn't agree upon -- she remained convinced the world was ending and saw no use for a device that could store 20,000 songs -- but we always found common ground.

We agreed Santa Barbara was one of the most beautiful places either of us had ever seen. And we even enjoyed watching the occasional Lakers and UCLA game. "How do they make that ball go in the tiny hole?" she marveled.

Toward the end of her life, Evelyn was weaker and frailer but her determination never wavered. Just a few months ago, a doctor gave her the choice of hospice care or another round of ravaging chemotherapy, unthinkable for a woman of 90.

Find a way or make one.

Evelyn chose the chemo.

And there was another, softer moment, shortly before Evelyn moved into an assisted living facility, when she feared our weekly visits might come to an abrupt stop.

She tugged at my shirt sleeve, drew me near and whispered, "Please don't forget about me."

I promise, Grandma. That will never happen.

Contact Jeff Girod at 951-368-9585 or jgirod@PE.com or log on to www.myspace.com/jeffgirod

Monday, August 11, 2008

Dreams vs. reality

I'm not so good at keeping up with the email I get on Facebook, but it's been fascinating hearing from people I haven't heard from in years. One of them used to work with me on the (non-world famous) Wheaton College Record. She's now the religion columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, and has a book coming out--Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace, by Cathleen Falsani (I guess she's dropped the "Cathi").

But that's not what I'm writing about. In looking for the book to order, I came across her name in another book, written by a colleague of hers at the Sun-Times, Neil Steinberg. I saw he'd written a book with an irresistible title: Complete & Utter Failure: A Celebration of Also-Rans, Runners-Up, Never-Weres & Total Flops. That's part of what makes the web so great--the serendipitous stuff you find while looking for something else. It's out of print, but I found a copy and read through it quickly. It's amusing and profound, and a refreshing look at success and its opposite.

One of my favorite passages comes at the end of a chapter, setting us up for the author's disappointment in the next chapter, but it in some ways describes us all pretty well:

"The last day of my participation in any sort of organized educational institution came on June 19, 1982, when I graduated from Northwestern University, nearly seventeen years after that first day of kindergarten at Fairwood School. The college had issued us the standard black robes and mortarboards, and I was so impressed with mine that I wore it the entire day, even during the break between commencement and convocation ceremonies, when I strode into the Pali Kai Lounge, a cheesy bar on Davis Street I frequented at the time, and let the barflies buy me drinks.
To an impartial observer, I must have seemed like a character from Eugene O'Neill--the young idiot in a bar spouting socialist philosophies and railing at the world. Only I didn't even have misplaced, pent-up anger to spout at the world. I sat happily at the bamboo bar and soaked up the booze, confident that the spheres were in order. Properly fortified, I toddled off to get my diploma. On the way to the auditorium, I broke into a run, holding onto my mortarboard, rejoicing in the feel of my academic gowns flowing around me in the wind. I thought myself a wonderful creature, blessed by education, separated by an enormous gulf from the pedestrian workers tossing me a gape as I flew by. I thought the world was about to be jolted by something new and fresh and fantastic, and that the difficulties of life which face most people would dissolve in deference to me. I thought wrong."

He goes on to describe his obscure jobs and eventual success, which of course was not as "new and fresh and fantastic" as he expected. This early 20's hubris takes a while to get over, but it's part of the aging process discussed in my last entry. The older folk who think it's only part of this generation are suffering from selective amnesia, and today's young'n's will shake their heads at tomorrow's know-it-alls with a strong sense of entitlement.

'Twas ever thus

I was reading my pastor's thoughts on the novel The Emperor's Children (Have No Clothes) by Claire Messud. You can find them at :

http://drtscott.typepad.com

Part of the discussion is about young 20 and 30-somethings trying to make it in the world, and how the deck may be stacked against them like never before, along with the fear that our greatest generations are behind us and the current and future ones are too selfish and spoiled to rise to the previous levels. I'm paraphrasing because I haven't read the book--the review just inspired my thoughts below:

I heard (and can still occasionally hear) the same thing said about my generation, the "slacker" Generation X. I did believe some of it, and gave some credence to the excuses X-er's gave in advance for not making it in this world, including the economy, high prices of everything, job exports, etc. And yet, on the verge of 40, I and most people I grew up with are providing for themselves and their families, and some are wildly successful. I can't think of anyone living in their parents' basement, but I know they exist. I just don't think they exist in greater numbers than they used to.

I think we're taking longer to be independent because education seems to take longer these days, so more people are opting for college and post-graduate degrees than they used to.

As a side note, someone told me this weekend that in his family, the degree of success among the siblings turned out to be inversely proportionate to their grade point averages. This doesn't mean slackers will always win, but it does mean you probably shouldn't bet on the "most likely to be successful" polls in high school.

I also heard when I started that the Baby Boomers weren't saving enough, so there'd be a huge retirement crisis looming. And yet I also read the next 30-40 years will be the greatest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen, from those same Boomers. The truth lies somewhere in between. And my 15 years of working with peoples' estates shows me that there are savers and spenders in each generation, and that each generation worries about the irresponsibility of the younger ones.

In our estate planning, it's difficult to know best how to pass down the parents' values to their children, especially with a wealth-transfer plan. The easier answer is that if the values haven't been passed down by the time of the parents' deaths, it's probably too late. We can help in crafting a plan that will help achieve objectives, like funds for education of the family, encouraging certain prudent investment strategies, preserving the wealth for children while allowing them freedom to start a business or freedom from large house payments, and guarding the wealth during substance abuse problems and other crippling addictions while allowing it to be used for treatment. We can also plan to avoid the wealth, if it's large enough, to help enhance beneficiaries' lives without demotivating them from working and the loss of self that comes from that demotivation.

I may still tell my children they don't know how good they have it, but I also know they probably won't realize it until they're much, much older, and I can forgive them for that--I didn't realize it myself until I was a father. I'll remind them of this when they're subjected to whatever the "slacker" term is for the class of 2016.