NEW BLOG!

 

 

For those (that) people (person) who reads this blog (looking at you, Stacey!), I've started a new one about the first year of widowhood, called The Wida's Walk because of thinking of myself as "The Wida Huck," as said in the dulcet tones of Marjorie Main.

New Blog starts here!
 

 

 

OBITUARY

 

Wilbur Kenneth (or Wilbert Cannut) Huck

1930 -2021

Wilbur Huck was a peculiar man.  (He called himself “eccentric.”)  He was a kind and sweet man who presented himself as cantankerous and kvetching.  A gentle man who could yell and bristle when he felt threatened.  A deeply loving man who could not reach out to make friends.  A literary scholar who wrote little.  A man of great learning who had trouble understanding himself and those he loved.  A man whose name was misspelled on his birth certificate. A Gemini.

                  Will’s parents were Volga Germans who immigrated to America before the First World War.  Each of them went through hardship while getting to the United States, his mother being turned away twice for health reasons, crossing and recrossing the Atlantic with sick eyes.  Both his parents lost their first spouses to the Spanish Flu and brought children into their marriage.  So Will was born at home near Bayard, Nebraska in a house with a large family among whom English, German, and Russian were spoken.

                  As a baby, he seemed bewitched or like a changeling to older relatives. A “wise woman” was brought in to perform a spell to fix his strangeness.  In later years, thinking of this story, his wife wondered if this early bit of “healing” was a response to a child with high functioning Asperger’s. 

                  Will started reading very young, getting his library card and taking out books from the adult section when he was in grade school.  A favorite story of his was the time a woman complained that “this little boy” should not be allowed to check out  Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. The librarian and his mother said that he was already able to read novels and why shouldn’t he?.  His early scholarly attitudes also made him a “teaching assistant” in the two-room school he attended, sometimes being put in charge of instructing younger children.

                  He went to high school in Minatare, Nebraska and then on to Yankton College in, South Dakota, preparing to become a Congregational minister.  A year in the field as a replacement preacher (the only year he ever drove a car) taught him that he didn’t have the social or political skills for the ministry.  (And perhaps having a parishioner drop dead of a heart attack in the center aisle the first time he ever served encouraged that decision.)

                  He returned to school and earned a couple of degrees from the University of Chicago, Masters in Literature and Bachelor of Divinity.  His first job hunt led him to Idaho State College in Pocatello.  Although he looked for work elsewhere, taking a leave of absence to teach at Pacific Lutheran in Washington, he eventually accepted his lot, though with some grousing.  When ISC became a university after he had received tenure, he faced pressure to get a doctorate, pressure he resisted loudly with the help of his faculty union. He was a highly visible character on campus, winning a “best teacher” award while also being hated by some for handing out “the grades they deserve” and resisting grade inflation until his retirement.  

                  He taught a variety of courses including basic composition and upper division literature.  Among the lit courses he taught were British, American, Women’s, 20^th Century, and the Bible as.  He also invented the first film studies courses at the college.  As a professor, he always found new books to share, new movies to show.  He despised and rarely used anthologies and textbooks, preferring “real books”.  Ironically, his one major publication, The Modern Short Story, was an anthology, edited and with commentary and questions by himself and William Shanahan.  As an expert in film, he was called as a witness in the 1974 Idaho Falls censorship trial of Last Tango in Paris.

                  Beyond the classroom, he ran the writing center for a few years.  He also spear-headed a team that created a long-running film program called Cinema Six, offering one of the only ways to see foreign films in Pocatello.  And as a long-time member of the Speakers and Artists Committee he helped bring great culture to the intermountain campus. 

                  On that committee he worked with Huldah Bell (ne: Hanson) and they became great friends.  In August 1971 she introduced him to her niece, Kakie Hanson, who had just graduated from a California high school and come to Poky for college.  After Huldah’s birthday party that October, this rather feral young woman followed Will home and started something.  Two years later they eloped without telling Kakie’s parents.  She was 19 and he was 43 at the time they wed in the Bannock County Courthouse.  Their union was a scandal which both of them ignored.  It paid her tuition through her Masters program.  Although living with another person, especially such an eccentric one, was rough and tumble for both of them, they eventually grew into their relationship, in spite of her being a Boomer and him being a member of the Silent Generation.  Will supported Kake through her schooling as well as her mental health struggles.  Kake wound up caring for Will through his final years of vascular dementia. 

                  Not that Will would have noticed these facts as a “balancing.”  He didn’t approve of what he called “a debit-credit morality.”  The concept of “things balancing out” within relationships, whether with other humans or God, was not part of his weltanschauung.  He gave what he could to people and his god and accepted what was given, be it a feast of love or a famine of friends.  There was no “this for that” where connection was concerned.

                  But where money was concerned, he kept his eyes on the scales. The man never met a penny he couldn’t squeeze till Lincoln popped a tear.  Until his death, he was living with furniture he inherited from his mother.  He believed in guerilla consumerism.  Until his dementia, he did all the household shopping with clipped coupons.  When Kake took on the financial tasks Will had performed most their lives together, she realized how much he had cared for her by shouldering that burden through the years.

