Grief...and Death

My daughter-in-love recently eased open the door to my room and, with her knowing smile, informed me that she had an exceptional idea. Over the 20 years I have known her, I knew her ideas were unfailingly exceptional so she had my undivided attention. "You," she said, "need to do a blog."  Pretending to understand, I nodded. Still with the smile, she told me she would let me know when it was up and running and gently closed the door.  

And so, at the age of 84, I am now a "blogger," as Google so informs me, having never even read a blog.  When I asked Patti what I might write about, once more with the smile she said, "Whatever comes to your mind, Granddaddy," the title by which I am known amongst family and close friends.

Well, dear reader, she casts a very wide net.  After three careers, encompassing such diverse worlds as national security, the energy business and a number of public policy issues, I can still speak to a wide array of questions with some authority.  I have also long devoted as much time as I could muster to studying an eclectic mix of disciplines that ignite my passion for learning.

Much of this history is recorded in my two-volume memoir, "Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention," upon which I shall draw from time to time.  However, since it's publication in 2016, a recurring theme in its pages has increasingly consumed me: Grief, too often inseparable from its devoted companion, Death.  So, however painful for me and likely for some of you, dear readers, here is where I shall begin my blogging...if there is such a word.

After 84 years of well, life, I carry a lot of baggage here. I have cared too much about too many people and too many things to expect otherwise.  That said, unlike for so many young people, through my early years Grief and Death left me largely untouched.  We were not introduced until an bright April morning in 1963.  I was a freshly minted instructor pilot on my first mission with a student.  We had just lifted off the runway when the engine of our single engine jet trainer seized and caught fire.  After spending precious seconds commanding the terrified student to eject, I was certain I was too low to survive my own ejection.  But, Death rolled the dice and literally left me hanging; after one swing of my chute I slammed into the ground.  My student and I both eluded Death, and Dorene was spared the Grief visited upon every military wife who opens her door to the unexpected arrival of a chaplain.

Five years later to the day, that brush with Death played out again.  I had just arrived at my base in South Vietnam as a freshly minted F-4 pilot.  I left this war torn country a year later having felt the sudden jolt of Grief after seeing the rolled-up mattress of a squadron mate who had not returned from his evening mission; stared Death in the face once more while dangling in a parachute at 14,000 feet above the South China Sea after ejecting from my crippled aircraft; delivered Death to untold numbers of Vietnamese in the form of bombs, cluster munitions and flaming tanks of napalm; and, in the latter half of my tour as a general's aide in Saigon, watched the Grief on my four-star boss's face as he signed letter after letter of condolence.  By the age of 30, I was already a Grief- and Death-scarred veteran.

Grief receded for the next 13 years, supplanted I suppose by profound regret after becoming a stranger to my family during the three years of my first Pentagon tour.  But it was waiting and watching quietly before returning with a vengeance.

After two rapid promotions and four succeeding tours, in 1982 I realized my dream assignment: command of a B-52 unit.  That happiness was short-lived. A week before Christmas, one of these eight-engine machines crashed on takeoff, leaving ten lives snuffed out in a blacken field of burning wreckage just off the end of the runway.  Dorene and I were pummeled by Grief as we endured eulogy after eulogy and whispered inadequate words of condolence to ten distraught families.

By now, I had learned to take happiness with a grain or two of unease.  That lesson proved well founded when, a year later, I was given command of a second, much larger B-52 wing.  Again, the weight of responsibility for the mission and the lives of now 6,000 people bore down, even more heavily.  Several of my young airmen found ways to severely injure or kill themselves, whether on motorcycles, drowning or drug overdose, deaths that could have been avoided had proper training and disciplinary programs been in place.  I was filled with sorrow, anger and dismay at this senseless loss of life and the Grief it entailed for the families.  I was also deeply embarrassed that these incidents were occurring on my watch and took actions that put an immediate end to them.  

After a year, the success of my unit brought me another tinge of happiness when I was promoted to my first star.  I had delighted in calling my father, a retired army colonel, with the news (the operator relayed to him, per my request, the words, "Colonel Butler you have a collect call from General Butler").  Within a month, Death called for him instead, as it did in the following month for Dorene's two older brothers.  Grief just piled on.

