The end of a five-month long project to tell a man's life story. Without a doubt the most personally rewarding and satisfying thing that I have ever written. I hope others who may read it think it was a story worth telling.
The slow decline continued into 1976. There were good days where he felt and acted like his old self, usually when getting together with friends and relatives, but those days seemed to be dwindling. After yet another thoracic, or chest, surgery on February 20th the good days were pretty much gone, reduced now to tolerable days, and even those were outnumbered by downright bad days, days in which it was all he could do to get out of bed and watch TV. Then early in the evening it was back to bed where he would pull the covers up tight around himself, as if trying to hide from it all.
When looked at with an unflinching eye, anyone’s life is bound to have its contradictions; and the idea that others see things in us we cannot see in ourselves is neither new nor unique. That being said, probably the biggest contradiction in C.J.’s life came to greater light when dealing with cancer and his own mortality.
Here was a man skilled at public speaking, a man who loved to converse on so many subjects, a man so outgoing he could tell a joke or funny story as well as anyone; but here also was a man whose innermost thoughts were almost impregnable. Long before he got sick, Carol and the kids could always sense when something was bothering him, but they knew better than to ask what the problem was. Money worries, health issues – Clarence would never say. One way or another he let it be known quite strongly that he didn’t want to talk about it. They were infrequent, but when he was in one of those tight, quiet, locked-down moods everybody kept their distance. Only Carol could get through, on occasion, and even she found it very difficult to do so.
Thus, it really is no surprise that now in the time of his greatest challenge, his greatest need, he was unable, or unwilling, to open up and express his feelings and his fears to anyone. Not even to himself, at least not in his private journals.
That periods of depression and sullen silence would set in at this point is hardly a surprise. Indeed, given the circumstances, who wouldn’t react that way, at least to some degree? Still, the questions remain: Why couldn’t he ever talk about it? Would it have helped ease the pain somehow? Was this all part of the silence-is-strength mindset that men of his generation were brought up in? The fear that any crack in the wall might spring a flood of emotions and sap his strength and purpose altogether? In C.J.’s case there are no sure answers anymore. The terrible, heavy thoughts had to be there – every morning when he woke up and then again every night before he drifted off to sleep. He was sick. In all likelihood, terminally so. But as for how he was dealing with that fact, only he could say. And he wasn’t talking.
Of course recognizing his withdrawal made it no less frustrating to those closest to him – his wife and children.
Back on February 18, 1975 Diane wrote him a direct and heartfelt letter of love and concern. In that letter she wrote: “I know there are communication barriers between us at times and I guess it’s hard for me to approach you, especially about the cancer….I want so much to know what’s going on in your thoughts. It will be such a mental relief off your shoulders, and ours too. Even though we carry on ‘business as usual,’ watching TV, laughing, talking as if everything is ok, it’s just an act really….[Your] state of mind is your worst enemy now and you can’t let it control you.”
Clarence did respond to Diane’s letter, but whatever he said is, unfortunately, long gone. The truth is he was putting up a bold front as best he could, as though everything was, more or less, “business as usual.” But, giving credit where it is truly due, he was at the same time carefully preparing for what now seemed to be the inevitable.
He had the foresight to sign a ‘living will,’ which instructed doctors to discontinue further treatment if and when they deemed it no longer viable. Back in the mid-70s that was not as common as it is today. He also began to sit down with Carol and go over in detail all the financial matters that would need tending to in the future. More than ever, financial security for his family was of utmost concern to Clarence, and he decided that when the time came he wanted his body donated to the Medical College of Wisconsin Department of Anatomy in Madison. He did tell Carol he wasn’t going to waste any money on funeral home expenses, or for that matter, not even on a burial plot or headstone. That money, he figured, would be better spent on insuring his family’s future well-being.
