2006 Life Goes On

2006  Life Goes On. Littleton, New Hampshire, Robert Frost, August Wilson's death, Anson and Hannah to Roanoke, Virginia, dizzy spells, holidays with one missing, Super Bowl and Pittsburgh sports, Gloria, breast cancer, female solidarity, Roy’s Honduras project, Bluffton Mennonites Writing conference, Aaron Thomas Miedel born August 9, 2006.

After Jakob’s death, life goes on, and one must tend to the living. I remember that from my brother Paul’s prayer at Jakob’s burial, I suppose a kind of admonition to the living.  Hannah and Anson were moving, I went with Roy to Honduras, Gloria had a bout with breast cancer, grandson Aaron was born, and the Steelers won the Super Bowl.

After Hannah and Anson’s residency was finished in Philadelphia, they headed for Littleton, New Hampshire, where Hannah did a short-term medical assignment in the summer and fall of 2005. Anson was waiting for the appropriate ophthalmology practice to join. Gloria and I went up to see them in October with snow already on the ground and pines and hemlocks all around. One evening we drove up near the Canadian border to see a moose lumbering across an open field. Lumbering is the right verb because we passed traditional lumbering villages and the paper mills still around, but it had the feeling of southwestern Pennsylvania steel towns, the industry had left and only large buildings were still standing.

That Fall was my first travel in this rural New England country-side of fresh snow, small farms, black bears, white clapboard houses, and a Sunday Methodist worship. One afternoon we went to a farmer’s market, most memorable for a North Country folk singer entertaining anyone who would listen.

Another day we went to nearby Franconia to Robert Frost’s farm and home where he lived off and on from 1915 to 1938. It is now turned into a museum and writing school with a walking tour of some of the familiar poems he wrote there such as “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and “Road not Taken.” What was not lost on me was that Frost’s immediate family was plagued by mental illness and death; a son had also ended his life in his 30s.

While we were there, August Wilson died on October 2, 2005, and I remember seeing it on the front page of the Boston Globe and thinking the greatest dramatist since William Shakespeare had died. I loved his plays, and in June of 2006 we saw his penultimate play “Gem of the Ocean” at the Pittsburgh Theater; two years later on October 9, 2008, we went to “Radio Golf.” Both were set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the first in 1904; the latter in 1997; the century and Wilson’s cycle were complete. 

By November Hannah and Anson and Sadie were loading their belongings and moving to Roanoke, Virginia. On the day of the moving I got up and felt dizzy. I tried to stand and walk but felt dizzy so finally I went back to bed. I could not help with the moving which I had regularly done over the years for our children. A good part of my identity is tied to my physical abilities and usefulness, and now I was useless in bed.  After that, for a number of months when I would get up in the mornings or at night, I would get dizzy spells. Our family physicians, my brother Roy and daughter Hannah, were always available but never intrusive.   

Sometimes, in the office, I would get dizzy, and I would lay my head down on the desk for a half hour and then go back to work; other times I would go home. Finally in the summer of 2006, I took a dazed spell on the tennis courts and passed out, and Hannah demanded that I go in to William Weisel, my doctor, for tests, thinking that I was having mini- strokes. I did all this and also took some pills which were prescribed. Then after a year, my dizzy spells went away. I thought it may have been the stress of Jakob’s death and our losses.

After the Roanoke, Virginia, move Hannah was with Carilion Family Medicine in Vinton (“Dr. Miedel is fluent in Spanish”) which turned out to be a good fit. Anson and the Roanoke Eye Care and Surgery group were not; he chose not to join the firm. They had a good church relationship at a university fellowship not far from Virginia Tech with an outstanding pastor Les Horning and his wife Crystal who had done a children’s book for us at Herald Press. On September 24, 2006, the Christiansburg Mennonite Fellowship had a dedication service for our grandchildren Sarah Elizabeth (Sadie) and Aaron Thomas. My mother and the children’s great-grandmother Mattie attended; she flew down for the weekend from the Canton-Akron Airport; I think it was about the last of Mattie’s long-distance trips to our family.

