Thoughts and Pictures of the Week Dad Died

Some highlights of dads death and funeral week

Chris and Meg and family visited Dad on December 31st. I was surprised how tender Ezra, 

Travis and Maggie were with dad. I was a little worried the visit would freak them out, but they seemed fine. The expressions on their faces are very indicative of what they were thinking. I think this is the last picture taken of dad. Chris has since said he was glad they took the time to visit. He looked pretty bad. I don't know if I want to remember dad this way and may delete this picture. 

Mom and I went to see dad the day before he died. I spoke of part of this visit at the fureral. After we left dad's room, mom stopped to talk to some the the aides and residents. I went back to dad's room to see if he was still asleep. His eyes were open and he held up a hand. I went in and took it. He grasped my hand with a surprisingly firm grip and looked at me.  I kissed him and told him that I loved him and he was still my favorite dad.  His grip relaxed and his eyes closed so With one last look I went to find mom. As we were walking back to the car we both commented how poignant the visit seemed, but we didn't want to read too much into it. 

When Roark called the next night at 10:45, just after I got into bed, I knew he was going to tell me dad had died. My first thought was that dad did it. He finally passed through the veil and was whole again. I felt relief and joy.  Mom, Roark and Melanie, Brett and Kerri, Shelley, Ann, John and I gathered around dad's bedside. The aides had shaved him, changed him into a white shirt and smoothed the bed clothes. They told us that as they were getting him ready for bed, he took a rattley breath and died. It was completely unexpected but what we had been praying for. I had to hold his hand one last time, but he clearly wasn't there any longer. We all sat around dad with almost a giddy feeling of thankfulness, at times being maybe a little disrespectful of mom's tender feelings. 

The best part about dad's death was that all my children and grand children came for the funeral. Matt and Erin got in the car that weekend and drove straight through from St Louis. This meant so much to me because it has been really hard for Erin to think about driving cross country, but she did it anyway. They spent the first of the week with her sister Seana and came up to stay with us on Thursday. Chris and Meg stayed with Annnie. Both Matt and Chris brought their dogs so often we had 6 grandkids and 5 dogs including Annies's frolicking in our backyard snow. The snow as deep enough to sled down the stairs or ride the sleds over the big rocks to the soft (hopefully) snow below. They even hauled the sleds all the way up the hill behind the house and tried to ride them down, but it was more like pinballing off the trees than sledding. It did my grandma heart good to watch them. 

The morning of the visitation everyone but me met Thomas and Monica up Millcreek Canyon for a mountain adventure. Matt and Erin's kids don't have mountains where they live and they wanted to see them. I stayed home to work on my talk. When I saw these fun pictures I kind of wish I had gone with them, but I was stressing over my talk and it came together while everyone was gone. Notice you can see parts of five dogs in this picture. 

Dad's Furneral Talk

Mom wanted all seven of her children to talk at dad's funeral. This is my talk.


Mama often said that when she and dad got married they only had two things in common: love of the Lord and love of each other. These were the two constants in our lives. One family home evening dad talked about this scripture: Jacob 2:7-8

7 And also it grieveth me that I must use so much boldness of speech concerning you, before your wives and your children, many of whose feelings are exceedingly tender and chaste and delicate before God, which thing is pleasing unto God;

8 And it supposeth me that they have come up hither to hear the pleasing word of God, yea, the word which healeth the wounded soul.

             Like Jacob.  Dad was always concerned his wife’s tender feelings and wouldn’t let us children be the cause of her wounded soul.  He loved and cherished her and we knew it. We never could get away with talking back to her or being disrespectful. That is the only time he got mad at us. Brett remembers dad throwing him down the stairs twice for sassing mom. Probably an exaggeration, but you get the idea.
            We children idolized dad. He was the fun parent. Poor mom was the boring stay at home parent that took care of the humdrum everyday things.  Sorry mom, it’s true. We got to do cool things with dad. We never realized what mom did behind the scenes to make dad so great.
Mom was taught by her mother who taught her that the needs of her husband should always come first. But that didn’t mean she was a door mat. One day after John and I were married mom spoke her mind about something and John said “so that’s where Jeanne gets it from”.
            Dad came home every day from the clinic for lunch and a nap. And mom, bless her heart made sure he had something to eat and took a nap with him. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I married for time and eternity, not for lunch. 
How mom got through medical school with 6 children and one on the way is beyond me. During most of their school years, mom wrote to her mother and step father, while they were on a mission to Hawaii where Grandpa Trump was doing sheet metal work for the temple grounds and Polynesian Cultural Center. One letter I read was dated May 23, 1961. In part she wrote:

This is a rough year and a good one to get over with. Bruce has enjoyed it so much altho (sic) the pressure kind of gets to you once in a while. We have been going around in circles lately. Did I tell you Brett fell off his trike and I had to have a stitch put in his head? Well, this was a few weeks ago and he is fine now but after that Jeanne came down with a strep throat about ten days ago and then last week Stacey came down with it and in the meantime Jayne had fallen down and just barely scraped her knee. I put a couple of band aids on it to protect it in case she fell down and I didn’t take it off until the next evening. It looked slightly inflamed then and by the next morning it was really infected. Bruce cleaned it out and said it was a staph infection. It seem to be getting worse so I called the doctor and had him call in some medicine for her so she was on oral medication and also a salve for her knee. Then----Last Saturday was cleanup day in the Village and Jeanne tripped over a trike and fell on a rake and split the skin on her knee. One of the rake tines went about two inches up into her leg and the doctor had to take four stiches in it to close the wound. He was cleaning it out with a syringe and it disappeared up the hole that the tine had left. We didn’t think it was too serious until he noticed that. It still needed attention but that type of wound is hard to heal. It seems to be healing beautifully tho (sic) and Bruce will take the stitches out Sunday. He wasn’t here when it happened and another medical student picked her up and looked at it. I was returning a ladder and heard her cry and when she didn’t stop I knew it was serious so I ran. I finally got ahold of Bruce at the hospital and he came right home. She had a pretty rough night that night but she is fine now and quite pleased that hers was even “worser than Jayne’s.” Roark came home from school yesterday with a good case of strep throat, but he is on the mend today so I think all is well with us now.

             Mom was so good about making things work so dad could do what he wanted and still include the family. Dad would say “Let’s do this” and mom would say, “OK, how can we make that work for the whole family.” 
          Dad loved camping and fishing and many vacations were spent in the mountains. Mom even made a week at Fish Lake doable for dad. She did get dad to compromise, so one year we went camping, the next year we went to the beach.
         Somehow between the two of them they made our family want to be with each other. Often we would turn down invitations from friends to do things with the family because the family was going to have more fun. This desire to be with our family has extended to the next generation. We have several pictures of dad hiking Mt Baldy in the Uintas with his grandchildren. I remember coming home on summer without John and going up to the Uintas with dad to hike Mt Baldy. Thomas couldn’t have been more than six or seven. I pushed and pushed the kids to keep up because I wanted them to be worthy of hiking with dad. He finally looked at me and said, “Back off, your kids are doing great.”
         I remember the last trips dad went with us. Rafting the Snake below Jackson, his last trip to Jayne’s beach house in Mexico, and Roark taking him canoeing at Mirror Lake when he was 82. It was then we realized that the dementia was taking him. The trips no longer lit up his eyes, and we only saw confusion.

            Still mom thought she could make things work for dad, help him relearn things his brain forgot. She tried so hard to heal his wounded mind and body. On our last visit to the care center the day before dad died, he was asleep in his room. He looked so small and worn. Mom sat in the chair by the bed and took his hand. His eyes opened and he grasped her hand. After a while, she leaned closer to him and said: “Bruce, you know I love you, but it’s OK. You can go now. Your mother and father are waiting for you, do you see them?” He nodded and closed his eyes. She sang “Have I Done Any Good in the World Today” and “High on a Mountain Top”, the two hymns we are singing today. They were his favorite hymns.  After a while we kissed him goodbye and left.

           Mom, thank you for helping dad be such a great dad. I learned how to be a wife and mother from you. 

Bruce Taylor Neville MD June 26,1930-January 6, 2016

I was given the honor of writing dad's obituary and life story. The first two pictures are the pictures mom chose for the obituary, the first because it showed his Air Force wings, the second because it showed the man she knew and loved. The other pictures I added for my blog because I want them in a narrative. 

 Bruce Taylor Neville M.D.

Bruce Taylor Neville, dearly loved husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, brother, and uncle left this world on Epiphany, January 6, 2016 due to the frailties of age. He was born June 28, 1930 in Salt Lake City, the son of Joseph William and Julia Taylor Neville. He had four siblings, including his identical twin brother Robert (Maxine) Neville, Joseph (Evelyn) Neville, Anne (Robert) Gustaveson, and Nancy (Drew) Van Wagoner.