Here the point must be made that other than Clarence himself it was Carol who bore the brunt of the illness. More than anyone else, she lived day in and day out with not only a lifetime of memories but the present reality as well. As she gradually grew stronger in her lead role within the family, she watched as her husband of nearly thirty years grew physically weaker and more dependent – a definite reversal of how things had always been between them. True to her own nature, Carol maintained throughout a quiet and faithful strength that certainly helped sustain everyone during these troubled times.
As for that memoir project Clarence wanted to write, he was able to complete a lengthy synopsis of his journal entries for the years 1950 – 1973. (With this he deliberately stopped short of the time that cancer took hold.) At the conclusion of that family memoir he added this final, prophetic note:
The kids may eventually want to read this and, if so, I hope they get a few laughs reminiscing over the many events. We had a lot of fun as a family and since the fortunes decreed that I was to get kicked out of shape I’m so glad it happened after I retired and we have a reasonable degree of security, come what may.
The final stage began to set in around March of ’76. Confusion seemed to be seeping into his day-to-day living, enough so that at one point he was examined to see if he might have a brain tumor. That test proved to be negative. Finally, in late April, it was clear he needed more assistance than could be provided at home. He was taken to the VA Hospital and assigned a bed in one of their wards.
For several weeks he stayed there comfortably as possible, welcoming visits from old friends and family. Near the end he was given a private room, and then a curious thing happened. While what was left of his physical strength continued to slip away, so, too, did the pain. Maybe it was the medication, maybe the shutting down of his body. Maybe it was something else. Because more and more his thoughts during those last days started going back to simpler times. With a weak but genuine smile he would see visitors and in conversation make reference to past times and places as if they were happening right now: train schedules to Prescott, his dad working the night shift on the bridge, old baseball games and bands he used to listen to in his youth.
He was going back home for one last time.
It was when the cancer basically began shutting down his digestive system that doctors knew there was nothing left to do. Adhering to the agreement of the Living Will, they stopped administering any more cancer-fighting drugs, employing only what they could to help dull the pain. On June 3rd – Carol’s 54th birthday – members of the immediate family gathered at his bedside and waited, with an overriding sense of relief, for the end to finally come.
With a last audible breath Clarence John Stolt’s life ended peacefully at 9:04 P.M. on Thursday, June 3, 1976.
On the outskirts of Prescott just south of town lies Pine Glen Cemetery. Dedicated in 1856, twenty-some years after Philander Prescott first staked his riverfront claim, the grounds have weathered many a harsh season since and held up quite well. In a corner of the cemetery, not far from the bluffs that overlook the fabled Mississippi, sits the STOLT headstone, the final resting place of Francis and Fay and other loved ones.
From this spot one can look over and see the wide swath of water that carves out the landscape. Where once paddle-wheel steamers and wooden flatboats roamed the water, now it is sleek pleasure boats and the occasional industrial barge lumbering along. The traffic may have changed, but the river has been, and always will be, a constant in these parts.
It was not far from that river that C.J. Stolt was born on a September morning in 1916 and grew to be a man with a caring heart, a good laugh, and a writer’s instinct. That instinct and innate creativity weaved in and out of a life that may have been shortened but was, to all who knew him, certainly well-lived. His was a meaningful part of the whole. Perhaps now some who didn’t know him might agree.
Looking back on it all brings out different things: smiles and recollections, maybe a what-if question or two, and yes, a twinge of longing and sadness for those who knew him and wish he was here to read these words. But in the end this is not a sad story. Quite the contrary. Time, like life itself, moves on. And while the details of his story now come to an end, it is the warm memories that linger, and the rich legacy that stays here with us.
Which brings to mind the poem Clarence wrote when he was 11 years old, the one in which he fancied his young life being like a flowing river:
A river ran on and on
Day and night and night and day.
Going and going and never gone.
Longing to flow to the far away
Staying and staying and never still.
Going but staying, as I would say
River go the sea.
And another river might say
Stay with me,
And the river would answer
I go and I stay.
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