Over the past month, signs popped up around the Emory University campus advertising VeloCity Atlanta, a fundraiser for Grady Hospital, the public hospital serving metro Atlanta. Grady is the leading trauma care center in Georgia, and trains physicians from Emory University and Morehouse University Medical Schools. For me, Grady has a special connection, as I've seen a psychotherapist for about 15 years who primarily works at Grady, both providing psychotherapy and also training clinical psychologists, while also working with the Emory Clinic. My therapist has been tremendously helpful in changing my life for the better. My only regret is that I didn't start therapy decades earlier, rather than waiting until a major life crisis in my mid-40s.
I was planning on running the VeloCity 9-mile trail race in Chattahoochee Hills on Saturday morning. Then about 10 days ago, Bonnie texted me mid-morning with the sad news: "Unclie Pei passed away." If this was not unexpected, nonetheless his death began a process of grieving, and planning to attend his funeral as soon as the family announced the arrangements. In the past six months, this is the third death of someone who has been close to me.
Now that we were in San Jose, California, for Unclie Pei's funeral, I decided to run the virtual 9-mile distance on our last morning in San Jose, starting around 6 am, before boarding a midday flight to return to Atlanta. This was a contemplative run, along the Lower Gualalupe River trail, just a half-mile from our hotel, near the Norman Mineta San Jose airport. (Mineta himself passed away on May 3, just one day before we landed at the airport named in his honor.) I found the entrance on Airport Boulevard, heading down a ramp but still about 20 feet above the small stream of the river.
I was thinking of my Uncle Don Noble, who passed away in January. Uncle Don married my mother's older sister in 1959, with two sons born in 1961 and 1962 as my closest cousins, the second one born just two months before my birth in September 1962. Our families have always been close, enjoying together holidays and major events throughout our lives. My earliest memories are from a visit to New Orleans when Uncle Don was working in the aerospace industry in Huntsville, Alabama. I was sitting on my father's shoulders watching a parade, which I later learned was a Mardi Gras parade. I must have been no older than 2-1/2 years old at the time.
Uncle Don was an engineer who worked for Lockheed for many years. He was contracted to work with NASA from the early days of the space program, moving to Clear Lake City in southeastern suburban Houston when what is now called the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center was founded in the mid-1960's. Uncle Don was the most accomplished STEM professional (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) in our family, winning an award for his contributions to the electronics for the Apollo 11 mission, which brought the first humans to land on the moon in July 1969. Uncle Don worked on the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and early Space Shuttle programs, before retiring in the late 1980's. He was a quiet man, a gentle and warm father figure in my life, along with my own father and maternal grandfather. I remember when Uncle Don taught me how to fish for bream on a camping trip at Lake Livingston in East Texas, showed me how different colored wires selectively carried electricity through small hand-built electronic devices, let me listen in on ham radio conversations with other operators around the world. After listening to a short conversation with an operator in Australia, I remember spinning a globe and looking near the bottom to find the distant land that modern communications had brought to my awareness. He guided us on tours of his workplace at the Johnson Space Center, just a few miles from their home, including a private visit to Mission Control on a day when the room was empty! Uncle Don was a proud graduate of Texas A&M University (class of 1955), which I subsequently attended in the early 1980's at the same time as my older cousin. I never quite shared Uncle Don's enthusiasm for Aggie football, but my college experience was an important time of personal growth, favorably changing the trajectory of my life to look far beyond the small town where I had grown up.
When my father passed away in 2005, Uncle Don was so incredibly helpful to my mother, my brother Will, and me, as we faced the sudden intensity of our grief. I know that Uncle Don was also mourning the death of his brother-in-law, but by his example I realized just how helpful it was to have someone close but one level removed to help with practical matters, driving us around town, mostly listening but occasionally asking the right question at the right time, graciously stepping back when Mom, Will, and I needed time for just the three of us.
