LAWRENCE, Kansas — My friends Cap, Kitty and I were greeted by a young woman as we walked through a gate and entered the Ryan Gray Playground for ALL Children.
The children on the swings, slides and climbing challenges were from the local Boys and Girls Club, the young woman said, and the playground had been reserved for them for a while.
“I’m Ryan’s mom,” Kitty said quietly, and the young volunteer smiled and waved us inside.
Cap and Kitty’s son was 17 when he died (“Seventeen and a half,” Kitty says, wanting to preserve every moment of Ryan’s existence). He was born with an inoperable brain tumor that grew slowly and affected his physical abilities but not his passion. for basketball and the University of Kansas Jayhawks. The team – the region – adopted it as a symbol of bravery and spirit. After his death, his parents led an effort to “keep the ball rolling” and named the playground after him.
The pain is still there, Kitty says. But she and Cap can smile when they talk about her son and the lasting impact he made.
Kitty (she was Kitty Lloyd when she captured hearts as a member of Valley City High School’s Class of 1967) is the third classmate I’ve reunited with on this second tour of Chuck’s excellent friendship. (Cap, a year before us in Valley City, he got his MD from UND. He’s an old friend too.)
The first “friendship” tour took shape two years ago, shortly after my doctor gave me an x-ray, ordered some tests, and called me the next day to give me the news that I have cancer. Stage 4 lung cancer, to be precise. When pressed for a prognosis, she admitted that cases like mine could suggest between two and five months.
Many of you have faced similar challenges or, like Cap and Kitty, been hit with other hard knocks, so it feels good to share my story with you. And maybe some of you responded like me.
I needed to see faces and hear voices that mattered to me: first friends from school days, classmates from university and people I had worked closely with over the past 50 years. I went from Bemidji to Brainerd to the Twin Cities and back on that first “friendship tour” (not a farewell tour, I insisted) and it was a week of smiles, hugs and peace of mind.
Now, about 30 months after that diagnosis, I wanted (needed) to do it again. But this time, the arc of my friendship tour is much longer and has taken me, as I write this, to Arkansas. As you read this, I hope to be in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with my granddaughter Morgan, a graduate student at the University of Southern Mississippi. (The rest of my family, including her ex-wife Marci, also a 1967 VCHS graduate, sent me off with a birthday party.)
The friends I’m seeing along the way, most of them, are like I’m turning 75 this year and dealing with loss and the inevitable declines of age. Thomas Jefferson wrote about it in 1819, when he was 76 years old:
“A deterioration in health, at the age of 76, was natural to expect and is a warning of an event that cannot be far away and whose proximity I contemplate with little concern. Indeed, in no circumstances has nature been kinder to us than in the gentle gradations by which she prepares us to voluntarily separate ourselves from that which we are not destined to always retain.
“First one faculty is removed from us and then another, sight, hearing, memory, eucasia, affections and friends, stolen one by one until we remain among strangers, mere monuments of times past and specimens of antiquity. for the observation of the curious.”
(I looked it up: “Eukracy” is an archaic term for a mixture of qualities that constitute health or soundness.)
Before arriving at Kitty, I spent a night with her high school classmate Rod Fagerstrom in St. Paul, and then a night with her classmate Kirby Brier in Ankeny, Iowa. Rod, her best friend since kindergarten, recently lost a good friend who was his last golf partner. Kirby, who was everyone’s model of a “good guy,” lost his wife, Sandy, also a member of the VCHS Class of ’67, two years ago.
Earlier, I spent an evening with Mike Vadnie, who worked with me at the Grand Forks Herald in the early 1970s and later became a lawyer, partially specializing in press law.
I found him on this trip at a nursing home in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota, where he is recovering from a fall and broken hip. A few years ago, he fell outside his fishing house on the ice, lost consciousness, and nearly froze to death.
We talked, Mike in his wheelchair and me leaning on my cane, and reminisced about happier times. We laugh, mention other old friends (some are no longer here), and remind ourselves that we have much to celebrate and be grateful for.
Mike, Rod and Kirby are adjusting to a different world, just as Cap and Kitty and all our contemporaries reach age 75 and marvel at the achievement.
And it is an achievement. On May 18, nine days before my 75th birthday, I became the oldest member of my immediate family: older than my parents and siblings ever became. That’s something, right?
Chuck Haga had a long career at the Grand Forks Herald and the Minneapolis Star Tribune before retiring in 2013. He can be reached at crhaga@gmail.com.
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