Appendix
E.
Dad's
Transition,
the Longer Version
This was removed from the next-to-last Chapter of Katy’s book, drafted in September 2001. It is redundant with the section following.
Bad News From Dad
On September 6, the phone rang. It was dad! He had called by accident but would call back in just a minute after the call he had really intended to make. He had news that might be of interest to us. The news was that he had been suffering for some time with alternating diarrhea and constipation and was to have a colonoscopy sometime the next week. We weren’t too alarmed; often these procedures were just precautionary, one of many diagnostics. We were placed a little more on edge, however and expected more mixed news in the coming weeks.
This was removed from the last Chapter of Katy’s book, “Transitions”. The book was supposed to be about Katy, not dad. What is included there is much more concise, but this is still something worth keeping, elsewhere.
Bailey Duncan, 1926-2000
Shortly after the accidental phone call of September 6, dad was diagnosed with rectal cancer. The protocol for this in the year 2000 was to treat with radiation and chemotherapy for six weeks to try to reduce the size of the tumor then to schedule surgery. This surgery would result in a permanent colostomy. Dad’s doctor installed a subclavian catheter from which he would receive steady chemotherapy treatments five days each week for six weeks. The prognosis was fair to good but still we worried. Each week of chemotherapy and radiation treatment made him sicker. Each week Saturday was the worst day and by Monday he was beginning to feel better, just in time for the next treatment series to begin.
For the first time I had ever known or heard of, our school district had the entire week off from school at Thanksgiving. We planned a trip to Texas for a visit. I finished a project that I’d been procrastinating for fifteen years, since dad’s mother’s sister had died, going through their pictures and selecting up a slide show, like the old days when we would visit grandma and aunt Da in Canyon. I premiered this show at my next turn of our new Family Night tradition then we prepared to take it on the road.
Treatments ended the week before Thanksgiving. When dad started feeling better this time, there wouldn’t be more treatments to set him back. We started to talk about surgery dates and care plans afterwards.
Viannah had a Color Guard show on the Saturday that began the holiday week. We took Viann, Katy, and John to the airport and sent them off to Houston, then I attended the show that night, we went to church the following morning, and flew to Houston ourselves that evening, arriving around midnight. We were picked up by Viann and her brother Michael in a rental car and taken to Michael’s place near Red Rock arriving about 2:30 a.m. The next morning we got up shortly before noon and drove to Hillsboro, stopping in Waco to pick up a slide projector and screen that I had reserved by phone the week prior.
The visit was fairly normal considering the circumstances. We had the slide show Monday evening. Dad sat through most of it and answered questions about the various people and places shown. He was the only one who could have known many of them and even he didn’t recognize everything. We worked in the yard during the days and played games at night, going to favorite local eating places for some meals. Due to the difficulties at the house, the five of us stayed in a new motel up near the freeway.
On Tuesday dad had an appointment with his oncologist in Waco. We crammed the projector and screen into dad and mom’s Escort. Wilda drove, dad sat up front with her and told her every move to make. Mother and I sat in the back. I talked to her about other things to keep our attention off dad’s front-seat driving. It was just like the good ‘ol days, except that we were all many years older now than then.
“I’ve been driving for twenty years, dad,” Wilda finally hinted, loudly. Nothing about the direction giving, navigation or warnings changed. He had been like this as a flight instructor too. I recalled the day I was to solo. He went around with me once in, I thought, a Cessna 152 or 172 and wasn’t supposed to say anything. Just like my son John, he couldn’t do it, he kept motioning with his hands and pointing to instruments and controls all the way around the pattern. After landing he got out and I went around once all by myself: takeoff, crosswind, downwind, base, final, and touchdown. I remembered that might have been the only time I had soloed a plane. We tore the tail off my shirt and stapled it to the wall. Mother was mad we had ruined a perfectly good shirt for such a purpose.
We arrived at the clinic and went in. Dad, in his friendly and overt way, wouldn’t listen to anybody, not even the doctors. He told everyone who asked that he was getting better and that surgery might not even be needed due to his treatments. The doctor’s eyes and not-so-subtle suggestions told another story. He lobbied us to get more opinions, maybe go to M.D. Anderson in Houston and maybe even have the surgery there. Dad would have none of it. He liked and totally trusted his surgeon in Hillsboro and was going to stay right there. I was planning to come back out to help with all that. Nobody was talking dates yet. Dad was only talking, well, denial.
In his letters and phone calls throughout the ordeal, dad would always mention that he had talked at length with his Creator about all this and was ready to go either way. “Either way, I win!” he would conclude.
On the way home we stopped by one of his favorite donut places on Valley Mills Blvd., another trademark behavior. There were donut places in all of dad’s haunts around Texas where he was known as a “regular” customer. At least you would think that the way he talked to the people behind the counters.
