It is hard to describe the loss of a sibling.  I have accepted the passing of grandparents, then favorite teachers and past professors, even parents, and now some of my classmates are encountering their ends.  And whenever it happens, I am hit by my strong memories.  It all seems so impossible that they could be gone… and gone for good.  With each such death, I face both the loss of a relationship, past or current, and with the fact that we are all mortal, including me, and including the “littermates” I grew up with.

So with the passing of my sister Laurie, the middle child among five, I am slapped with an awareness of death’s proximity.

Like most sibling relationships, it was intense and close while we were children, sharing the same parental guidance, following (and breaking) the same family rules, experiencing family events together, creating family jokes, exhilarating in, and sometimes suffering the family vacations.  We also spent a lot of unsupervised time together.  Our diverse individual interests ended up enriching all of us.

As we became adults, the sibling intensity diminished as we expanded our horizons and relationships.  In our case, a bond remained that kept us in touch, continuing to attend family gatherings but also sharing our life experiences as we found partners, built careers, and raised our own families, occasionally leaning on each other when we encountered difficulties or setbacks.  Our interests may have been diverse, but the childhood and family connections remained.

An early example of those unsupervised times was when my brother Eric and I built a treehouse.  It took days, maybe weeks of unskilled labor to hammer a platform between oak tree stems and construct a rope ladder to reach it.  When completed, we had our sanctuary, high up and overlooking the neighborhood.  Our sisters were curious, and after their persistent complaints about our “no girls allowed” rule, we decided that we would allow them up, but only if they paid us a nickel.  This worked out well, right up until they depleted their entire allowance savings, after which we denied access.  Somehow, word of our treehouse fee arrangement reached our parents.  It must have been difficult for my entrepreneurial father to explain why we needed to return our take.

Despite being scammed by her older brothers, Laurie was one smart cookie.  But her strengths were not the same as her brothers, who had excelled in chemistry class.  This created a gap in the teacher’s expectations and caused him to say to her one day:  “Why are you not as good at this as your brothers?”  It hurt her, and when I later heard this story, it diminished my opinion of that teacher.  Laurie may have gotten a B in chemistry, but she was a National Merit Scholar;  I was not. 

As children we were captive passengers on summer family vacations.  Despite the natural bickering that occurs when siblings are held in close quarters, the fascination with the rugged landscapes of the mountainous western U.S. kept us in collective awe.  We camped and hiked and explored, building a shared experience that we still reflect back on today.

Our connections as siblings continued as we became adults raising families.  And when our parents moved to Idaho, we formed a caravan of vehicles, helping to transport their possessions west, but stopping to camp at State and National Parks along the way.  It was an amalgam of families, each trying to keep their brood safe and under control.  It was nearly impossible of course, which only reminded us of how it must have been for our parents to have managed us.

Laurie encountered challenges in her first marriage and eventually divorced.  I recall them, but only at a distance.  No one can know the inner workings of a marital relationship.  I don’t know if I was able to help her during this time, but I do know that when I encountered marital problems of my own, she was extremely helpful to me.  What a reversal of sibling support!  The younger being able to counsel the elder.

It was not the only difficulty Laurie encountered.  She suffered several others, perhaps related.  While her first marriage struggled, her second thrived.  Her boys needed guidance; she provided it.  Her husband suffered liver failure; she helped him at every step through a complex transplant.  She once sought solace in alcohol; she overcame it.  When she encountered declines in her health, she found the balance of medications to mitigate them.

She more than once quoted John Lennon to me:  “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.”  This suggests that she was embracing the chaotic nature of her life, rather than regretting it not running at a slower pace.

Whenever something unplanned came along, she made plans to get past it.  She was an optimist.  Her Facebook page announces: “Encourage one another and build each other up.”  This was Laurie.