                  Will picked up their shared burden when he took early retirement from Idaho State University in 1990 after 33 years of teaching.  In late 1989 he visited Kake in Central Oregon, where she was teaching at the community college and, after two days of shopping, bought the house that he would die in thirty two years later.  He moved to Bend in September, 1990 with his entire personal library which eventually grew to about 10,000 volumes.  Over a retirement that lasted (almost) as long as his teaching career, he read, watched movies on television, and enjoyed traveling to see art, theatre, and film.  During the school year, he supported his wife by taking care of the shopping, cooking, clothes washing, taxes, bills, and outdoor flowers. 

                  From 1976 until 2016, Will also cared for the household cats, first the beloved golden Max, then ferocious five-pound Rafferty, followed by the most-revered June Jhumpa (rescued from the Deschutes County Humane Society)  and boring old black Sasha.  In 2009, after years of argument, Will allowed Kake to purchase a poodle puppy with whom he promptly fell in love.  Birdy and Will have been caring for each other ever since.

                  Will is survived by his wife of 48 years, Karen “Kake” Huck. He is preceded in death by his parents, John and Effie Huck, and all of his siblings:  Hermina, Mable, Hank, Jacob, Elmer, Sam, Frieda, and Bill.

                  The funeral will be streamed live from the Trinity Episcopal Church Youtube site:  .https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxl0n_Mp4Je0f9oApiqxCdw?   

Bring Out Your Dead

 

Wilbur Kenneth Huck was pronounced dead by on-call hospice nurse Flora at 3:45 p.m. Sunday, December 26, Boxing Day, St. Stephen's Day.

Bereft of life, he is no more.  He has gone to sing with the choir invisible and shall soon be pushing up the daisies in the Pilot Butte Cemetery and sometime in the fall a bronze representation of Birdy will watch over him through time and eternity or someone in the Mad Max future pillages the graveyard and melts down her sculpture into canon balls.

OK.  If I gave a fuck about SEO as I did for the two long years I wasn't able to run my funeral/wedding celebrant business well enough, I'd be expecting an  editorial comment about how the preceding sentence was too long but in argument I must say I was profoundly influenced by the book All the King's Men when I was in high school and emulated the paragraph-long sentences of Robert Penn Warren.  And of course (right arm flourishing upward) Shakespeare!  and Dickens, in the form of memorized passages of A Christmas Carol.  What I mean is, I had long, complex sentences in my head long before I wrote Sentenced to Venice.

Even as my friends surrounded me with loved during the last couple of weeks it was wretchedly hard dealing with the piss and shit and sadness about same and cleaning and loving him and hating the process and being really fucking mad at God for putting as both through this kind of ending.  

And Heart and Home Hospice failed me at the end.  It's nobody's fault.  Everybody did the best they could but it wasn't good enough.  The week before Will died our CNA caregiver and I both knew he was dying.  I had been promised by Nurse Karen (who left Heart and Home for a better paying job) that she would be able to accurately predict approaching death and I'd have someone coming by every day.  Nurse X. was telling me, "Oh, I'll come by twice next week."  This the last week of his life.  How come Jen and I knew and Nurse X didn't.  I feel some crankiness with her, although she was very professional and caring during her visits.  However, I asked her to find me a volunteer and she said, 'After the Holidays - hard to find somebody now.'  I assume she had to follow certain protocols and was doing the best she could.  I felt caring from all individual hospice people but I cannot recommend the business.  Their protocols or Nurse X's interpretation of them gave me insufficient support during Will's final week.  They never gave me "the booklet" about the end of life -- no one offered it to me.  People seemed to expect me to know what to do.  One nurse seemed surprised I'd never changed a diaper.  Basically, I felt abandoned and neglected, even though Nurse X wrote a text to me saying "If we are to a point of daily visits then we will be there for you daily."  My whole experience with them speaks to me of corporate bullshittery -- the people hired seem caring but overworked and underpaid and the protocols left me desperate and gasping my last week.  Why?  Plus nobody from Hospice took the time to explain, orally, how to use the medications until after I started having trouble with him fighting me while I tried to change and clean him.  I never got their death booklet.  "What to do until the reaper comes."

December 16:  Hospital bed moves in.  Pastor Noah Heinrich is there to visit with Will and also support me in a time of transition. 

Nurse X visits.  I ask about getting a volunteer to visit me.  She says that she will ask about it.  DOES NOT GET BACK TO ME ON THIS ISSUE EVEN AFTER WILL DIES.  DOES NOT SAY SHE IS SORRY.  Not that I'm pissed off or anything.

 He helps me bring up the pad from the couch downstairs. I covered that with sheets and blankets.  During the night I would wake when I heard the metal on the hospital bed to find he'd uncovered his long, bare legs and seemed to be trying to get out of bed.  I would ask him what he wanted and he wouldn't know and he'd lie down again. 