Over the holidays, our immediate family often reflected on the one missing (it would be a re-occurring conversation), but the conversation never went much beyond the immediate family. It may have been that we felt no one would quite understand, that Jakob's life was too complex in his goodness and losses for anyone else to appreciate. I remember several years later, the church asked me to share about our tragedy, but I demurred. It may have been in part that I did  not want his life to be defined mainly by his death. But a decade later, if I were to share, I might reflect on our adjusting to a new reality which we intellectually knew but emotionally did not recognize; I'm indebted to daughters Hannah and Elizabeth for saying this so well. 

Our family and I'm including the extended Andrew and Mattie Miller family always felt we were exceptional (yes, I know every family has and should have an element of this). But now emotionally we knew were were prone all the frailties, terrors, and paradoxes of the human condition. We confessed to being descendants of sturdy Anabaptism in following Jesus, but we also needed the mercy and grace of that same Jesus to carry us through life's tragedies. The theologian Stephen F. Dintamin once wrote an important essay about this theme back in the nineties.   

And then the Steelers. After a bad start, they made a run in the post season, ending in the Super Bowl winning over the Seattle Seahawks on February 5, 2006. It had all the familiar Steeler elements as Jerome Bettis, the affable power back for many seasons, had a homecoming to Detroit where his mother still lived. The wide receiver Randle El threw a trick pass for a touchdown, and Heinz Ward was smiling and consistently making catches and fierce blocks. We were part of a Scottdale Mennonite party at the home of Janice and Daniel Walter near Greensburg. During the Steeler run, I would think of Jakob because of his entertaining commentary and generally inaccurate predictions or descriptions.

The same was true of Pitt Basketball, and Elizabeth got tickets for several games that year (2005-2006) with Aaron Gray, Ronald Ramon, Lavon Kendall and Sam Young (the latter two being pianists). We often went to a game around the holidays when the students were away and good tickets quite accessible on Thanksgiving weekend against Florida State and during Christmas holidays against Dayton. During that summer baseball on June 16, 2006, Michael and Ruth Yoder joined us for  a Pittsburgh and Minnesota game. And there was an annual Indians baseball game as my brother David who had season tickets through Walnut Hills Retirement Community. On my birthday in September, David invited the brothers along;. David often invited family members to join him for games.   

Human mortality and health remained with us during the year when in July Gloria submitted to a routine mammogram, and a spot was discovered on her breast which turned out to be cancerous. I’ll never forget the Sunday Gloria stood up in sharing time in church and asked for prayer. Gloria seldom participated at sharing time, but when the worship was over she was surrounded by a dozen women, a cohort her age standing around her in support. It was as though they all knew what the danger was; they looked like a female herd surrounding a wounded one in total solidarity. Do not enter, their formation seemed to say, in no uncertain terms. We knew, of course, that cancerous cells were not ultimately repelled by female solidarity, but the image and strength of these church women stayed with me for a long time.

On September 7, Gloria checked into the Mount Pleasant Frick Hospital early in the morning, and there was good support as Hannah came up to be with her; Elizabeth came out, I think, and one of our pastors Donna Mast was also there most of the day. By the end of the day, the surgeon thought the cells were removed, and reported that the cancerous cells appeared not to have spread to her arm pits and other parts of the body. I remember when she came home and was sitting on the sofa with Hannah on the one side and little Sadie on the other, both with their arms around here in total solidarity.

It was a year after Jakob’s burial. In some ways Gloria had been the biggest silent sufferer in his death. Meanwhile, she had missed only two days of school teaching during the entire ordeal, and afterwards made monthly trips to the Arnold Palmer Medical Oncology for chemotherapy treatments. By the next spring Gloria was ready to run again in the Susan G. Komen 5-K, and the rest of our family ran too, even extended family came. Her sisters Carla Stutzman and Bonnie and families came down in solidarity. And while Michael and Ruth Yoder lived in Pittsburgh, each Spring Paul and Carol and children with their fleet sons-in-law came down and ran in solidarity with Gloria. A decade later, as  I post this, she is still running every day and playing tennis several times a week.  

Meanwhile, in February I got a call from brother Roy telling me he was getting together a team to go to Honduras to build an addition onto a church several hours from San Pedro Sula. The trip was about half family reunion with sister Rhoda and her son Jonathan along with Ruth’s daughter Sarah Roth and Roy’s daughter Susan. So Millers and the rest were Holmes County friends Roy had recruited. Roy had learned some basic Spanish and loved the rural peasants; this indigenous approach was to eat with local people and have the work all done with nationals and with local hand tools. In addition, there were side excursions to visiting a coffee plant and hiking up a mountain almost at the border with El Salvador. In the evenings, Roy would lead a de-briefing circle where people could express their feelings regarding Honduras living, both the beauty and the poverty. Honduras was economically the poorest country in Central America.

