Tom

Today my morning email yields this from my cousin Eileen in Phoenix:

“I wanted to get this info over to you all as well. Tom got out of surgery about 5:30 this evening Phx time. He’ll stay in the hospital another week or so and then will be able to start chemotherapy/radiation in about two weeks.
The kids are there with him along with everyone else. Everyone’s contact info is below.
Love to you all!
Eileen”

WTF??????

So now I am learning my 44-year-old cousin Tom, a dry-witted, quiet blond man with three kids and a devoted second wife, Cindy, who has worked for the Wisconsin power company for 20 years and loves to sip a Budweiser, has a tumor in his brain.

And I think about Tom’s and mine great-grandfather, Oliver Hancock, who was a terrible drunk who divorced his wife and didn’t support his four children. And lived until the age of 75, leaving a second wife behind. How does this happen? How did he get to be so old?

I found this in my Uncle Frank’s notebook on family history. A yellowed sheet with a couple of typed paragraphs sent to my grandmother, Hazel O’Neill, who rarely saw her father after she was 18 years old:

“Dear Mrs. O’Neill:
Mrs. Oliver Hancock has asked me to advise you that your father passed away on May 3, 1954. The property in his estate was negligible and what little there was, under the community property laws of the State of Idaho are now vested in Mrs. Hancock as owner.
If you have any further inquiries, please advise.
Very truly yours,
Watt E. Prather,
Attorney at Law
Bonners Ferry, Idaho”

What a cold, small, sad letter to send someone’s daughter.

I looked up Bonners Ferry. Northern Idaho. It has a population 2,515. Median household income: $24,900. It was a gold rush town in the 19th century; when the gold ran out, it became a lumber and farm town. In 1998, Randy Weaver, who had built a cabin in the woods 8 miles from Bonners Ferry to raise his family, home-school his children away from a “corrupt society,” and amass weapons, held off the FBI in a shoot-out in the famous “Ruby Ridge Incident.” His wife was killed by the FBI. He eventually surrendered. And was played by Randy Quaid in a made for TV movie.

This is where Oliver Hancock’s demons had driven him in the 1950s.

I wish I could understand him.