December 17:  At 5:34 in the morning after an extremely restless night, I posted a call for help on Facebook.  I knew we were in the very last phase and knew I couldn't get through it by myself OR with the support of a Hospice that seemed to be abandoning me.

I FB posted that the phase Will and I were entering, with me sleeping on the floor beside his hospital bed, was much harder than I thought it would be.  Friends come through with food, dairy-free ice cream, visits, phone calls.  Awesome group, the people I know, now that I know how to know people who are awesome rather than people who abandon at the slightest sign of discomfort. 

December 18:  He has a shitstorm in bed.  After working with him for a half hour I finally contact Nurse X who contacts the oncall who contacts me.  SHE is absolutely wondeful, Nurse Keyara.  I yelled at her about lack of support and she calmed me down by doing proper listening techniques ("I understand what you're saying") and I apologized to her.  

 I got friend visits and food and fed my relationship with weed so freely I stopped getting high.

What I didn't get was a call or Facebook message from my pastor!  And I got hit with rage spurt and I made a decision to use a communication method I dislike but one which seemed appropriate in the given situation.  I triangulated (which probably turned into a quadrangle or quintangle) my rage, telling someone else about it (and using all my Irish fucks which I give freely).  I didn't receive any message from him before I went to bed.

I exchange the couch pad for the mattress on the single bed I bought from Target. 

I text Pastor Noah repeatedly but it isn't until late that night that he is able to respond, having been out of cell phone range.

December 19, Sunday:  He makes it to the bathroom with me holding on to him, holding steady his 113 lbs.  He is dying and he is insisting on getting to the bathroom, I'm sure because it is less trouble for me.  More friends visit.  My pastor calls and apologizes.  I forgive him and accept his apology while noting that it did happen that I felt abandoned by him.  From that point on he calls every couple of days.  Unfortunately, he tends to use his Digby O'Dell voice and I want to say "talk normal" which I will if he continues to use it.

December 20th:  Will sleeps almost all day.  Visit from Nurse X.  She tells me she'll come twice next day.  Why do I know he's dying when she doesn't?  I have a partial night away from the house but it's snowing so heavily that I head back after a nice dinner.

I contact Holly Pruet, a Funeral Celebrant I've met and hire her to create a Eulogy for Will. 

Fucking reSupply doesn't show up to move the marital bed.  I engage in some explosive messaging (that anger still finding targets) and the next day I hire College Hunks Moving Junk.  Yay -- quick, profesional, showing up when they said on Thursday.

December 21 Tuesday:  Jen calls in sick.  She will not be able to come back to work until Friday morning.

The new Nurse's aide, Rachel, comes to change and bathe him and he lets her because she's awesome instead of scary, like the Tuesday Dec. 14 cna.

Pastor Noah comes for his final visit.  He has a great talk with Will during which Will says that he is ready to die, that he know that he is dying, that he is ready to go to heaven. The wonderful Pastor Noah is talking about Paradise and an end to pain and I ask Will if he wants to go be with Birdy and June Jhumpa and he says "yes."  I tell him I love him and he says he loves me.

And I want to say God Bless Pastor Noah.  We have very different Christian theologies, but we both believe in doing the work and he does the work.

 December 22, Wednesday:  

I am on a zoom call with Holly Pruet when thin almost-a-ghost Will Huck appears confused at the door of the bedroom, having climbed over or through the rails of the hospital bed. 

At 4:00 in the afternoon I am blessed by a visit from the Trinity Episcopal choir.

December 23:  another visit from Nurse X who blithely says, "We'll see you for two visits next week."

December 24:  Jen is able to give me three hours so I run an errand downtown and then return early because of the snow.  I watch some of the evening service but am not feeling all that much like welcoming that baby who was probably born in spring anyway.

December 25:  I call the hospice because I've let him go too long without changing.  The lovely oncall person arrives and we change him and he fights us.  I fear the last thing my spouse said to me was "no no go away" while pushing me with his hands.  I assume he suffered a cluster of more strokes at this point in time.  Once he and the bed were clean, he didn't change position until he couldn't.

I spent the day putting all his remaining clothing (except a couple of pieces I will keep and a couple give away).

December 26:  Boxing Day, St. Stephen's Day.  

When I woke up I saw he was in the same position.  I took his hand and noticed his fingertips were blue.  He had a fever of 101.  I'd been giving him morphine with aloprazolam for about 36 hours after a nurse finally told me I could do that (oh, my...I could have used so much more information so much earlier).

 I called Hospice.  On-call Nurse Flora said she could come after she dealt with three other clients in LaPine.  

Jen gave me a few hours to have lunch on Sunday.  I went to Greg's Grill and had a steak.  I returned.  Jen left.  Hospice nurse Flora arrived and we cleaned him and she notice a fever of 103 and said he was dying as she sat there.  We changed places and she stood with her hand on his heart and I held his hand and watched his face as he died as I was telling his spirit or driver or whatever was left that I loved him.