From The Founder's Desk
columnist: Walt Thiessen

Topic: Separation of Church and State
My Father Died Today

I got the news at 8:30 AM when my mother phoned to say that my father had died just after midnight. His passing was not unexpected, and it fact it was a relief, because my dad died of starvation induced by Parkinson's Disease. His body had slowly wasted away due to his inability to swallow food and drink until there was nothing left but skin and bones at the end. The disease had cut off the nerves' ability to distinguish objects in the throat. Swallowing was an ordeal, and he was often at risk of choking to death. He had a great deal of therapy, and it worked for awhile, but the disease ultimately won out.

Yes, Parkinson's Disease is a truly horrible disease. As many know, there are famous people like Mudhammad Ali and Michael J. Fox who are afflicted by the disease. Parkinson's isn't normally a cause of death. Normally, causes of death are less directly influenced by Parkinson's. Furthermore, the course of the disease varies dramatically from victim to victim. It doesn't always work its way into the throat, but it can, and it did in this case.

My dad was a quiet yet gregarious man. He woke up whenever he entered a room full of people, and his presence lit up the room in his quiet way. He engaged in volunteer activities most of his life. He was a throwback to a time when people worked for one company their entire working lives. He worked for General Electric company for 44 years. He started as an electrical engineer just out of high school in the late 1930s, but was soon switched to sales because of his quiet, outgoing demeanor. Yet even that wasn't totally appropriate for him, because my dad was never a "hard sell" type. He eventually made his way into what was then known as "Employee Relations." Today we would call it Human Resources. His job for many years was helping people who had lost their jobs at GE find new work either within the company in another division or with another employer. But his greatest time at GE came in his last position, when he was National Executive Secretary of the Elfun Society, an internal company organization devoted to encouraging volunteer activity and involvement in local communities across the country.

Elfun (short for "electric fund") was originally a private, upper echelon organization for GE's top-level managers that enabled those invited to engage in some excellent investment opportunities. One of the main criteria for invitation was that the invitee must be directly involved in his or her local community in a voluntary way. My dad assumed the position of Executive Secretary in the late 1970s. At the time, it was a minor yet prestigious appointment...desired by many because it was a relatively unstructured position that did very little actual work. My dad changed all that. During his tenure, membership was opened so that more and more employees could participate in it. Today, it is open to any employee of the company, in large part due to my father's influence.

He turned the position into an active position, mainly because no one told him he couldn't. He took the fledgling periodical put out by the national Elfun office and turned it into a full-fledged magazine that provided some in-depth reporting on the various ways GE employees had become involved in volunteer activities. He traveled around the country and, using his unique ability to charm an audience, cajoled and teased and gently urged Elfun members to actually put their Elfun memberships to work in their communities, and not to merely enjoy the prestige of being an Elfun member.

At his retirement dinner, he was praised by speaker after speaker who spoke effusively of his contributions to the Elfun Society and to the company as a whole. Even then-CEO Jack Welch, often known for his cold-blooded handling of the company, sent a personal letter that was read which warmly praised my dad's accomplishments. Indeed, about a year later, when my dad was invited to corporate headquarters for some function or other in Fairfield, CT, he was standing on the side talking to a former colleague when in swept Jack Welch and his entourage. Welch, like many CEOs of major corporations, was treated as something of a king by his underlings, and he relished the role. So it was considered quite significant when, in the middle of greeting someone high up in the hierarchy, Welch stopped, looked over at my dad, and said loudly, "Is that Walt Thiessen over there?" He then immediately strode through all his admirers over to where my dad was standing, shook his hand warmly, and told him how glad he was to see him again.

This is more significant than you might realize, because my dad never worked directly with Welch and only had indirect contact with the CEO's office while he was employed at GE. For all my dad knew, Jack Welch didn't know him from the tens of thousands of other managers and employees who worked below Welch in the company's hierarchy. So for Welch to not only know who my dad was but to take the time to single him out just for coming to an event as a minor guest was nothing less than extraordinary. It showed that Welch really did know my dad's work, and he admired it greatly. High praise indeed. My dad always played down this incident. It was my mother who would urge him to tell the story. But there was also no doubt that the experience gave my dad a feeling of quiet pride.

