When I was 15, half a lifetime ago at the present moment, my
uncle Ted took me on a flight in a World War 2-vintage observation aircraft
that was kept in flying condition by the museum where he and my grandfather,
his father, volunteered. He decided to execute a tight turn onto final approach
and it felt like he flipped the airplane on its side as we lined up. The senses
humans evolved with are not well suited to understanding the dynamics of
flight, and we probably didn’t bank any more than 45 degrees, but it felt like
we were about to go over with only a few hundred feet of altitude beneath us. “Whoa!”
I shouted, and pushed the stick back toward center, evening out the bank to
something more comfortable.
Looking back, this was a singularly bizarre moment in my
life. Like my grandfather, Ted flew for the Air Force (Army Air Force in Grandpa’s
time) during a time of war. Unlike my grandfather he repeatedly flew into
combat in unarmed aircraft. During his service in the Vietnam War Ted earned an
Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross for his technical skill and devotion
to duty. He also became proficient in the supersonic jet trainers that killed
the astronauts Ted Freeman, Elliot See, Charlie Basset, and CC Williams in
training accidents. Now here I was, a punk teenager with about 10 hours of dual
instruction in gliders, correcting his flying with tactile force. In
retrospect, I’m embarrassed. On the other hand, he didn’t dress me down for it
after the flight. Perhaps Ted understood more than most pilots that experience
and skill don’t prevent you from occasionally forgetting that an Aeronca can’t
be made to handle like a T-38.
On Saturday I made the drive from my family’s new home in
Seattle to Ted’s house in Richland, Oregon, a speck of a town in about as
remote of a location as you can find in the contiguous 48 states. The drive
took me through Snoqualmie Pass, through the deserts and farmlands of eastern
Washington, across the wide blue churn of the Columbia River, and along the
home stretch of the Oregon Trail so worn down in the middle of the 19th
Century. It’s as perfect of a 400 mile drive as I’ve ever been on, and I’d
recommend it as the best possible introduction to the Pacific Northwest. Ted’s
immune system and his doctors had been fighting cancer for the last several
years and I knew that this was likely to be the last time I would see him.
We spoke to each other a few times that afternoon. I told
Ted about my children and about the work I’ve recently begun at Blue Origin. I
told my son that I was visiting my uncle, who was sick, to try to cheer him up,
and he asked me to show Ted a heart that he made in preschool to help him feel
better. I showed that to Ted and he seemed amused. It was good to hear his
voice, though it was clearly hard for him to say much and I did most of the
talking. I sat and looked at the southern reach of the Wallowa Mountains,
listening to the rustle of wind through the leaves, watching the swallows and
magpies dive and dart for insects, trying to contemplate life and mostly just
settling for breathing. Early the following morning Ted died at the age of 74.
Maybe that doesn’t seem like much of a climax to a life
intensely lived, but life doesn’t follow the neat narrative structure of our
stories. The true narrative of living is more of a drunkard’s walk from event
to event, sometimes in misery, sometimes in joy, hopefully in love. Roger Ebert
had it about right in his review of O
Brother, Where Art Thou! It’s like The
Odyssey, in the sense that it’s one thing after another.
Between the bookends of his life Ted found plenty of drama
and tragedy and comedy to fill that narrative space. Besides rooming with a
future Space Shuttle astronaut at the Air Force Academy and serving in Vietnam
he raised three children and went through the infernal microcosm of medical
school and residency that my wife has just surfaced from. He found love and
companionship late in life much like the ideal love of youth. So many lives
were cut short by that insanity in southeast Asia, but he was one of the ones
who got to come home, and he made the life he lived here, in California and in
Oregon, worth living. You’re catching me at the wrong time to say anything
positive about the medical establishment, but surely his service here, helping
so many lives over the decades in little and big ways, merits some kind of meaning
to the chaos of life in general and his life in particular.
I won’t pretend that I was one of the most important people in
Ted’s life. In Richland this weekend I saw his children and grandchildren, his
wife, and his brothers (my father among them). But when I saw him he was always
welcoming and joyful and loving. He put up with my crap when I complained about
finding parking in downtown Seattle. We rode four-wheelers (reminding me a bit of the setup to Rush's "Red Barchetta") and shot at targets
and drank beer and watched a total solar eclipse in Richland. Before that I
have so many wonderful memories of seeing him during my visits to California
and his visits to Arizona. I consoled him when his father died, and he consoled
me when my brother died. So much and yet, at the end, never enough.
Jeremy Frampton was one of the 12 killed during the collapse
of the Aggie bonfire pile in 1999. Part of his memorial is this poem he left
behind:
If I stare long enough
If I talk hard enough
If I touch soft enough
If I love deep enough
Will I live long enough
To love life enough
I am haunted by the question, which is sort of another way
of saying that I don’t understand the human condition. I suppose no one really
does and my desire to want to own this and understand it completely is an
occasion of the sin of pride. Still, unlike the trees and the magpies and the locusts
and the fungi, we can see the roadmap from birth to maturity to reproduction (if
we’re lucky) to death, and we want to make sense of something that nature has
given us nothing to make sense of.
The point isn’t that a life well lived and death well
planned, in a home surrounded by beauty and love and family, makes death easy.
It’s still awful, though less awful than anything else. I’m glad at least that
Ted took what was out of his control with grace and masterfully crafted what
was in his control to the life he wanted, to his last day. I’m so glad that I
got to have him in my life for my first three decades.
