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| June 2018 |
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Passing of the Torch
My Mom passed away recently, two days after Mother’s Day and a month after her 97th birthday. What a flood of memories I have been reliving. It was time — she was ready. But it is still a painful transition. It was good Mom had two boys, as she understood and could keep up with us most of our lives. Her own stories as a child always made me jealous of all they did on the family ranch outside Fallon, Nevada. Her parents, Oscar and Betty Swanson, had both come from Sweden as teenagers, met, married and homesteaded an 80 acre piece of desert. I can still vividly remember visiting Grandpa and Grandma’s place, with its old workshop, barns, fences, dairy herd, chicken house and never-ending chores. I earned my first real money trapping gophers at age 6, as the county paid a 10-cent bounty for every gopher tail you brought in. Grandpa also paid 1 cent for each bailing wire we picked up around the ranch. Mom’s handshake remained strong to the end from those early days of milking cows and working on the ranch. Mom and her friends made their own fun in those early days, swimming in the canals and skating on them in the winter, making a group swing out of an old car frame hoisted into a tree, and driving over the top of sage brush that would lift the entire car. She and her older sister, Ella Swanson Bishop, made accommodations between their Adventist religious practices and their high school friends. Mom went off to La Sierra for college, but then was convinced by friends to transfer to Walla Walla College, in Washington. It was there this freckle-faced cowgirl from Nevada caught my Dad’s eye and they married the summer he graduated. With WWII raging, Dad’s earlier polio gave him a medical deferment, so he took a job teaching science at Campion Academy in Loveland, Colorado. It was there my brother Ken was born at the old Boulder Sanitarium. From then on, Mom’s life was dedicated to her boys. Two years later, Dad was accepted at what was then the College of Medical Evangelists in Loma Linda and started medical school in 1944, where I was born a year later. We lived in a remodeled garage and Dad would ride us to the market on his bike, with me in the front basket and Ken riding on back, where he could buy a large bag of broken Ruskets for a month of breakfasts. Then an internship in Spokane, Washington, several years in Rockford, Washington, and then back to Dad’s old stomping grounds in Troy, Idaho. It was there we really grew up, thoroughly blessed by wandering the fields and woods, working on the local farms, and attending a two-room church school with never more than 25 students. Dad was a true country doctor, practicing with a college friend, Omer Drury, and anchoring that corner of northern Idaho. As “doc’s” wife, Mom initiated, organized and hosted a never-ending sequence of activities — from Saturday night parties to church campouts for huckleberry and mushroom picking, Fourth of July ball games, and sifting for arrowheads along the Snake River. It was a good life and one we were always eager to return to even after we headed off to academy and college.
Though neither had traveled abroad, Mom and Dad had a deep sense of adventure and a calling to serve others, and they started responding to short term mission needs, first in Ecuador and Jamaica. After Dad completed an anesthesiology residency at Loma Linda University Health — and saw Ken and me through medical school — they accepted a full-time call to serve as missionaries in Blantyre, Malawi. We followed them and for a few years all of us were in Africa — Mom and Dad in Malawi, Ken and Dee in Zambia, and Judy and me in Tanzania. After a second stint in Nairobi, Dad returned to join the anesthesiology department at Loma Linda, followed by retirement to Roseburg, Oregon, then College Place, Washington, and finally back here to Loma Linda. As their sunset years progressed, they had many friends from different countries come by to visit, while Mom kept up her garden and flowers, always driven by a need to remain active. I noticed their covering for each other’s growing limitations — Dad’s decreasing mobility and hearing, and Mom’s fading memory. Dad died three and a half years ago at 94 and now Mom at 97. But their memory will live on through their two children, five grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. Mom’s tough Swedish heritage, quest for adventure and strong work ethic, coupled with Dad’s curiosity and intellect, flows through our veins. They never completely understood the social issues of today with changing behaviors and mores. And while they asked the usual questions about their church, their loyalty never wavered. Generous in giving and living, they led a less complicated life than now, anchored in a bedrock belief and commitment to core values they inherently knew and understood, long before we spelled them out in more recent years. I am deeply grateful for a family — though often separated by miles and oceans — who was consistently loyal to each other, without drama, and for a wife and sister-in-law who seamlessly joined that family. While we were private without a lot of visible emotions, the feelings ran deep and Mom leaves a huge void. Now we are the oldest generation, living with our own stories and making our own memories. But I am acutely aware that my own life and history are molded by an incredible heritage that I owe to my parents. Thank you, Mom and Dad. See you soon. On this graduation weekend, may we all remember our own unique heritage and value what we have been given by those who have gone before. Thank you, graduates, for sharing a part of that journey with Loma Linda University Health. Richard Hart, MD, DrPH
President
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June 7, 2018
Notes from the President — Passing of the Torch
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