My dad had been a youth volunteer and organizer in the years prior to meeting my mother. He grew up in Schenectady, NY and in his youth traveled all around the state to youth conferences. These were religiously oriented gatherings where young people would get together to socialize and have fun and sing and play games, all in the spirit of honoring and worshipping God. My dad was quite well known around the state and in high demand. In today's terms, we would call him a "warm up act," and it was a job he did very well. He would go to a youth gathering and be asked to lead the group in song singing. This was during the 1940s and early 1950s, and such singing was considered a major activity at such gatherings.

My dad was really good at leading this kind of activity. Even if the young people at the conference didn't feel like singing, he had a knack for getting them to try it anyway. He was always able to turn it into a fun activity. By the time he was done leading them in songs, they were more of a group, a team, than they had been when they arrived at the event, and the organizers would always be grateful because by the time my dad handed back the podium to them, the group was giving their complete attention to the meeting rather than to their own socializing. It is not an overstatement to say that my dad's skills as a song leader were in heavy demand around upstate New York, from Albany to Buffalo and every city and town in between.

He met my mom when he was in his late-30s and she in her late-20s. Of course, she accompanied him as he went to some of these events. At one particularly memorable event, he was asked to lead a conference that had a huge audience that filled a large hall. I don't know what the exact numbers were, but there may have been 500 to 1,000 people in that hall. They were noisy and disorganized, and the conference leaders were at a loss as to how to get the conference going. Bear in mind that this was before the time of microphones and loudspeakers, so there was no easy way to yell above the din of hundreds of conversations. So they turned to my dad and asked him to do his thing.

My dad went up to the stage and tried to call out, but the din was so loud that no one heard him. Everyone was ignoring the stage. So he thought about it a moment, then called out to some people sitting in the front row, "Hey, can you hear me?" A few of them nodded yes. So he said, "Do you know, 'I've Been Working On The Railroad'?" A few of them shouted back that they did. So he said, "Sing it with me." So, amidst the hubbub of activity all around the hall, he started singing the song with a small handful. Pretty soon, the young people nearby the singers heard the song, and some of them started to join in. Like the spread of a wildfire, my dad succeeded in getting row after row after row of people to join the song. After just a few verses, about half the hall was involved. By the end of the song, the entire hall was involved in singing.

He had a long list of songs that he knew he could draw upon, and he proceeded to lead them in a bunch of these well-known songs. The entire hall was singing enthusiastically by this point, and my dad engaged in one of his favorite leadership activities. He would conduct them with one finger. By lowering the finger, he would get them to sing more quietly. By raising it, he would encourage them to raise the volume. He'd use his finger to ask one section of his audience to sing one line, then another section to sing the next line. He literally had them, not merely in the palm of his hand, but on the tip of his index finger.

In later years, he served in a variety of volunteer roles. He was president of the local chapter of the American Red Cross. He served on his local Selective Service board. He was a member of the local YMCA, and a member of the Y's men's volleyball team. He (like me) was a hacker of a golfer.

He was a family man who didn't wear his religion on his sleeve, although he was a regular church goer. Raised as a Presbyterian, he and my mom (who was raised as a member of the Disciples of Christ church, a sister church to the Congregationalists) both encouraged my brother, my sister, and myself to be church goers too. In my case, I ended up revolting against it (for a variety of reasons), but he didn't resist. He felt that the choice was mine and respected my choice. His respect made it easier for me in later years to acquire a new form of spiritual faith that suited me better than organized religion, although he often said he thought I'd have made a great minister.

I got to see most of America because of my father. We used tents to travel across the country on more than one occasion, both north to south and east to west. Later, we replaced the tents with a small pop-up trailer. I reckon that I've been in all but six of the 50 states in the union because of those trips. Tenting wasn't always the most pleasant way to see the country, but given that it was economically our only option, it was well worth it. I have fond memories of those trips. It gave me a great appreciation for the scope and diversity and beauty of this country of ours.

