Bjarne Slind 4/17/19--4/12/08

It's been a long time since I've made a blog posting. The new job with the very big media company  eats essentially all my time and leaves my hands capable of making very few extra keystrokes.

But today I need to think about what it means that my father Bjarne Slind died last Saturday.  I always think best by placing the tips of my fingers on a computer keyboard and watching to see what I write.

Dad died last Saturday morning, five days short of his 89th birthday. By all accounts he died quickly, and probably never knew what happened to him. He'd had a long slow physical decline, and his many health issues were like  competing train wrecks. He had a great deal of physical discomfort in his last years, and many limitations of his mobility and freedom to be independent.

My brother Eric has been his primary--and incredibly devoted and compassionate-- caregiver through the past five or six years. Dad moved to assisted living after his wife died four years ago, and then, last year, after he broke his hip and had hip-replacement surgery, he required a higher level of care. So he had to be moved to a nursing home.

Eric found Dad a wonderful place to stay, a real house, with only four other elderly residents, and a whole family living there. He had a beautiful garden in which he could sit, and there was always something happening at the house in terms of kids, pets, and blooming plants for him to see. Dad wasn't terribly happy there, but then, considering his physical decline and the limitations on his freedom, I doubt he would have been very happy anywhere. Still, it was the very very best you could imagine for someone with his physical limitations.

Dad was an immigrant who came over to Washington State's Palouse country with his parents and five older siblings from Selbu, Norway in 1922. He was only three at the time, but was my grandmother's last baby, so was at home with her, and speaking only Norwegian far longer than his older siblings. His mother died of the complications of von Wildebrand's disease when he was 10, and I think the early loss of his mother was one of the primary filters through which he viewed the world for the rest of his life.

Like many other immigrants, the choices he made in terms of education and profession were pragmatic. He was good at math and science, so chose to study electrical engineering in college. Along with many others of the ``greatest generation,'' he served in the U.S. military during World War II. And like many men with engineering degrees in the Pacific Northwest, he went to work for Boeing right out of school, and stayed there his entire career. 

I think Boeing opened many doors for him that he could not have otherwise known existed. Boeing gave him an outlet for his perfectionism and desire for accomplishment.  Because of his work at Boeing, he was able to travel the world--I think he actually flew more than 1 million miles on United Airlines over the years--and saw and worked in places like Cape Canaveral, Florida,  Madrid, Spain and Woomera, Australia. And he had the opportunity to be an aviation pioneer and move, with Boeing, into the space age.

He married at a relatively young age, at the age of 23, just four months to the day after Pearl Harbor. And he had four kids within nine years. Mom died after 31 years of marriage, and he remarried someone who also lived to have a 31-year marriage with him. When his second wife died, all the light went out of his life, and I think he merely endured the passing of every day after her death.

I suppose all of us--his children--are like him in some ways we consciously chose and in others that just came along for the ride. All of us are very hard-working like Dad was, and each of us takes a great deal of pride in and care for the work we do, certainly a lesson we learned from him. Dad had a great love of the Western U.S., and it's no accident that all of his children and grandchildren live on this side of the country. 

Some of us inherited Dad's love of travel. I know that even in today's miserable airline conditions, I am happy to get onto an airplane and always sit by the window so I can look out and see where I've been and how the plane is operating.

We're all storytellers, every single one of us. I joke that this is part of our Viking heritage because in ancient times, the storytellers always got fed and had a chance to sit by the fire. But I also think that it comes from hearing so many of Dad's stories. Like anyone else who ever worked in the aviation industry, Dad  could never talk about a flight without getting his hands out to describe his flight path.

Amazingly, Dad knew just as many stories about our mom's side of the family as he did about his own. In the last few years of his life, whenever I'd go visit him, I'd take along a reporter's notebook, and interview him about long-ago days:  about hitching up mules to pull the combine and sewing shut wheat  sacks during harvest; about where he was when he heard about Pearl Harbor; about what his mother thought during her first years as an immigrant.