Forward with me now as I pass rapidly over the Grief I felt, as have so many other grandparents, when the ravages of autism began to present in our daughter's first child three years after his birth.  And again, when my son's marriage failed after 10 years and two children.

I am happy to say that our resiliency as a family brought us through these challenges to very fortunate outcomes.  However, Grief and it's devoted companion were making a journal of what my life would hold, to be slowly revealed over the decade beginning in 2011 when a virus eased into my right plural cavity and began nibbling away at the lining of first my right lung and then the left.

That was the beginning of a long saga filled with puzzled medical specialists, unrelenting pain, and a pharmacy's worth of medications. After two agonizing surgeries, I fell from peak physical health into a medical no man's land where an idiopathic condition robbed me of my vitality, compromised my autoimmune system, and is destroying my central nervous system. It will also shorten my life presuming that some other eventuality does not intrude.

I must say, in all candor, that Grief visited me with a pretty sharp pang of regret for the loss of my hopes for this period of my life.  And while I am grateful that Death dealt with me kindly, the fact that I was spared the worst again proved cold comfort.  In early 2020, just as Covid was settling in, wreaking global Death and sorrow, I lost my brilliant younger brother to cancer, contracted when he was exposed to Agent Orange during his own tour in Vietnam.

I come finally to two cups of Grief that Death set before me and my family to end one decade and begin another. The first was filled with a long and bitter draught of a dreaded disease: dementia. 

Brett, Patti, Lisa and I did not understand the unsettling signs of Dorene's s affliction until a brain scan in the spring of 2020 revealed the frightening hole in her brain.  At some point she had suffered a stroke which in turn triggered what soon proved a severe form of dementia.  She was gone in 18 months.

No, better said, she left every day for a year and a half. Every day a new mystery to unravel as her persona slipped back toward childhood; every day a struggle to put on a forced smile and play children's games with her or say childhood prayers; every day not wanting to accept that this was really happening.

But it did, at two o'clock in the morning of October twenty-fourth, two thousand and twenty.  Yes, that's the way I will always remember it, written out the long way, not abbreviated, because it was not abbreviated--it was painful every hour of every day of every month.

Brett, Patti and Lisa enveloped me with compassion as each of us dealt with sorrow in our own way.  We soon discovered, though, that Grief had no intention of abating.  Just over 2 months later, Brett and Patti's son--my oldest grandson, still in his early 20s, died from an inadvertent drug overdose.

I was sitting near Patti when Brett told her that Jake was dead. He just spoke the words straight out with no embellishment; there was no way to soften them. Her anguished wail rose and rose until it seemed the room could not contain it. She fell to the floor, disbelieving, cursing Death, screaming as if she might drive it away.  But Death, of course, does not yield not even to distraught mothers. It's simply ushers in Grief at its most profound.  Grief that burrows deeply, that turns back every page of motherhood, back to the first sign of life in the womb.  My compassion for Patti cannot be measured; her painful cries will be in my head until the day I leave this earth.

We carry on, the four of us, knit by common bonds of suffering.  Lisa still has more than her share of Grief to deal with, while Brett, Patti and I moved to Kentucky where Patti has extended family and happy memories to lean on.  We acquired an inviting house that Patti's touch has transformed into a beautiful Kentucky home, sitting amidst seven acres of bucolic countryside.

I now spend my days helping with the chores, reading deeply into subjects that fascinate me, enjoying family gatherings and deepening my faith after it has been sorely tested (I should say this pursuit is greatly facilitated when one's son is a minister).

After reading through this in draft form, at my behest, Brett and Patti did pose one important question: what was my takeaway? That is a fair question, and after some reflection, my answer would be simply this. Death and misfortune happen.  Grief follows.  But that is so because Life happens.  And I would not trade mine for any price.

And so, I have blogged.  I don't really know if this will be just a one-off little excursion or if it will capture my fancy.  Or I suppose I could be hounded back into my more insular life by an army of insult hurling trolls.  But in any event here it is, a blog, general-ly speaking (the title I really wanted but someone beat me to it).  In closing, I will readily admit that this may not have been the best topic for my first outing.  It's just that I have thought about Grief and Death for a very long time and finally decided to talk about them...while I can.