Overall Wit & Wisdom

Bill Chitwood for Progressive Dairyman

I recently had another new experience in my life. As we live out our lives we have many first-time experiences, such as the first day our first child takes a step.

The first time you experience a new thing you treat it differently than if you have the same experience later in life.

Remember how with your first child you kept them so clean and got so excited about each new thing they learned. In our family we had four children, and our last boy slopped his food with the dogs.

My new experience was the first death in our family of someone of my generation. My wife and I have both buried our parents. That was hard, but it was to be expected. It is a little different when it comes to your own generation’s time to go.

The one who died was my wife’s brother. We are a small family, within my generation, as my wife had only one brother and I had only one sister. My wife’s brother was named Charles.

Charles lived to be 77 years old. Charles enjoyed life. He did not live a very healthy lifestyle as we know today. He smoked, drank at night to relax, drank coffee all day to stay alert and did not exercise at all, but he enjoyed all of his lifestyle choices.

I had a discussion with one of Charles’ sons before Charles died. His son was put out with his father because of his lifestyle. You see, this son is a health nut. He rides a bike each day, enters bike races and eats organic food. I told him Charles enjoyed what he did and today so many people do not enjoy life and live to be 90 years old or more.

Charles was a workaholic. He started working when he was 14 years old delivering Western Union telegrams on his bike. Maybe that is where his son got his love for cycling. Charles got his education and became a CPA. He has done our taxes for more than 40 years. He loved to save people money on their taxes, but he was a stickler for doing things to the letter of the tax code. When he signed his name on your tax return, you did not have much of a chance of being audited.

Charles had a lot that went wrong with his body. He had open-heart surgery four years ago. That surgery fixed four bypass blockages and put a new valve in his heart. Charles had Parkinson’s Disease, and he shuffled when he walked. He and his wife went from Kansas to South Dakota to see a grandson receive his Master’s degree, and the trip about did him in. After the trip, he was put in the hospital for weakness, and they found internal bleeding and lung cancer. His last days were in the hospital fighting to keep going.

Charles’ attitude about his work meant he cared about doing a great job for the people who were his clients. He wanted to keep working, despite being told by the doctors in the hospital that his condition would require him to go to a nursing home to recover strength before he could go home. When he heard this, he told his daughter-in-law to go order him a new laptop, complete with a wireless satellite hook up that would allow him to access his office and continue to work.

Each one of us in our lives has a story for others to hear. In this column, some of my friends’ and family stories are told.

I will always remember the first time I met Charles and his wife, Betty. It was the day after Christmas in 1952. I went to Kansas with my girlfriend Helen, who would later become my wife, and her parents to visit the town where they had moved from before coming to Oklahoma.

We went over to Betty’s parents to eat our evening meal and all get acquainted. It was a great meal but for dessert. Betty’s mother made rhubarb pie. I had never seen rhubarb pie before, much less eaten it. It was beautiful to look at, and the first bite was not too bad, but each bite after that got a little worse. Now I was really trying to make a good impression on all the new folks so I ate it and told them how good it was, but the rest of my life I have been on the lookout for rhubarb pies.

The minister came out to the house to compile some material to be used at Charles’ funeral, and he knew just the right questions to ask. He asked the family what they thought Charles would say was his biggest thrill in life. One of his sons told him that his dad once said it was to be able work as a CPA and to go into a company that was in trouble and help them turn things around so the people who worked there would not lose their jobs. He had this thrill many times.

As we look back on our lives or during times of grief, like this one in our family, you think about what your legacy will be. The thing that comes to my mind is a little saying my wife has hung on the wall in our bedroom, which says, “We shape our lives not by what we carry with us but by what we leave behind.”

Charles will be missed by many people. It makes me wonder how many will miss me. PD