What became clear on the plane and at the airport was that Honduras was visitor and charity friendly (a veritable cottage industry for bilingual Hondurans). Well-meaning American church and civic groups had ready access for short-term volunteer experiences. Aside from these ad hoc groups on the ground one would see vehicles marked “World Vision” or garbage trucks “given by the people of Japan.” I could not help but see a re-creation of my father Andrew Miller (albeit with greater resources and a medical degree) now expanding his Thelma Stoutenheimer’s Southern Ohio mission to Olvidio Flores’ Honduran mission. In fact, it had all the paternalistic elements of hugging the women and children who were grateful to Roy’s generosity which he was trying to pass along to his daughter Susan.

One could only marvel at the apparent confidence Roy had on responding to Honduran poverty and developmental, while NGOs, governments, universities and charities have spent centuries trying to approach the same issues. Our own daughter Elizabeth had a University of Pittsburgh master’s degree in international development, along with several years of international living and service. Still, charity is primarily an amateur project (best done out of love, as the Gospels taught), and I admired Roy and these North Americans for their efforts. Roy’s home community felt the same way about it, and on November 9, 2006, the Holmes County Chamber of Commerce awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award at Walnut Creek’s Carlisle Inn. That same evening, nephew Kent Miller and the Rhodie family also won an award for management of the Comfort Inns at Millersburg and Berlin.

That fall October 28, 2006, I attended a conference at Bluffton University in Ohio called “Mennonites Writing: Beyond Borders” with the intent of giving definition of my marginality to the guild. I presented the paper with the title: “Confessions of Poorly Echoing the Vanished Mennonite Bishop and Offending the Mennonite Artists and their Liberal Friends.” The reflection was a tribute to traditional authority figures and the benign bishops I grew up with among the Holmes County Amish and Mennonites (think Jacob Mast, Harry Stutzman and Roman Stutzman) and a rejoinder to the poets Jeff Gundy and Julia Kasdorf who had accused me of trying to re-institute what they considered the mid-century legalism of the old Mennonites.

I had the impression that the audience in the room was entertained if not in agreement with my stories and views. It was one of the best things I had written in this context since Ben’s Wayne. For the uninitiated, I’m sure these intramural and often sectarian debates the Mennonites were having about their identity were probably a mixture of quaintness, irritation, and even nonsense. Still, that’s the the beauty of being a part of a sectarian group, even a disintegrating one; we find some strength, hope and even humor in our debates.  

By the end of the year, it was our turn to host the whole extended Andrew and Mattie Miller family who came down at Christmas 2006, staying at Laurelville. We spent an evening of doing charades of family history and singing songs and hymns. Around the circle and often on my lap was a little baby boy Aaron Thomas Miedel who was born on August 9, 2006, early in the morning in Roanoke, Virginia.

Aaron’s birth was announced to us by a young raccoon that appeared outside our bedroom door at about three o’clock when I woke up. I later found out that the raccoon appeared about the same time Aaron was born and considered him my messenger, and especially Aaron as only a little lower than the angels. In any case, I thought it quite fitting. His mother Hannah’s birth had been announced by angelic Grey Squirrels in Bowling Green, Ohio (1975). As with all of Hannah’s babies, Aaron was a good natured little boy.  

 Most of this comes from my memory and my personal journals and files of 2006. Stephen F. Dintamin's essay "The Pastoral Significance of the Anabaptist Vision" was widely printed in Mennonite journals but can be accessed at Goshen College's Mennonite Historical Library website: https://www.goshen.edu/mhl/Refocusing/DINTAMAN.htm  
My experience in Honduras appeared in “A Week Among the Hondurans,” The Independent-Observer (March 23, 2006, 9). “Confessions of Poorly Echoing the Vanished Mennonite Bishop and Offending the Mennonite Artists and their Liberal Friends,” unpublished paper given at Mennonites Writing: Beyond Borders Conference, Bluffton University, Bluffton, Ohio, October 28, 2006.