A week ago I shared some visions of young progresssives and conservatives in the early 1960s.  The post is here.  In the note introducing the post I said “[this is] an invitation to give some thought to our past, present and future as a nation and society, and your role in it.”

As I relate in the post, I was early adult at the time of the Sharon (conservative, 1960) and Port Huron (progressive, 1962) statements.

Today’s post is for a specific reason: 60 years ago today, July 24, 1965, at about 10 p.m., my wife Barbara died at University Hospital in Minneapolis.  She was 22 years old, and she was awaiting a kidney transplant.  I was 25, our son, then 1 1/2, was back in North Dakota with my parents.  I went to the Western Union office in downtown Minneapolis to send the message that Barbara had died.  Barbara’s body was sent home to Valley City by train.  In the morning, I drove to ND by myself, The funeral was in Valley City on July 29, 1965.  This was not the way her and my adult lives were supposed to begin.  By no means was our situation unique.  It was certainly unusual.

Barbara and I had married two years earlier.  We were young,.  Both of us were college graduates.  Barbara started teaching in September, but lasted only two months due to kidney disease, previously undiagnosed or manifesting in any way.  There was little normal, the rest of Barbara’s short life.

At the end of May, 1965, her final trip began when she collapsed at home in Elgin ND, where I was a teacher.  Within a week we were in Minneapolis, over 500 miles away.  The trip was by ambulance, automobile, and train.  There were no other options than kidney transplant for her survival.

In summer 1965 we were, in a very real sense, poor.  I had to leave my job, and move to a place I’d never been before, with no intention of ever being in Minneapolis.  Life was a pretty frightening survival experience. Here are my recollections, written in 1981 for our son, of that time in Summer 1965.

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I’ve been thinking about our experience 1963-65 in context with those vision statements referred to above, and the impact of 60 subsequent years of life experience.

My walk on the tough side of life happened at the very beginning of my adult years.  Like most newly minted college grads, I was something of an empty vessel, and in 1965 in a totally new environment where I didn’t know anyone, nor did I know anything about the new environment of life itself,  I think of that song lyric of John Lennon, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Thinking back to especially those two months, I got an early and important introduction to two related aspects of humanity: community and partnership.

What I learned from early harsh experience was that the community that was the United States or any country for that matter, was a pretty incredible collection of people who care for each other especially in the most difficult times.  They are mostly anonymous, but when needed they appear.

To this day I could make a long list of people who were there for me in 1965 when chips were down.  I couldn’t tell you with precision how it is that many of them happened across our path and helped out in the sundry small and large ways that made the greatest difference.  Nothing about anyone would stand out.  Each came through in their own ways.

Because of 1965 and other life experiences, it is no accident that I constantly look for ‘community’ in my daily life.  “Community” is not perfect,  but it seems always to be there when it is needed.  Community is all of us.  It is too easy to lose sight of that reality in the current incessant barrage of negativity, but we are a good people, and we should never forget that fact, even in the more difficult times.

Also having an impact were public institutions: the partnership aspect.  These included medical institutions that served us when we had no possibility of paying our bills because we had no insurance; and businesses like the old Lincoln Del, which somehow found out I needed a job to survive and hired me and accommodated my needs.

I could not have survived were I forced to rely on myself.  Those difficult times were a unique opportunity for me to realize how interconnected and interdependent we all are, and in a way I’ve tried, albeit imperfectly to apply this to my life ever since.  There are lots of thanks owed, even now, 60 years later.

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July 29, 1965 we buried Barbara at a cemetery on a hill overlooking Valley City, North Dakota.

After the funeral, my history of the day says, the family went down to a park in LaMoure County and since we were all together the group had a belated celebration of the 60th wedding anniversary of my grandparents, both living, who had married in 1905.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned something else about that weekend in July, 1965.  The day after our picnic, on July 30, 1965, President Johnson signed into law the Medicare Act in Independence, Missouri, and gave President Truman the first Medicare card.  In a sense, Barbara was a witness to the beginning of one of the greatest benefits of government to later generations.

Let’s hope democracy survives.

FINAL NOTE:

Last September I was at the Keys Restaurant in White Bear Lake, and noticed a rather unusual framed piece of art on the wall.  I took a photo, and it is shown here, and speaks for itself to everyone.

POSTNOTE:  At the time of Sharon and Port Huron gatherings (1960 and 62) I was, like millions of others, old enough and able enough to participate.  But such gatherings are always exclusive, for good and not so good reasons.  Most of us had not a single clue that any such conclave was going on.  And that’s okay.

The participants in those meetings had an abundance of passion and energy.  What they totally lacked was perspective – the kind that you can only gain by direct experience, as Barbara and I learned very rapidly only a month or so before the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963.

This is the quandary for the young zealots of any generation.  The elders are a storehouse of wisdom, but they’re old….  What do they know?  Well…plenty.  But….

You can pick up some ideas from reading books analyzing the past, but only by growing through the ups and downs of living can you figure it out – and even then, only very imperfectly.  A certain recipe for losing is the very course that we seem to be on at present in this country, where we’ve been divided into tribes, one good, the other bad, depending on one’s personal perspective.  This has never worked, and hopefully it will not work now.  It is the younger generations who will live with the results….

COMMENTS: more below:

from Fred: This is a sobering yet meaningful and hopeful account of loss and perseverance. The axiom is “life goes on” and so it does. But we never forget those beloved family members and friends inevitably lost along the way.

from Kathy: Thanks for your message about Barbara.

from Marion: As usual, Dick, thank you.