We had a difficult relationship from day one. I think Dad wanted everything to be nice and acceptable and  to conform to what he though were appropriate social mores, some of which were more suited to 19th century rural Norway. And I never have found such behavior easy.

Yet I remain proud of many of Dad's accomplishments. He was, on so many levels, a self-made man. He liked to solve problems, and even now, I find that thinking a project through is often my favorite part of writing or making art or arranging my garden. I think that problem-solving systems approach he had is a good thing, although he sometimes did quirky things, like laying out his garden with an irrigation system grid of white plastic pipe. Yes, it did the job, but it was somewhat less than an utter aesthetic delight.

I'm so sorry my children--and indeed, all his grandchildren and great-grands--had such a limited experience of Dad, particularly when he was younger and healthier. Later in life, particularly when his health began to decline, he found it very difficult to be around people other than his wife, particularly in situations in which he could not be in control.  Life with young people is not something that can be tightly controlled with tidy boundaries.  So, for the most part, the kids did not see him all that often,  and rarely saw him at his best.

We will be having some sort of memorial/family picnic in June, I think. Right now it's too hard to get the family together, and too expensive, particularly for the younger people in the family, to buy plane tickets on such short notice. Dad is being cremated and his ashes are going in a niche in a Seattle cemetery next to his second wife.

I  added a few photos of Dad at the bottom. of this posting: The first is of Dad probably around the time he started first grade. He's in his bib overalls with one of the farm dogs. The second photo is of Dad with his parents and siblings. Throughout his life, whenever he said the phrase ''my family,'' these are the people he meant. He's the youngest, so he's right in front. The third photo is from the World War II era, and Dad, in his  Navy uniform is at a San Francisco nightclub with our very blond and glamorous mother. Next is a photo of me riding a horse with Dad at my maternal grandparents' ranch in Ellensburg, Washington.  The fifth photo was taken at what was one of our very few family picnics. It think this was around 1992 or so. Dad is with my brother Eric, and yes indeed the family resemblance is very strong.

 

Well, as I so often say, what is remembered lives. And yes, Dad's is one of the names I'll read when we do the spiral dance next Samhain.

I'm now the elder of the family, and I will do the best I can to share photos, and stories from Dad's life with the rest of the family. If we don't remember who we are and who came before us, we will be heading off into the future with no roots. And that doesn't feel like a good way to try to go foward.

obituary death die parent father seattle immigrant family Norway Washington+State Boeing memorial funeral generations legacy Palouse Ellensburg wheat farming Viking aviation aerospace

 

Comments

[Adam]

Beautiful blog. Thank you, Aunt Victoria.

[Sandy Person]

I'm so sorry to read of the passing of your dad in the Times yesterday. I sent a memorial donation to PS Blood Bank as suggested and they emailed back saying they didn't know where to send a confirmation. How neat you are Google-able.

Your blog is a lovely tribute to your dad and I'm glad I found it when trying to find you. Your parents were very, very kind to me when I needed grown-ups to be grown-ups many years ago.

Best to you Victoria. You and sweet Eric and your sisters are in my thoughts.

Sandy ... an old acquaintance from Cocoa Beach days.....

[T. Thorn Coyle]

Blessings to you and your family.

[Martha Nelson]

I love you and your family so much. I was sad to hear of your fathers death. Dad died about two years ago after a battle with kidney disease. My children and grandchildren never really knew him before he was sick. I am the keeper of the pictures and memories. Your blog has inspired me to keep the heritage going. I wish I could talk to you. I have so much to say.

Love,
Martha Nelson

[Yvonne]

Dear Victoria,

Sorry to hear about your dad.

[terry grant]

Hello Victoria,
I have missed your clever words and beautiful on the Quiltart list and was concerned when you stopped posting to your blog. I send my condolences on your father's death. Like you I am now the elder of my family--such a strange place to be in life, if you are like me and still think of yourself as the child you once were. I hope things are good at the very big media company and you, yourself, are well and happy.

Just a "hello" from an online admirer.

[Corky]

Victoria, I just realized that you're back posting to your blog and was saddened to read about your father's death. Condolences to your entire family. Your father sounded like quite a man.