We turned the projector in, went by Hobby Lobby then home on I-35, all under construction. Viann got a totally different progress report from dad than she got from the rest of us.
Wednesday late we said our goodbyes and drove to Dallas for Thanksgiving Day with Viann’s sister Elizabeth, her family and brother Michael’s new family. Dad and mom had gone to the traditional family Thanksgiving there for many years, in fact, ever since we were first married over twenty years ago. For the last ten or twelve they had gone even though we had been out of state. This year dad wasn’t up to the trip. “Probably next year,” everybody said.
Thanksgiving morning we all got up early and participated in the Turkey Trot in downtown Dallas. Viann and I walked the route, taking about an hour. We had our traditional Thanksgiving festivities, including the hearing of Alice’s Restaurant. Friday we visited and cleaned up. Saturday we got in the rental car and drove back to catch our flight in Houston back to LAX.
Sunday we were back to the routine: church, rest, work on Monday. The following Saturday the girls were in a Miriam Singers performing at the church’s Lucia Festival. I accompanied this performance. Many pictures were taken. I called home every few days to check up on doctor’s appointments and see how the future plans were firming up.
The next Saturday, December 9, was the 30th birthday of our interim music director at church, Raimer Rojas, who happened to be the son-in-law of our recently retired music director, Roland Tabell. The party was a picnic in the park. John and Viann and I went while the girls went off to do singing telegrams, a fundraiser for the school choir program. We returned from Arcadia, picking up the girls on the way and got home about two. There were eight messages on the answering machine, two from mother, several from a friend of Viannah’s who was coming for the weekend and couldn’t find the house, and others. For mother to call was rare, for her to leave a message, unprecedented.
As we sorted through all this traffic, we learned the news. Dad had been taken to the hospital and his heart had stopped there in the emergency room. In the second call, mother said they hadn’t been able to save him and she was waiting back at home. This call was less than half an hour old. I collected myself and called back.
“What happened?” I asked.
Dad had been feeling much better, mom said, and had just updated the mailing list for the Christmas Cards that they were about to mail out. He had bought oil to change in the car and truck and was puttering around starting to do things again. Shortly before lunch he had felt poorly and lain down on the couch. When mother came to get him for lunch he was shaking uncontrollably. She had taken him straight up to the hospital, only a mile away, and we knew the rest of the story. Her friend Shirley from church had brought her home and was looking out for her. Shirley’s daughter Amber worked in the emergency room and had been with her there. No one knew why this had been so sudden. There were many questions. Everything was black.
The next hours and days were beyond difficult. We arranged for mother to go home with Bennie Hughes and stay with her in Hubbard that night. Wilda and I arranged to fly from opposite coasts meet the next day at DFW, get a car together and go down. Viann called Elizabeth and asked her to go down and help mother start the arrangements that would have to be made starting Sunday afternoon. We started calling and e-mailing people everywhere. Every call we had to make or note we had to write brought on another wave of grief. “Poor Dad,” I kept muttering, or “Shoot! Shoot!” I was really unable to think much.
Wilda and I arrived mid-afternoon Sunday and, finding no one at home, went straight to the funeral home where the arrangements were in progress. We were just in time to help pick the casket.
The following days were a blur of pain and friendship. Many more notification calls had to be made. I was asked to pick music for the service. Our credit cards were all maxed-out from the trip just two weeks before and there had not been time for a billing cycle since. My friend at JPL, Jan Tarsala came to the Avis car rental to put a car for Viann on his own credit card so that she and the kids could leave for the long drive to Texas after school on Monday. Except for an ice storm, she would have arrived very late Tuesday. Instead, they stayed in Abilene Tuesday where a stranger bought their dinner (because, at this point, the credit card seemed to work randomly) then came on to Hillsboro in improving weather Wednesday mid-day.
Because of this and the weather, the funeral was set for Thursday morning with burial Friday in Panhandle. Burial arrangements had been made forty years before when mom’a mother, Wilda Pennington had died after a long struggle with multiple sclerosis.
Many more notifications had to be made. Each call was both a joy and a trial. One by one dear friends had to be told the news, after which we caught up on each of their lives a bit too. We tried to think of and call at least one friend from every place dad and mom had lived. The fresh Christmas Card list was helpful. The Christmas Cards themselves had to be changed, of course. Mother made copies of the obituary out of the local paper and enclosed them with a poem she had written in 1963 about the seasons of life. A suitable copy wasn’t extant, so I retyped it, on dad’s typewriter.
Dad’s pacemaker telephone monitor had to be boxed up and returned.
Then there was the viewing. Wilda exclaimed, “It doesn’t look like him at all!” Mother said he had lost a lot of weight. We decided to put his glasses on him. That helped a little. We sat around for a long time. Finally I remarked, “It’s because he isn’t laughing and telling stories. That’s the way he would always be, even at something like this.”