He had a lifelong inseparable bond with his twin brother, Bob, which was not dimmed by distance, time, or age. When he was five, his family moved to Cedar City and later Escalante, Utah where his father worked as an engineer for the government, building roads in central Utah. Living in the mountains above Escalante in a small cabin was an idyllic childhood for the children, though probably not for their mother.

                The family moved to Ogden, Utah when Bruce and Bob were 9 years old and eventually settled in Washington Terrace. Bruce was amazed and disappointed that the Wasatch Mountains were not the red of his familiar Escalante.

During World War II, Bruce and Bob rode their bicycles to deliver telegrams to the families of fallen soldiers. They graduated from Weber High School and later Weber College. They both served LDS missions in Germany and were companions at one time, much to the delight of the German people.  

                The twins served in the Air Force from 1953-1957 following their missions. They were in the Strategic Air Command working as performance engineers on the B-36 bombers, training to deliver the atomic bomb to sites in Russia.

  Bruce received his wings from the Air Force and soon after married his beloved Beth Ann Hill on May 14, 1954 in the Salt Lake Temple. They had seven children in seven years: Roark, Jeanne, Jayne, Brett, Stacey, Shelley, and Ann.

Bruce started medical school at the University of Utah when Beth Ann was expecting their fifth child. He graduated in 1962 shortly after their seventh child was born. During medical school, he worked all night every 5th night as a lab technician at LDS hospital to support his family. He joined Drs. Ralph Peterson and Joe Amano at the Clearfield Clinic as a family physician and later worked with his son Dr. Roark Neville at Davis Family Physicians. As a physician, he was loved by his patients for his kindness and compassion and respected by his colleagues.  He served as the President of the Davis County Medical Association, President of the Ogden Surgical Society, and President of the Utah Academy of Family Physicians.

Bruce loved learning about new things and sharing them with his children. He enjoyed golf, fishing, hiking, sailing, canoeing, alpine, and cross country and telemark skiing. His love of the outdoors continues with his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren as they seek adventure wherever they go.

 He had a firm testimony of Jesus Christ and faithfully served in many callings in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. From 2000-2002, Bruce and Beth Ann were called to the Sao Palo, Brazil mission where he served as the physician to the missionaries in the Sao Palo MTC and the ten northern Brazilian missions.  

His and Beth Ann’s legacy are their children: Roark and Melanie Neville, Jeanne and John Lingard, Jayne and David Rogers, Brett and Kerri Neville, Stacey and Steve Engebretsen, Shelley Neville, and Ann Neville; 23 grandchildren, and 38 great grandchildren with 4 more on the way.

Friends may visit with the family on Friday, January 15, 2016 from 6:00 -8:00 p.m. at the Lindquist Mortuary: 1867 North Fairfield Road, Layton, Utah. The family will also receive friends on Saturday, January 16, 2016 from 10:00-10:45 a.m. at the Farmington Greens Chapel: 79 South 1525 West, Farmington, Utah with funeral services following at 11:00 a.m.

 

Christmas Eve Pizza

Note:  Alicia Moritisen Walters, one of the girls I taught in Mia Maids 15 years ago, asked me to write a story for a book she was self publishing about the magic of a child's Christmas. I was a bit perplexed about what to write because my mom and especially my dad didn't embrace the Santa myth and I played it down with my own children as well. In fact when Thomas was five a friend of mine asked me to ask him not to tell her son that Santa wasn't real. In typical Thomas fashion he said "I would never do that mom, it is important to Greg."  I have taken "literary license" with some of the events, mainly with the timeline to make the story fit Alicia's parameters. But the gist of the story is true and I vividly remember putting those olives on my fingers.

Christmas Eve in my Grandparents’ basement in the 1960s was where I learned that black olives were meant to be worn on my fingertips as well as for eating. My Grandmother had long, silver hair that she always wore elegantly wrapped around her head like a crown. She taught English at the high school and was somewhat intimidating to my brothers, sisters and me. Grandpa had eyes that twinkled and looked impossibly tall with a thin, pencil mustache. Our family didn’t eat at their house often because the seven of us, born seven years apart, were too many and probably too noisy for Grandma and Grandpa to fit around their kitchen table. 

