Major sadness this week. I'm hoping to find a silver lining by writing about it, but I'm not sure there is one. It keeps sneaking up on me and smacking me in the head when I least expect to start thinking about it. I've been sitting on this post for a few days hoping that it'd cool off, but it hasn't. So here goes.
Last week a good friend & neighbor went to work as usual.
He retired from the Army in the late 1990s (after 30 years of service). Based on today's pay tables, his military pension is a tad over $60K/year (with an inflation COLA) minus $460/year for health insurance. However he wanted to pay down his mortgage so he went right into a federal civil-service job supervising a personnel department on an Army base. It's probably a GS-13 position, and in Hawaii you add a 25% cost of living supplement. Knowing his frugal habits, I suspect that he and his spouse were saving over $90K/year.
He and I have been good friends for the last decade, even if we didn't understand each other on the subject of paid employment. He could see that I was reasonably intelligent & fit so he couldn't understand why I had stopped working as soon as I hit 20 years (for a comparatively puny $40K pension). He felt that it was important to have work in his life and he was uncomfortable with retiring before he was completely debt free. He loved golf (several rounds a week) and was astounded that I'd given it up for surfing. At their last Thanksgiving dinner he noted that he'd turn 66 soon and would work for "just one more year" to finish paying off the mortgage. Then he and his spouse would work for "a few more months" to pump an extra $50K cushion into their retirement portfolio before calling it quits. I made the usual joke about "just one more year syndrome" and we moved on to other subjects.
Last week at work he started his usual morning walk-around chatting with his staff, but his sentences didn't make sense and they soon deteriorated into gibberish. He became increasingly incoherent so they called an ambulance and got him to Tripler. I'm not sure what the diagnosis was-- stroke or cerebral hemorrhage-- but the doctors carried out the emergency procedures and eventually began draining fluid from his skull to relieve the pressure on his brain. At some point in the ICU he lapsed into unconsciousness. His youngest son and the son's fiancée are Tripler nurses so I'm pretty confident that his dad had the best of attention & care.
His wife said the doctors had explained that it could happen to anyone. He had no visible health risks (and indeed may not have had any health issues). He'd felt fine that morning and neither of them had noticed any warning signs. His work was low-key routine administrivia with lots of autonomy. He was pretty much the civilian boss at his office, with such huge experience & credibility that his supervisors left him to get things done without their help. His biggest "stress" would have been figuring out whether the week's golf foursome should include the general or the colonel.
When I spoke with his wife two days ago, she said he'd regained consciousness that afternoon, made eye contact with her, and squeezed her hand. The doctors started talking rehab.
A few hours after she told me that story, he died. I don't know what happened, and maybe I never will. I was told that it happened very quickly and was unexpected.
He'd been around the Army for nearly five decades, so he had quite the contact network. The general appointed a temporary-duty casualty officer whose sole job is to assist the family for a few months in navigating the benefits bureaucracy. The officers are assigned from a rotating pool, so when one particular major came to work the next morning he was told to pick up his casualty officer orders and contact the family. That's how the major learned that one of his mentors, a man he'd served with nearly two decades ago, had died.
My friend's oldest son is an Army lieutenant colonel. When the major called my friend's home, the son answered the phone. The two of them realized that they'd had a tour together at a previous command. I guess the "good" news is that there will be no bureaucratic logjams.
These two combat officers are regrettably all too familiar with death. Yet as the lieutenant colonel and the major tersely worked through the casualty officer's checklist, using martial jargon like "the body", "the autopsy", "the family members", and "the funeral", tears were streaming down their cheeks.
My friend had his affairs in order. (Hey, he was a personnel specialist.) His widow has the military's survivor benefit plan, his Social Security survivor's benefits, and their savings. He might have been eligible for civil-service pension benefits, so she might get some compensation from that too. He also left her some life insurance. She has a long-term care insurance policy. She knows all their financial accounts and how to handle the bills. Several years ago, he even reserved a grave on a nearby military base so that his spouse wouldn't have to drive "all the way to Punchbowl" to tend it. Two of her sons (and their families) are on the island to help out. They know my spouse and I are just a few doors down for handyman services and rodent control. There won't be any problems.
When she told me her spouse had passed away, I asked what I could do for her. She asked me to walk up to their house and help her clean their lanai with her sons. As we men hauled off the trash and organized the furniture, she said that her spouse had been planning to do this cleanup but had put it off until next weekend. Next month their lanai is going to host their youngest son's wedding reception.
My friend never spoke about his military billets or his deployments-- only about the places they'd been and the people they'd befriended. I'm sure he was assigned to combat zones, but he never mentioned it. I'm sure he has the usual awards & certificates yet I've never seen anything on his walls but family photos. He loved them and they knew it, but he felt that the best way to show his love was to provide for them. He would have felt guilty leaving the workplace before he'd completed what he felt was his duty.
The funeral will be this coming week. I'm honestly hoping that the chapel is crammed too full for my spouse and I to be invited. It was hard enough breaking the news to my spouse over the phone while she was on travel, and we still haven't passed the word to our daughter. We'll get to that in a day or two.
I can't wrap this up with any eloquent lessons learned or other pithy conclusions. I don't have any. Maybe someday I'll blog about it or add it to the book, but I'd much rather be with my friend on his back lanai kidding him about working while I'm surfing.
I would suggest that if you or a loved one is afflicted with "just one more year" syndrome, then this is a fitting opportunity to reflect upon the risks of that approach.