Shortly afterwards, Uncle Don began to suffer debilitating conditions similar to Parkinson's Disease. Over many years, he endured a gradual decline in his strength and vitality, and was eventually restricted to a wheelchair. I last spent significant time with him on the happy occasion of his 60th wedding anniversary with my Aunt in July 2019, our last big family gathering before the COVID pandemic made it too dangerous to socialize freely. I was fortunate to briefly see Uncle Don one last time in November 2021, when I went to Houston to help my mother during a minor surgical procedure. We weren't able to talk other than to say hello through an open patio doorway, not wanting to take any chances in spreading the virus.
Bonnie and I flew to Houston for the funeral in mid-January, at the height of the Omicron wave. We were fully vaccinated and boosted, and I wore a mask at all times while indoors, so felt fairly safe making the trip. Uncle Don's sons were able to attend, along with my mother and her husband, my brother and his wife, my aunt's best friend, who played a tribute on the violin, and one person around my age who had grown up across the street from Uncle Don's family, and began a career at NASA in the same research facility working with Uncle Don just a few years before he retired. Unfortunately neither of Uncle Don's two grandchildren or three great-grandchildren could make the trip, so I think that there were only about 10 of us in attendance, plus a videographer who was a friend of the family. It was a small graveside service in a beautiful old cemetery near Galveston Bay.
A few miles into my easy run, my reverie was interrupted by the sound of ducks swimming in the small stream. I stopped to take some photos, then saw a couple of adult ducks much closer to me on the side of the trail. As soon as I saw two small ducklings between the two adult ducks, one of the ducks hissed at me, the universal meaning very clear: "Don't hurt my children!" Ah, we are all the same, I thought. And in that moment, I realized that I probably will never again enjoy eating Peking Duck.
Continuing on the easy run, I thought of the second passing, that of my ex-wife, Shannon. My brother called in February to tell me. He was doing some genealogy research on the family, and was startled to come across an obituary. Shannon had died from cancer in November 2021. At the moment that I heard this news, I didn 't want to hear it. I was rather angry with my brother, because I didn't want to expend emotional energy toward a relationship that had ended badly some 15 years ago. At the same time, I was shocked and filled with sorrow that Shannon had died, too young.
Shannon and I met through a common acquaintance at an Independence Day concert on the New Haven Green, July 4, 1990. I had just begun a postdoctoral appointment in chemistry at Yale University, while Shannon was a graduate student in the Yale architecture department. We first became friends, then after several months were lovers, and married on May 24, 1992, the day before Shannon's graduation from Yale. We moved to Chicago in summer 1992. I was off to a good start in my career as a chemistry professor, but despite being in a large city, Shannon struggled to find her place in Chicago. In 1997, we decided to try to have children. It didn't take too long for Shannon to get pregnant. I was so excited, going with Shannon to the 8 - 10 week appointment to listen for the first heartbeat of the fetus. That hope was shattered upon seeing the face of the doctor, who only heard Shannon's heartbeat through the stethoscope, "There's nothing there" were the words that I remember. "Was Shannon actually pregnant?" I asked, and the doctor said, yes, the pregnancy test a few weeks earlier was accurate. The doctor warned us that the fetus might pass fairly soon. And indeed, a few days later, Shannon called from the bathroom, holding something in a piece of toilet tissue, "Is this it?" I held the fetus in my hands for a moment: it was about an inch long, it looked exactly like it's shown in textbooks. This could have been our child. But it was not alive. I put it carefully into an empty medicine bottle, not knowing what else to do, and brought it to Shannon's doctor the next morning. This was devastating for us both, especially for Shannon, but I found that I didn't have a place for my own grief. My social life was completely wrapped up with the same people that I worked with. I told a few colleagues, and of course my parents, who were sympathetic, but there was no one with whom I could just cry with.