This is how I will always remember Grandma and Grandpa

But that all changed on Christmas Eve. They always invited our family and our cousins and aunts and uncles for a traditional Christmas Eve dinner. We all went down to the basement kitchen and large family room. It was so exciting. We didn’t know anyone else who had a kitchen in their basement! Grandma used it to can fruits and vegetables in the summer because it was so much cooler in the basement than upstairs. The only furniture in the kitchen was a vintage, metal-legged table piled high with food. There was: turkey, rolls, a green molded Jell-O Christmas salad with marshmallows, nuts and cream cheese and the relish dish. It was a divided,  cut-crystal plate that held: carrot sticks, celery stuffed with peanut butter, pickles and a pile of pitted, black olives.

One Christmas Eve I watched an older cousin stand around the table before the blessing on the food. I saw her sneak an olive, but instead of eating it, she put it on the end of her first finger. She glanced around, saw that no adults were looking and poked another finger into an olive. Pretty soon all ten fingers were tipped with shiny black olives. She walked away from the table nibbling at the olives on the ends of her fingers. I couldn’t wait to try it. I knew my Mother wouldn’t approve. It was bad manners to play with your food. And ten olives for one child was way too many. So I decided to just do one hand. Five olives were still a luxury. I walked over to the relish dish and hurriedly loaded the fingers of my left hand with olives. Just as I finished I looked up and saw my Mother watching. I knew I was in trouble. But she just smiled and said “Make sure you eat them all.”  They tasted delicious.

Christmas Eve with Uncle Joe and Aunt Evelyn's family. From left to right: back row; Aunt Evelyn holding David, Aunt Gay, Grandma's sister, Stacey, Mom, Brett, Uncle Joe, Joey, Roark, Grandma, Grandpa; front row: Valerie, Jeanne, Jayne, Annie, Shelley and Jared in front.

In the 1970s Christmas Eve dinner was moved to my cousins' or our house as Grandma and Grandpa got older. We still had our traditional dinner except one terrible year. An aunt and uncle had just moved from back east and volunteered to have Christmas Eve at their house. She had some new, fancy ideas for dinner instead of our old-fashioned, traditional meal. When we got there, all we saw was a soup tureen and a basket of crackers the table. We were appalled to learn that Christmas Eve dinner was tomato soup! No turkey, rolls or a relish plate!  Just plain, old tomato soup. We didn’t care that it was homemade or “all the rage.” Tomato soup was for Saturday afternoon lunch with grilled cheese sandwiches, not Christmas Eve dinner! My poor aunt never lived it down.

I eventually got married and started a family of my own.  After college, we moved far away from our families across the country. I had kept up the traditional Christmas Eve dinner including the relish plate with black olives, and taught my children how to put them on their fingers. One Christmas Eve a friend and I planned to have Christmas Eve together. Between us we had eight children ages three to ten.  We were both away from our extended families and thought it would be fun for the children to get together.

Christmas Eve was on a Sunday that year. While we were at church that morning, a terrible thunderstorm came through and the entire area lost power. We were hopeful it would come back on so we could cook the turkey. But as the hours passed it became apparent that there wouldn’t be enough time for the turkey and rolls to cook. When the power finally came on we wondered what we could do to still have a special, Christmas Eve dinner.

We both examined the contents of our refrigerators and between us, we realized we had the ingredients for homemade pizza, including the black olives. I made the dough and we put all the toppings out on the counter. We told the children we were going to have a special Christmas Eve dinner: personal pizzas. We gave each child a piece of dough and showed them how to shape their own individual crust on the cookie sheet. Then they got to choose their own toppings, as much as they wanted. I watched one of my children load his pizza with as much pepperoni and cheese as it could possibly hold!  He looked at me out of the corner of his eye to see if I was watching and would make him put some pepperoni back. I just smiled at him and said,  “Make sure you can eat it all.”  As we sat around the table eating our Christmas Eve pizza I looked at the smiling pizza-smeared faces. “This is the best Christmas Eve dinner ever!” they all agreed.

This picture is a few years before the Pizza Christmas Eve, but it is one of my favorite Christmas photos.

The next year I asked my children what they wanted for Christmas Eve dinner.  In unison they all yelled, “Homemade personal pizzas!”  “But what about turkey and rolls and a relish plate?” I asked, “It’s a tradition.” “We can have that on Christmas Day” they said, “we want pizza like last year!” I thought about it and realized that my children didn’t have grandparents and cousins around to celebrate Christmas Eve with, so why not make a new tradition for our family. We have had our traditional homemade pizza on Christmas Eve ever since. Even now, when my children and grandchildren live far away from me and Christmas Eve is smaller and quieter, I have no desire for turkey and rolls. I make personal pizza and always load mine with black olives. And sometimes I slip one on the tip of my finger for tradition's sake. 