The highlight of my dad's retirement was that, due to the housing boom in Connecticut during the early 1980s, their house had acquired enough of a rise in value that it enabled my parents to retire on Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia where they built their retirement house. It is a beautiful lake, and it was an idylic place for my dad to be. He loved the lake, and he loved being there. It should have given him many, many years of happy living, and it did do that to a large extent.

The problem is that this is the same period when he became afflicted with Parkinson's Disease. It's a disease you can't ignore, because it constantly affects you. His body soon developed an ongoing tremor that only eased when he was asleep. I'd give him a hug hello or goodbye, and I'd feel the tremor directly. It was like he had a strong electric current that was constantly running through his body. Imagine having your hands connected to both terminals of a strong battery, endlessly, all day long, and you'll have a taste of what it's like.

He did very well living with the disease, and there was always hope for a cure. Much research had shown great promise from stem cells. Indeed, researchers had repeatedly placed stem cells directly into the brains of Parksinson's sufferers and it had eliminated most or all of the symptoms they were experiencing. But stem cells, sadly, are also a political issue, because one source of stem cells is aborted fetuses. They are not the only source, and indeed we now know that stem cells can come from other sources as well including embryos, umbilical cords, and bone marrow, but because of the virulent attitudes of pro-life extremists and the highly restrictive requirements of the FDA, stem cells have been and continue to be virtually unavailable for Parkinsons's sufferers to use.

I think you can now see why I hold "compassionate conservatives" partially responsible for the horrible effects of the disease my dad suffered under. Their fervent resistance to stem cell research has made stem cells virtually unavailable to Parkinson's sufferers. There is no doubt that my dad did not deserve such a horrible end. We had the means to prevent his death by starvation, or at least to give it a good fight. Chances were good that stem cells would have succeeded.

At the time of his death, the hospice volunteers marveled at how strong his heart, lungs, and other organs were. If not for the starvation, my dad could easily have lived another 10-20 years. He was 89 when he died, and by most estimates that would be considered a long and happy life, but I feel that he was cheated by Parkinson's Disease from truly enjoying what should have been his well-earned golden years. And I am quietly enraged that he was forced to starve to death amid plenty in order to assuage the consciences of so-called "godly" people who denied him his best opportunity to be healed by medical science.

My dad suffered from the disease for roughly 20 years before he died. He bore the disease in dignity, but it also greatly saddened him. He had always been an active man, who took full responsibility and dove into action whenever action was required. For him to have to give in and let others do the work that he wanted to do, merely because a horrible disease was ravaging his body was almost more than he could bear. Even on his death bed, when my siblings and I came to see him on more than one occasion, he would struggle to wake up and "join the party" even though his body wouldn't let him do it.

The last two months of his life were horrible to watch. It took a terrific toll on my mother, and to a lesser degree on my sister who lives nearby. When I last saw him this past Sunday, he was largely unresponsive. He was still struggling to live and breathe, even in unconsciousness. When my wife greeted him and asked him if he could open his eyes, he struggled to do so unsuccessfully. I tried to use techniques I know to summon spiritual energy to calm him, and to a certain extent I succeeded. But as I touched him in this effort, I couldn't avoid sensing through my fingertips how little there was left to his body. All the meat was gone, consumed by the rest of his body in its ongoing struggle to survive. There was literally nothing more than skin, bones, and some organs left. He was a tall man, 6'2" in his prime, but in his death bed there was so little left of him that he barely made an impression under his blankets.

My wife pointed out to me last night that people often have out-of-body near-death experiences, and she believes that when suffering becomes too great, they engage in such behavior in order to escape the immediate, physical torture of the ordeal, until their tether to life is finally cut and they can return to the original Source Energy which many people call God or Allah or Higher Power. Her idea gave me comfort, and I believe that it is likely to be true.