She had a smile that always lit up the room, and she had a friendly social breeziness.  She had the ability to make friends easily with everyone around her.  As my “outlaws” can attest, she was a welcoming sibling-in-law to each of my siblings’ spouses.  They saw her go out of her way to include them and help them penetrate the sibling circle. This was Laurie

Laurie was also a strong support for our mother, during her long struggle with COPD.  She frequently flew to Idaho Falls to help her, assisting and relieving our brother Eric and wife Rhonda, the front lines living in the same city.  This was Laurie.

In her recent years she has enjoyed her continued happy marriage.  I am extremely grateful that I met her the day before her scheduled surgery, the precipitating event of her passing.  She told me that it gave her great satisfaction to see her boys thriving.  She was proud of them.  She was pleased to be a grandmother to the son of her eldest, most challenging boy, who had found love, purpose, and family.  She was proud of her boys who had become fine men with talents and skills, had built strong relationships, and maintained the sense and appreciation of family, a value for which she so strongly provided an example.

I will miss Laurie.  This is a lightning strike for me.  A strike that happened while I was making other plans.

Cover art for “Vietnam 1970-71, Confronting Challenges” (click to enlarge)

I helped my uncle complete a memoir in his last weeks of fighting multiple myeloma. It is a collection of stories, told in his inimitable style, of the year he spent in Vietnam in 1970-71. My foreword for the book is below.

The book was self-published through my Blurb account for the benefit of close friends and family. There have been others that have expressed an interest in having a copy of the book. There are a few options. If you want a physical memento that you can hold and read and cherish, you can order one from its Blurb book page.

The listed price is the actual cost (there is no markup). Custom printed books are expensive, but you get a real hard-cover book! To reduce the expense slightly, Blurb makes promotions from time to time with discount coupons. You can Google “Blurb coupons” to find them. I once encountered and used a 40% coupon.

If you do not need the artifact of a physical book, the content is available here in a (50MB) PDF file for free. Download and enjoy it. Maybe you will decide you need it in a form not requiring a machine to read. If so, go ahead and order the book.

Here is my introduction to Bob’s memoir:

Foreword

The author of this volume is Dr. Robert Olson, whom I know as my Uncle Bob. Over the years I heard him tell stories of when, fresh out of medical school, he served as a Navy doctor in Vietnam.  Now, over the last 12 years, he has worked at putting words to paper to capture the remarkable experiences of that life-changing year, and he has collected photographs of that time, taken by himself and others. 

It has been my privilege and honor to assist Uncle Bob in assembling this book. While he is a master storyteller, he is not a master of the modern tools of writers.  But as you will see as a recurring theme in so many of the stories that follow, he took on that challenge in his signature manner—head on, picking up what he needed, as he needed it, to accomplish the task.  Microsoft Word, hardly an intuitive editing tool, was Bob’s choice to render his material and turn it into text. 

Which he did. 

The modern tools of writing allow for easy revisions.  And he made many of them, carefully crafting each story for impact and detail, augmenting them with photographs to illustrate the locations, people and world context of the times.

When it became apparent that he would not be able to take on the final task of assembling the stories and photographs into a full book and actually publishing it, I offered to help.  I obtained his large “working folder” of the many files he had created over the course of a decade.  Despite failing strength and plummeting hemoglobin levels, he confirmed the titles of his stories, eventually to become chapters in the book, which I then used to locate their most recent versions.

As I performed my new role as copy editor and typesetter, I learned the backstories and more complete details of these events, many of which I had never heard before, and I was struck by a recurring theme.  It is hard to express succinctly, but it has to do with how we respond to events that are not under our control, not what we expect, not what we want, outside our experience or skill, and sometimes even frightening.

This sort of event happens to all of us: life is unpredictable, and stuff happens.  In these stories, we see a response that does not shy away, but rather, meets the challenge head-on.  It is more than just “making lemonade from lemons”; it goes beyond “rolling with the punches”.  It is a full embrace of these unexpected and undesired events; an acceptance and a firm resolve to do the best you can in a difficult situation. 

And in the end, two results obtain:  the outcomes are better, and you are better. 

I am struck, but not surprised, that Bob considers these difficult, challenging moments to be among the highlights of his life.  I hope that after reading this book, you will understand why.

Thor Olson

September 2022