Dad was the only one who would know what to say or how to comfort people at a time like this. It had been his job for fifty years.
The hundreds I expected at the funeral weren’t there, so many had already gone on before dad and many of the rest lived so far away. Cousin Sappho, in particular, was in Hawaii. We talked to her and her daughter Dechen. Dad had been an only child, but Sappho was a first cousin and in many ways considered him to be like a brother. “He was such a hell-raiser when he was young,” she had told us once, “everybody was amazed when he became a preacher!”
But many did come to the funeral, people from the Hospital Auxiliary, the Texas Wing of the Civil Air Patrol, friends from Hubbard, from the Covenant Baptist where they had been attending, and substituting as needed. Robby, my friend from Taylor for the last thirty years took the day off to be there as well as Ed and Ellen Moers from our Rosehill church days. Ed would do anything to fly the plane somewhere. And of course, all the family within driving range, the Skemps, even Jenny, who had to be checked out of a drug rehab halfway house for any outing, and Michael and Mary.
There was a dinner for the family at the Covenant Baptist Church to which we invited all the out of town friends then after going by the house to change clothes, drove away to Panhandle where we would spend the night. We arrived late and checked in to the Double N motel. The next morning we had breakfast at the Bean Patch next door and drove around past the site where mother had been born and some of the places she had played as a little girl.
More family came to the cemetery service, the few local relatives still able to get around. The local Methodist Minister, someone we didn’t know, was brought out for the graveside service. How many times had I been with dad for a service like this? How many times had he done one? Dad had performed the graveside rites for both of Viann’s parents twenty years earlier. This pastor was a woman. In principle mother would not have approved of this, but she was accepting and polite. It really wasn’t that important.
We took pictures, found graves of relatives, and drove off. Mother said, “He’s not here, I saw him leave last Saturday,” still not crying, only nearly so. “Yes,” I replied, too quickly, “This is just the earthly remains, the part that was sick.” I stopped before getting any more trite. Wilda listened but said nothing. We drove off toward Amarillo.
Cousin Vivian bought us lunch at a fancy place in Amarillo. We had more chance to catch up with the local relatives including Bob Green, a son-in-law who had come up from Midland to drive some of the older folks around. He had a small employee safety related consulting company and a cell phone that allowed him to not miss much work on a day like this. We talked interesting oil business talk over dinner. I didn’t feel much like taking notes.
Around four, it was time to leave for home. Since this was already a third of the way back to California, Viann and the kids had decided to head west, Wilda and mom and I were going east. We said our goodbyes and parted ways on opposing entrance ramps to I-40. It was a long drive. Wilda slept in the back seat while mother and I talked about life long ago in her youth. We stopped only in Henrietta for gas and little snacks. We got home about 11 p.m. and in ten minutes the phone rang. Viann had stopped for the night in Gallup, New Mexico.
Saturday I changed the oil in the car and truck, trying to do everything exactly as dad would have, right down to the dashboard label. I soon realized that I couldn’t fully do anything exactly as dad would have. Something unique was indeed lost. The garage and tools were not well kept at this point. Mental note: The garage will need work when I come back out.
Sunday we went to church and visited Shirley’s mother in the hospital. Monday we took care of business, closing bank accounts, dealing with investments and retirement plans. Due to an error in setup, I had inherited a big piece of mother’s portfolio. We made arrangements for the interest payments to go back to her as before. The Methodist pension would be reduced by about 30%; mother was a “surviving spouse.”
Tuesday, Wilda and I went to see dad’s surgeon. We discussed dad’s optimism of denial. We discussed the subclavian catheter and the progress of the illness and his final moments there at the hospital. The cause of death was sepsis. His immune system had been weakened severely by chemotherapy and radiation. He had been instructed to come in if he felt the least bit bad but, as always, he had chosen to tough it out. By the time he was shaking uncontrollably, it was too late. I wondered to myself how, after six weeks of chemotherapy, you would know what felt “bad” and what felt “good?”
Some thought this was just as well; he wouldn’t have done well with his condition after surgery. Mother was angry. Dad wouldn’t tell anybody anything. When she learned things by accident or prying she would make him do the right thing, like going to a doctor, at once, but she couldn’t know everything. Dad was not a hypochondriac. For good or ill, the reality was that he was now gone. That, like so much else in life, was irrevocable.
Wednesday, we all drove to DFW for my trip home. It was the leading edge of the Christmas rush. Only by getting in the wrong line accidentally did I get on the very last seat of my overbooked flight. We flew right over Panhandle on the way to Denver. Once we were out of Texas I finally got out the lightest of the five items of reading material I had brought along and tried to think about something else. Other things had happened in the world on December 9. I read the L.A. Times for that date. There was a good piece on the impending California electricity crises. Always something.