My father's hospice care was provided by Medicare. It showed me first-hand the downside of bureaucratically managed care. One of Medicare's bureaucratically mandated ways to keep expenses under control is that you can't get Medicare-paid hospice care in your own home. They'll only provide it in a medical facility, such as the rehab center where my father spent his last days. One of the most gut wrenching experiences was during my second-to-last visit to my dad, the last time he was able to consciously engage me in limited conversation. Not only had the Parkinson's affected his ability to swallow, but it also affected his ability to speak. Communication was a tremendous ordeal, but he made a huge effort at one point when I was alone with him in the room to make himself understood, and he succeeded. I'll never forget the look on his face, a ghastly look, when he pleaded with me to help him go home. He knew he was dying. He knew what was happening. He knew he could handle it better in his own home, in his own bed.

But there was no way for us to pay for in-home care financially. Medicare wouldn't cover it; the Medicare system has made alternatives virtually impossible to afford except for people with lots of money, while it has contributed to forever increasing medical costs over the years, and my parents didn't have enough funds left to pay for him to get private care at home. There's no way my mom could have cared for him directly....his daily needs were far more than she could meet by herself. He required professional assistance, so the rehab option was the only option available if we were to preserve enough funds for my mom to continue to survive financially after his passing. I don't know if I can adequately convey the emotional distress my dad's request caused me, because I knew I couldn't honor it. I lost it entirely and cried that I desperately wanted to take him home more than anything. I sat there sobbing, wishing that I could somehow honor this last, simple wish of my father's, knowing simultaneously that there was no way I could do so short of engaging in personal bankruptcy for myself and my mother.

Then my father did something extraordinary, but something which was so like him. He was the one starving to death. He was the one who so desperately wanted to go home. He was the one who felt the most helpless. Yet, he chose that moment to take me in his weak arms and try to comfort me! Tears are streaming down my face as I type this; it was such an incredible, loving gesture for him to make. I shall always remember.

The last words we expressed to each other consciously were words that said how much our love will continue to go with each other. I never saw him conscious again after that.

The call came this morning, and I know that my father is, finally, no longer suffering. I am grateful that he has moved back toward the greatest Love there is, and I am grateful that he made such a huge and largely positive impact on my own life. I shall miss him, of course, but I know he is not really gone. He has merely moved onto the next great adventure.

I shall miss a lot of things about him. As an example, I shall miss when I visited him at the lake during vacations. We would always take at least one hour each time I came to walk down the road where they lived, called Island Lane, toward the short foot bridge to the island at the end of the road that extended into the main body of the lake. We walked and talked just to be together. There was very little signficant about the conversations, and there didn't need to be.

I shall miss seeing him standing on the dock, waving to us as we brought the boat in from exploring the lake or swimming or water skiing. If he was around the house (and not tied up with another activity), he always made it a point to greet us as we returned. The image of him standing on the dock and waving to us is etched upon my mind and my soul.

I shall miss his quiet sense of humor, which was oriented around small and gentle subjects rather than subjects of great distress or pain. For him, a shaggy dog story was much funnier than the raving antics of an on-stage comedian. He didn't say much, and when he said something it was meaningful. He rarely engaged in throw-away phrases. He spoke quietly, but his words always carried in the room. He had a pleasant, baritone voice. It was untrained in singing, and his lack of training showed, but he could carry a tune nicely, and his voice was pleasing to the ear. He loved banging away at the piano. He had only had a few lessons as a child, because the family was so poor it was more than they could afford. So his skill level was always pretty tenuous, and he made lots of mistakes when he played. It was sometimes painful to hear him play, but he did play his favorite song, Souza's "Stars And Stripes Forever," pretty well. And he played it as loud as he could bang the keys.

I shall miss his presence, his quiet simple wisdom, and his example of courage. But most of all, I shall miss just being able to quietly talk with him and hear what he had to say to me.

I love you, Dad, so very very much. Go joyfully into the endless deep that is the love of God, and know that my love goes with you.

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©2008 Walt Thiessen, all rights reserved. You must have written permission from the author in order to republish this work.
Published: Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Last modified: Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The views expressed in this article are those of Walt Thiessen only and do not represent the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. Walt Thiessen is solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.

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