Retirement loomed for Dad, Clark Knowlton, as 1990 wore on, as did
death. He was approaching the
retirement age, since in 1989 he reached the magical age of 70 where retirement
was increasingly becoming mandatory. Dad genuinely loved his work—writing, teaching, and
organizing civil rights and antipoverty programs and movements. While he had the model of his father,
who upon retirement found a new life in writing, Dad worried what he would do and
how he could continue researching and traveling to conferences with the reduced
academic support retirement would bring.
He feared he would not be able to continue.
Furthermore death was a constant topic. Many of Dad’s friends died in 1989, among the Ross T.
Christensen. Mom was also
declining rapidly, due to liver disease.
Dad feared his own health was not good and that his demise might be
imminent, although he mentioned this to almost no one. Still he did not feel well. He was
weaker and his breath was short.
But his physicians found nothing to explain his feelings.
Yet during the course of 1989 he organized his files and sent them
on to the relevant university archives.
He made sure to complete as much as possible this autobiography as a
debt to following generations—how he loved his grandchildren. He silently prepared for what he
feared.
During 1990, as he reviewed his journals and went through all the
old pictures the family had accumulated, he relived his life in a private
accounting to self.
In the summer of 1990, while I was living in Buenos Aires on a
mission, Dad returned to Argentina.
I had met people who knew and remembered Dad from fifty years earlier my
first Sunday at Church there. They
said he should come back to see them.
I immediately called and told him.
He said “Son. I am afraid
to come back. Things are
different. My heart might break
from nostalgia.” Yet he hung on
every phone call from me with details about my life in the Argentina that had
so impacted his life and gave him his first broad education in the complex and
dangerous world he inhabited.
Finally, after receiving formal invitations from a number of
Argentine academic venues, my father obtained funding from the University of
Utah and came to Argentina. It had
changed. He had changed. But still his love was evident. My students and colleagues were
enchanted with him.
Fortune was on his side.
During his brief stay we traveled to La Plata, Pergamino, Rosario, Rio
Cuarto, and Liniers. In every
place Dad found people he had known, with little effort in searching for them,
as if somehow they were waiting for his return. At every stop some would recognize him, even through the
darkened glass of fifty more years of life, and say “Che ClarkKnowlton. ¿Qué hacés vos acá?” (Hey Clark
Knowlton, What are you doing here) as if it were just yesterday they had last
seen him. During the many hours of
drinking maté with his friends, I learned he had been nicknamed “La Librería
Andante” (The Walking Bookstore) because he always had a book in his back
pocket or near at hand. At that
moment I realized how my brothers and I had grown up with these people,
although we had never met them.
They lived all those years in my father’s thoughts and heart, and so
they were part of us.
Some six months after he returned home from Argentina, at breakfast,
Dad complained of heartburn. He
stood to go for some antacid and collapsed. My brother Dan stood and grabbed him before he could fall to
the floor, holding him in his arms.
The rolls had been inevitably reversed. Dan held his father as a massive heart attack struck. Though the paramedics came and rushed
him to the hospital, on that very smoggy January day, and tried to revive him,
Dad never returned. For a
week, after his respirator had been removed, he rested in bed in St Mark’s
Hospital in Salt Lake City, family at his side. He did not regain consciousness and a bronchial infection
settled in his lungs. After a
couple of days of laborious breathing, his lungs stopped and he was gone.
My cousin Dawn DeYoung and I were in the room. We called the nurses and they ushered
us out to care for him. We went to
the phones to call everyone to the hospital.
After the phone calls, while waiting for everyone to come, I looked
out the picture window into the fog.
Snow flakes were condensing before my eyes in the mist and I realized
how strongly death and birth are part of life. My spirit wanted to disperse into the fog from which snow
was coming.
At Dad’s funeral several of his favorite songs were performed. Dad had sung them over and over to us
as we grew from infancy to adulthood in his rust out-of tune voice filled with
heart. Each of them had
meaning. They
were: the Argentine Tango “Adiós muchachos, compañeros de mi vida…” Good by young people, my lifes companions;” The World War II song he said always
described my mother for him—she was his “Lilli Marlene” (“Underneath the lantern/By the barrack gate/Darling
I remember/The way you used to wait/T'was there that you whispered
tenderly,That you loved me,/You'd always be,/My Lilli of the Lamplight,/My own
Lilli Marlene”)[1]; and the
song of the Catholic renovation “De Colores” that Dad had learned in New Mexico
(De colores/de colores/se visten los campos/en la primavera./De Colores/de
colores son los/pajaritos que vienen/de afuera./De colores,/de colores es el
arco iris que vemos lucir.—in colors/in colors/are clothed the fields/ in the
springtime./In colors/ In colors are the/ birds that arrive/ from afar/ in
colors/ in colors/ is the rainbow we see glowing.)
Dad was
buried in a plot in the Elysian Gardens Cemetery, in Salt Lake County,
Utah. Mom was moved that an honor
guard of Chicano youths had shown up for Dad’s funeral to present him an Aztec
Eagle, which Mom had interred with him.
She had the eagle carved into his headstone as a memorial of that day
and of his life’s dedication.
As I write
it is another gray January day.
They promise snow will come tomorrow to cleanse the valley of smog. Sparrows huddle in the bushes outside
my window, just as they did outside his.
My beard is gray. Life has
gone on. Still Dad has left us
much to remember. Without him,
we–his descendents—would not be.
No comments:
Post a Comment