cc: file, Diane Cluff, Darrell and Nancy Krueger, Sara and Des Penny, Grandma Hafen via Tony Hafen, and Lloyd and Luana Warner.
"Tuesday I went to RePAIRS, the fifth every other week meeting I have attended since finishing the PAIRS relationship course on July 14th. As has happened each time I have been able to attend, there were tremendous personal insights. I feel like you will each gain from my insights. Yet when I wrote this Thoughtlet last night my mail system ate it and I wondered if I had written something inappropriate. I do believe in God and that He cares about me (and each of you) and is intimately involved in our lives, even to the point of causing me to lose words which are not well stated. So I am going to rewrite my Thoughtlet this morning and I will proceed in the spirit of D&C 9:7-9, where we are taught:
There were two related topics covered at RePAIRS: emotionally handling a life threatening illness; and closed family systems. The evening started normally with a `temperature reading,' which the PAIRS class recommends occurs daily with those we have intimate relationships with. Daily temperature readings start with appreciation, then each person presents new information, then puzzles, then complaints with requests for change, and finally wishes, hopes, and dreams. This is a great habit to get into, and I recommend each of you to memorize these five steps and build the habit of doing this to insure good communication with those you care about: a roommate, a sibling, a parent, and eventually a spouse.
Tuesday night one of the RePAIRS participants said `I have some new information I found out two weeks ago. I have not been able to share this with anyone in my family, and I feel it is safe to share it here. I have been diagnosed with lung cancer.' Needless to say, this set the discussion for the evening among the 12 of us there. I won't attempt to replay the discussion. William Clayton summarized my feelings in the fourth verse of `Come, Come Ye Saints' (http://www.walden3d.com/hrnmen/ 1997/9711.html). A recent e-mail from Roice referring to Bill Bavinger's death says the same thing in different words: `I am truly sad for the loss you and others feel for Bill, but in some ways I am very happy for him. To me, he is in a better place because he now knows. In my mind, he would be happy for that.' It is wonderful to have you kids teaching me! Maybe it is because I saw so much death, albeit just animals, at Nelson Meat Packing Plant, althought it is more likely it is because of my faith, that I am comfortable with and not afraid of death. However, it is still very emotional to watch someone start alone to cross the valley of the shadow of death which separates this life from the next.
Paul's recent letter sounds like he is seeing one edge of this valley with his tracting 20-25 hours per week in the consistent minus-forty degrees temperatures in Tolmsk. He sent 10 photographs which I have made color copies of and have or will forward so you each get to see them. His 25,000 ruble (US$4.16) Christmas tree is a hoot. He wrote that President Galbraith, his Mission President from Sugar City, Idaho, got up to do some branch business and instead of calling on his assistant to translate he decided to pick on him. Paul wrote: `I have never translated for someone much less in front of 60 people. But that is President Gailbraith. Spontaneous and demanding. I did all right translating. I only didn't know the word to ransom. But I know it now.' It seems from the pictures Paul is learning why the Russians don't smile (their faces are frozen), yet he still seems to be out to `fix it' (.../1997/9713.html). He even closed his letter with `I love you!' and then a joke `even if I wasn't at the joint Christmas Choir Concert' (.../1997/9750.html). I must admit, it is outside of the relm of possibility to attend a function in Katy when you are in Siberia.
Speaking of the impossible, Dr. Nancy White had suggested one of the women at RePAIRS make a list of 25 positive and negative things about each member of her family. She reported she could not make a list with more than 12 positive and 8 negative things about her father. So Nancy drew a genogram, a type of pedigree chart, on the whiteboard. It became immediately obvious her father had been tramatized at about eight years of age. He was in the back of the pickup when his older sister accidently shot his three year old sister in the head with a shotgun and killed her. As the discussion unfolded about the strained relationships between members of the family, including a brother being released from prison in February, Nancy was able to explain what a closed family system is and how damaging it can be to individuals. Given the discussion, the list of positive and negative lists were easy to derive for her to derive. I hope to be able to put into words some of the emotional insights I gained about my Dad, how trauma in his life affected him, how this has likely influenced me, and thus, to a lesser degree, how it has affected each of you.