In the following year, we moved to Atlanta. Two more miscarriages followed. Our relationship was never the same. There was a series of estrangements, Shannon working in other cities for a few weeks, a semester, a year; I took five weeks in Japan, three months in Spain on my own. There wasn't infidelity; if I was tempted, I was completely committed to trying to save our marriage. But at the worst of times, I spent occasional weekends for cooling-off periods, even weeks at an extended stay hotel. In case I needed to make a quick move, I started to keep track of exactly how much money I could immediately access. On July 4, 2007, I spent most of the day on our patio reading Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking." The next morning, as I was about to leave for work, Shannon picked up my laptop and threw it to the floor, shattering the screen. I started yelling, then before I did anything worse, walked out the door with the broken laptop. That was the last time I slept in that house. The divorce took more than a year to resolve. It was two more years before we sold the house, severing our final link. If I was sad to miss out on having children, I was relieved that I didn't need to continue contact with Shannon. Therapy helped me survive the separation and the divorce. Therapy also helped me prepare for a better life ahead, so that I was ready enough when I met Bonnie. Therapy today helps me to have the best possible life with Bonnie, as I've finally found contentment, unconditional love, trust, and safety.
Every so often I've wondered about Shannon. I knew from the internet that she was teaching architecture in Illinois. I was mostly relieved that she never reached out to disturb my tranquility. When I began blogging about running, I was always careful about what I wrote, not wanting to trigger any angry reaction, just in case she found this blog. When we visited Chicago for the 2021 marathon and stood outside of our former home in Evanston, I had no inkling that Shannon was in the last month of her life. I can't know how that news might have affected me then, but I believe that I would have avoided the trip to Evanston if I had known. If Shannon's family reads this, please know that I genuinely loved her. And I also dearly loved all of you, her family. I had lost contact with the family before I left Shannon. Without a connection to the in-laws that I had loved, there was one less reason to stay in the marriage when things grew unbearable. I hope that Shannon had some good years on her own, before illness ended her life far too soon. Rest in peace, Shannon.
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| Sign in front of the Don Callejon Kindergarten-8th grade school in Santa Clara |
While I was recalling this difficult time in my life, I had run across a pedestrian bridge across the Guadalupe River, onto the Santa Clara city side of the river. The trail on this side was gravel, a real trail run. I had assumed that I could get onto a street if / whenever the trail ended, and make my way back to the hotel on surface streets. But to my surprise, I reached a deadend: a highway was straight ahead, but the path was blocked by a fence. To my left was a steep descent to the river, and I couldn't see a dry pathway under the bridge. To the right, there was a clearing along the fence, but the airport was very near, and I imagined that I would encounter another fence before I reached a public road. There was nothing to do other than to retrace my steps for about 1/2 mile. I crossed the river on the bridge at West Trimble Road, which happened to be where a mammoth sculpture was located on the San Jose side of the river. This marks the site of a mammoth bone discovery in 2005, by a local resident who had grown up playing along the river.
As I worked my way back toward the hotel, with about three miles to go, I reflected on Kuk Pyo Chung's life, who the family fondly called "Unclie Pei." I first met him 12 years ago, at the rehearsal luncheon the day before my wedding to Bonnie. He was such a jovial and cheerful man. At one point in the afternoon, he surveyed the room of Chungs and Youns, and said to me "Look at what one bad visa has done!" Bonnie corrected him to say, "One great visa!" Unclie Pei won a scholarship to travel from South Korea to pursue an undergraduate degree at Yale University in the 1950's. He studied physics, became a United States citizen, completed a doctoral degree in nuclear physics at Princeton University in 1970, and sponsored his siblings for permanent residency, including Bonnie's mother and her family. There was a long waiting period, in fact the petition was filed shortly after Bonnie was born in 1970, and approved only a year or so before Bonnie came to the United States for college in 1987. Bonnie calls Unclie Pei "an astronaut" because of his bold, fearless journey to the "planet" called America.
There were a couple of dozen people at the funeral: his widow, their three children and their spouses, all three grandchildren, and several of Unclie's nieces and nephews. With other losses over the years, there weren't as many Chungs as there had been at our wedding a dozen years ago. The funeral was comforting, concluding with Bonnie leading the attendees in a Korean traditional song that Unclie Pei would sing nearly daily in his final days, on the phone with his surviving brother and sister. Although I didn't understand the words, I felt the emotion and the love, and a few tears came to my eyes.
As I returned to the hotel, reaching exactly nine miles just a block or so from where I had begun, I was reminded that life is all too short, even when it seems long, especially when one is young and feels that life will go on for nearly forever.