It was that stormy Christmas Eve that I learned that while some traditions, like my beloved decorations and music will always remain the same, others can and should be exchanged for something different. Sometimes the best traditions are not planned, they just happen.  

Snowy Evening: A Five Year Finish

5 years or so ago, Marianne, John's sister asked me if I wanted to work on a quilt project with her and Rachel. It was a Crabapple Hill design titled "Walking in a Winter Wonder Land"  with redwork embroidery snowmen with a pieced border. This is the picture on the pattern package:

I was intrigued, I have always like redwork and hadn't done any but I didn't like the title block with the musical staff and especially the block with a little verse on it.  It as just a little cutesy and meaningless to me. I said yes anyway and asked Annie if she wanted to do it with me. I had all of mom's red fabric that she had collected in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that she has stashed and thought it was be a fun way to use some of it. 

Annie and I loved quilting together. It was so fun to get together on Mondays, her day off and stitch for a few hours. We soon decided that we each wanted our own quilt and would do the embroidery on our own and piece the border together.  I was a little humbled to see that Annie's redwork was finer than mine. She was much more meticulous and sewed finer stitches than I did. And my redwork was pretty good. We would work on the quilt in the winter months then summer time, yard work and trips would happen and we would have to put our stitching away for a while. 

I finally got to the point that I had to make a decision about the verse and title blocks. Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" has always been a favorite of mine, even though I later learned he wrote it when he was contemplating suicide. "And miles to go before I sleep"  is a very profound thought no matter where you are in life. 

So I used Frost's title:

And the first verse of the poem:

As a side note, I machine quilted it using mono filament threat on the top. It is a clear nylon thread like very very fine fishing line.  So fine it is hard to see. I didn't want the quilting thread to show over the redwork and knew if I hand quilted it it would be another 5 years before it got finished. Using a non cotton thread goes against everything I know about quilting, especially one that is so non organic. But it did what I needed it to do and I am happy with the results. 

Now to finish the rest of my unfinished projects. Like this one:

Coal Stoves and Creamed Tuna

I asked Mama what Grandma did after Guy died. She moved her family to a little home on Center Street and 2nd East. It was a small 1 bedroom house with 12 foot ceilings that was heated with a coal stove in the living room and one in the kitchen. Grandma's sister Antionette bought her a white coal stove instead of the ugly black one for the living room. Mama said she used to help pull the wagon they used to carry the coal to the house. 

Mom remembers standing behind the stove in the living room to get warm. The coal dust used to get everywhere in the house including the walls which needed to be washed once a week. Guy's brother would come over and wash them for Grandma. One of mom's jobs was to clean the grime off the windows. She once said that this was the days before detergent and the soap they had didn't cut the grease and grime very well. So they really had to scrub to get things clean. 

Grandma and mama shared the bed in the bedroom with David in a crib. Keith and Dean slept in the living room. I asked mom what they lived on. She thought a minute and said "l don't know, I do know we always had enough to eat, but sometimes just barely."  They usually had a pot roast on Sundays but one Thanksgiving all they had was creamed tuna and grape juice in crystal glasses. Mama later found those crystal glasses in a box of things after grandma died and gave one to each one of her brothers as a memento. 

When things got hard mom used to hear grandma talking to Guy as if he were there, more to comfort herself than anything else. Grandma had wonderful faith and knew things would work out. After a few years they were thrilled to move into a nearby 3 bedroom apartment with central heating. 

Halloween

I finished several Halloween projects this year. For some reason I must have been feeling pretty industrious. The first was a pillow I made fo Matt and Erin from scraps from Halloween skirt and pants I made Ian, Lily and Molly while I was watching them while Matt and Erin were on a 2 week business trip to England and Ireland. 

The second was a wall hanging for Chris and Meg as a housewarming surprise. We hadn't been to see theim in Reno since they moved and went to spend Halloween with them. It was just a panel I added borders, but I think it turned out spooky cute. I love the green bat border I used for both. It is the only fabric I bought for both projects. 

I did a little wool project by hand. They are easy, rewarding and fun to do. Kind of like paint by numbers only with a needle and thread.  

And a few Halloween pictures of the grandkids. While we weren't there with Ian, lily and Molly I was with them for 2 weeks. 

I actually want treat or treating for the first time in year with Ezra, Travis and Maggie. I love the look on Ezra's face. He was a gladiator and Travis was Hiccup from "How to Train Your Dragon."

John and Maggie.  I love her new haircut. She was a police officer. 

And Annie in her Viking hat with her new puppy Tappen.