The stopover in Denver was not brief as expected. The Denver to L.A. crew had been delayed because their plane from San Jose had been delayed by weather back in Chicago. They would not arrive for several hours. After this and other delays we were off the ground before midnight. It was 8 degrees F with snow flurries. I could tell from the stars that we were flying northeast at first, then after ten minutes we turned back towards L.A. and joined the other air traffic headed that way.
Wilda stayed until Christmas Eve then returned to Norfolk from which she made a long-planned trip to Italy to visit a Navy friend. We made sure mother was set with a place to go Christmas Day and I called every night for several weeks to check up on her.
Some years earlier, after the death of my AMSAT friend and former President, Vern Riportello, I had sent a letter of condolence to his wife and copied dad. After reading it, dad had asked me to write his obituary for the Methodist Conference Journal, “One of these days a long time from now,” he had said. The day had arrived early. I got started.
I had been away from home for a quarter century and had long felt independent from my upbringing, yet dad’s absence from this world made it an entirely different place for me. For months the slightest series of thoughts would lead around some unexpected path to remind me of his departure. I finally began to realize what I had been told, that things would get back to normal, not the normal from before but a new, different normal. My dreams, plans, fantasies, and priorities underwent yet another re-evaluation, but this review was in earnest like never before, not from striving but from the impact of mortality. The new life would not be the same.
A.
Bailey Duncan
A. Bailey Duncan was born January 8, 1926 in Floyd County, Texas, son of Arthur Bailey and Lethel Courtney Duncan. At the age of two he moved with his family to Canyon, Texas where he graduated from high school in 1943. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II then went on to receive a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from West Texas State University in Canyon in 1948 and a Master’s degree in Theology from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1951. He married Louellyn Pennington on October 30, 1949 at First Methodist Church in Borger, Texas.
Brother Duncan joined the North Texas Conference in 1950 and was ordained as an Elder of the Methodist Church in 1952.
He served as an itinerant Methodist minister for 35 years serving churches in the North Texas Conference at Marysville and Sivells Bend; Chico and Park Springs; Kemp and Becker; Roxton; Plymouth Park in Irving; Frisco; Henrietta and Ringgold; and Centenary United Methodist Church in Pleasant Grove.
In 1968 he transferred to the Central Texas Conference where he served in Taylor (First) and Thrall; Hubbard and Mt. Calm; Wortham, Kirvin, and Richland; Rio Vista and Kopperl. His pastoral ministry included 21 pulpits in 11 charges and numerous revival venues. He retired to Hillsboro in 1984.
Following retirement, Brother Duncan was a flight instructor and math teacher at Texas State Technical Institute in Waco for four years. He was active in the Civil Air Patrol for 30 years serving ultimately as Chaplain for the Texas Wing with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He was a volunteer with the Hill Regional Hospital Auxiliary in Hillsboro and served in that hospital’s Chaplain rotation.
He died December 9, 2000 in Hillsboro following a short battle with cancer.
Survivors include his wife Louellyn; one son and daughter-in-law, Courtney and Viann Owens Duncan of La Canada, California, one daughter, Wilda Duncan, Petty Officer First Class, serving aboard the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71); and three grandchildren, Viannah, Katherine, and John Duncan all of La Canada, California.
Services were held December 14 in Hillsboro with Brother Leonard Lewis of Covenant Baptist Church, Hillsboro and Rev. Charles Wallace of Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Hubbard, officiating. Burial was December 15 at Panhandle Cemetery in Panhandle, Texas with Rev. Kathryn Boren of the Panhandle United Methodist Church officiating.
Bailey’s ministry and influence extended well beyond the local church. He served in local service clubs as well as the public schools where he often took temporary, part time assignments as a math or science teacher. His duties as Chaplain and Check Pilot in the Civil Air Patrol included search and rescue missions, ministry to families of those lost in crashes, and training programs and encampments. He was also a good friend, leader, and mentor to many of the pilots and cadets in the program.
He was a leader in each community where he served, bringing people of all faiths and persuasions together for causes of common good. He was instrumental in establishing and maintaining small local congregations throughout his retirement often acting as supply or alternate pastor. His friends spanned people in all walks of life and his trademark laugh, stories, and overt friendliness will be remembered by any who ever encountered him. He was direct about his faith in Christ and led many to join in that faith, yet avoided making its particulars a stumbling block to relationships.
Bailey has now gone on to join the company of his treasure in heaven, the many brothers and sisters, saints in Christ, who have gone on before him. His constant intercession with the Father on behalf of many who the Lord put on his heart is greatly missed. He now waits with Christ for those of us who remain behind, for now. “For I shall see Him face to face, and tell the story, ‘saved by grace.’”
Courtney B. Duncan, loving son.