8/3/97

A truckload of memories

The pictures are gone from the wall now. His nameplate no longer fronts the desk, which isn't his anymore, anyway. The pencil holder, the note pads, the stapler have been packed away.

Chuck Snook's last day as principal of Flanagan High School was June 30, a day he passed with his wife, Eve, and friends relaxing in northern Wisconsin. He finished the school year, got his office ready for the next one, cleaned the place out and closed the door on his career in public schools, 22 as a teacher, 14 as a principal.

No regrets. The time had come.

"My entire educational life," Chuck said, " I think I can put in three boxes. ...Three boxes and a damn truckload of memories."

And not much time to sort them out, bask in their glow, reflect.

"When you're retired," Chuck said a few days before he retired, "every day is Saturday."

But if you're dying of prostate cancer, as Chuck is, every day is precious, too--some more than others.

Take, for example, commencement 1997, Chuck's 14th and last as a high school principal.

For a moment in the life of a small town, when all the good and bad, the foolish and the lovely, are simply hung out there for all to see and hear, a high school graduation is the best. Boys and girls who were children yesterday contemplate lives as adults. Their mothers and fathers marvel at the passage of so much in only 17 years. The teachers put their books and chalk boards away for a brief rest. They've done what they could.

It is a moment filled with celebration mixed with trepidation.

Chuck presided over his last graduation in the packed gymnasium of his high school on a night in early June when the boys wore neckties, the girls wore high heels, and their mothers and fathers wore simultaneous tears and grins.

He told the graduates to become lifelong learners, to be responsible and to deal positively with adversity, to not be afraid of failure for without failure they cannot learn to succeed.

The Parent-Teacher Club announced a new scholarship in Chuck's name. The senior class gave him three rose bushes. The school board gave him a plaque to honor his service to the school. Chuck told them all he had "spent six of the most fantastic years of my life" at Flanagan High School, and he thanked them for the privilege.

He and Eve went to a couple of post-graduation gatherings and then home, where Chuck said later, "it was like somebody just hit a switch." The pain of his cancer, which has spread to his bones, took over, as if to say it was in charge and it would dictate the terms of his existence from now on. The pain in his arms, his spine, his chest and shoulders kept him in agony until he finally slept about 3:30 a.m. But he didn't awaken feeling any better.

His pain medication, Oxycontin and Oxycodone, had no effect and his life was hell until the following afternoon, when Eve took him to the emergency room at Pontiac's Saint James Hospital for a rendezvous with a syringe full of morphine.

That was Chuck's first experience with morphine, he said. It worked, too, as long as he was lying down. Otherwise, he was nauseous.

The weekend over, Chuck was back in the quiet halls of Flanagan High School. It was an exercise in winding down, but slowly, and certainly not stopping, for in addition to the plaque, his board of education gave him another gift: a purpose.

Chuck will be a consultant to the school district as special needs arise next term. "I'm looking forward to that," he said.

"If you're faced with nothing, I wouldn't know how to deal with that."

But Chuck, of course, is never faced with nothing. Cancer will not let him alone. There is first the pain, and there is the catheter and now the weakness he feels. It's often a real effort just to get up from a chair. He wakes up in the morning, he says, and he goes downstairs to read the paper, and he falls asleep.

He knows, he says, his systems are going to break down, and there may even come a time when he won't be able to get up from that chair.

And yet he continues to live the life he wants as best he can.

He and Eve spent a week with friends in Wisconsin. He's discovered the works of Maya Angelou and plans to read all of her poetry before the summer is over, and he's already worked on a project for the school board updating the junior-senior high school student handbook.

In July he was interviewed by Laura Berk, an Illinois State University psychology professor who is taping a classroom video to accompany her new college textbook, "Development Through the Life Span."

Chuck's section is on death, dying and bereavement.

He knows a good deal about the dying part, and he reiterated the principle that has guided him and Eve since his diagnosis: "I think," he said, "you can be in a positive state of mind even though you're dying."

Chuck can still get around on his own, he can still do most of the things he wants to do, he can still be a productive member of his family and community and society in general, and he still has things he looks forward to.

When he finishes the poetry of Maya Angelou, he may get to that new biography of Ernest Hemingway, his favorite author for 30 years. He may even weave a few baskets, a hobby he took up a few years ago. He and Eve are planning a trip with friends to South Dakota. He definitely will keep up with the journal he began Nov.10,1994, when he learned his cancer of the prostate had spread to his spine and his ribs, and that he would not survive it.

Then there are those letters his father wrote from Europe to Chuck's grandmother during World War II. Chuck's parents were divorced before the war and Chuck was raised by his grandmother, but even when his father returned from Europe, remarried and lived in the same town, there was little contact between the father and the son.

Those letters are the major connection Chuck has with his heritage, so he will type them in to his computer in chronological order, and when his is gone, his children and his grandchildren will have them and his journal, too.

Outside at the farm house he and Eve rent south of Flanagan, she will have those three rose bushes to remind her of the esteem in which his last senior class held him.

And inside, in boxes now packed away, there are the tools of his trade, now momentos of a career. There are his nameplate, his pen and pencil holder, his note pad and those photographs:

A sunset on the Mississippi River taken by his daughter, Jean; a sunset he shot himself at the farm house; the cabin in Wisconsin he and Eve enjoyed on summer and winter vacations; a lake near Oshkosh; and him and a friend in a canoe on the Horse River near Ely, Minn.

"It's been a great life," he told Laura Berk in that recording studio at Illinois State University, and he meant it.

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