Sydney and Uncle Cecil, 1979

In the 1960s, when my great uncle Cecil Jefferson Espy retired from a career in banking, he came back to Oysterville. He moved into the R.H. Espy House and took pride in the fact that he was sleeping in the same bedroom and, according to him but not to my mother and her brothers, in the same bed in which he was born in 1887.

He tidied up the grounds around the house, mowing the lawns with an old-fashioned push mower and, much to the neighbors’ concern, setting fire to the field to the east which is the way they kept the meadow grass down in his childhood – probably a carry-over from Indian times. He also took it upon himself to clean up the cemetery which had been neglected for years, first taking after the grass with a scythe and then patiently trimming around the stones with hand clippers.

“Uncle Cecil’s Bed” by Earl Thollander

He took charge of the old linen cemetery map, figured out where the unmarked grave plots were and helped people locate their loved ones. During that period, Uncle Cecil also became active in the Pacific County Historical Society serving on the Board and maybe as President for a time.

In the back of his mind, we eventually learned, there was always the thought that when he was “ready” – presumably when he could no longer take care of himself and the house — he would go to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Portland where he would stay until he died. That was what he remembered people doing when he was a boy. In fact, in those days, most people only went to the hospital when they felt death was imminent. Otherwise, they doctored at home or maybe got stitched up or had bones set in the doctor’s office – maybe minor things were taken care of by the dentist, or even the barber. Hospitals were a last resort.

“Umcle Cecil’s Wheelbarrow” by Earl Thollander

I thought about all that yesterday when Nyel and I went into Vancouver to Peace Health Hospital yesterday for his ‘pre-op’ instructions. Nowadays, the goal is to get you in and get you out as quickly as possible. If surgery is involved there are complex instructions to follow – not one but two showers with bacteriological soap and an iodine wash; sleeping the night beforehand on clean sheets; cancellation if you have any scratches, cuts or broken skin. YIKES!

When I was a kid, several generations after Uncle Cecil’s youth and several generations before the here and now, you went to the hospital prepared to stay as long as it took for you to be considered ‘recovered.’ If you were there to give birth, ten days was not an untoward amount of time. When I had my tonsils out in 1942, I think I was in the hospital for five days at least. That was before the days of supergerms and MRSA and other dread consequences of an overly sanitized environment.

I can’t help but wonder if, before long, we’ll revert to going to the hospital when dying seems the only alternative left. Surely, if they continue to develop non-invasive methods of curing what ails us — those magic wand techniques we saw used by “Bones” on Star Trek – we may well revert to looking at hospitals much as Uncle Cecil did. Not in my lifetime, though. Like with so many other things on the horizon, I think mine is the “tween generation.” It’s hard to know whether to be glad or sad about that.