One month after Dad's 31st birthday, on April 21st, 1947, his father, Roice Bengt Nelson, was killed in a farm accident. He was unloading a large plow off of a truck alone, when the plow hit a power line and he was electrocuted. Grandpa Nelson, who of course I never knew since I was not born until 1949, ran fairly large operation in Cedar Valley and the surrounding area. He had desert land for feeding sheep in the winter and cattle in the summer, mountain land for feeding the sheep in the summer, they had milk cows and made butter, a lumber mill, Nelson Meat Packing Plant, and one of the largest farms in Cedar Valley. The accident was completly unexpected and the family was traumatized. Dad was the oldest of 8 and he tried to pick up the pieces in the way his Father did things. Grandpa Nelson was authoritarian and demanding and knew what he wanted and when he wanted it done by. Dad had always done what he was told, and did not have the management skills to pick up the pieces. The brothers and sisters were willing to do what their father told them to, and were not willing to give this same reverence to their sibling. Within a year and a half of the accident Uncle Dick, then Uncle Ted, and finally Dad got married and went their separate ways. Dad married someone who was 19 because he wanted to be able to `train her.' This is a typical emotional reaction from someone who has been traumatized. The tendency is to create a closed system where there are no variables which allow another accident to occur. Just from this statement of Dad's, it is obvious why his marriage was so unhappy. Hindsight is often 20/20.
I expect this accident was only one of numerous experiences which caused Dad to believe he had no control over what happened in his life. He did not go into the army in World War II because he had an appendix operation and was not physically available when his friends joined up. He did work very hard during the war (as he did all of his life) and was the only meat packing plant between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas during this critical time-frame. He lost his airplane because a snowstorm collapsed the roof of the hanger and he did not have insurance. He losts tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to Sam Holland (?) because Sam got duplicate invoices and falsefied what was shown to Dad relative to the sales price of hides and tallow (grease cooked from the guts, bones, and trash meat from the packing plant), both of which were critical for the war effort. Albert Smith repeated this same thing by getting blank invoices from each of the livestock auctions where he bought cattle for Dad, providing Dad with falsefied documents which gave him extra profit and left Nelson Packing Plant out to go broke. In both cases, I was told they bragged to Dad about how they had duped him and that there was nothing he could do about it. Then the Federal inspectors came in and shut down Nelson Packing Plant. It was always a type of conspiricy, and Dad was never responsible for the outcome. Remind any of you of me?
I remember my Mom used to hire girls from Enoch to help her clean the house on Saturday's. Dad and I would come in from the fields for lunch, sit down, eat, and go back to work. Once one of these cleaning girls was eating with us and she said something like `You have the most different family I have ever seen in my life. You never talk. You never smile. You are always busy with something and yet not together.' She captured a description of a closed family system. She was from a large family, where there were dozens of kids and grandkids, uncles and aunts, grandparents and parents, always going in and out of their small house. There were four of us and we were taught to keep to ourselves. Sara and I were expected to be perfect. There was no room for mistakes because we were better than anyone else, or at least we were told we were.
In physics a closed system always stops, because of friction. In society a closed system mutates, because of inbreeding. In a closed room or car it can get very smelly, because of the farts (as Rob can attest). A closed family system can be emotionally suffocating. We all need fresh air. I am sorry my attempts to provide the best start possible for each of you have sometimes mirrored the closed system I grew up in. Maybe it is because of the fact I am comfortable to return to meet my maker that I want you each to know that as long as I live I am always available to help you as you skirt and touch on different cliffs overlooking and dropping into of the emotional valleys of the shadow of death. It was very touching for Sarah Johnson and Ben to ask me on Saturday for some advice about how she could put together her father's genealogy. I will prepare a packet and get it off in the mail. There are a few things I know a little bit about, and there is no one I want to share my experience with more than you, my six kids. Ben it is nice to have you back on the Thoughtlet mailing list. I hope what I have written is or will someday be of use to each of you. I realize it is partly my ego which makes me think think these Thoughtlets will someday be meaningful (and possibly even sacred) to you kids. I hope you realize how hard I am striving to open what has been too much of a closed system."