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HE WAS GONE
The Illegal Rhodendron

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Here is the photo of Bob I told you about. We were on a last outing of the summer, before school began. Bob wanted to go to Katahdin; we’d been talking about it for some time. The party included Mary Jo and Claud Sutcliffe and their infant son Matthew, Bob, and me. We camped overnight […]
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He started to get sick before he knew it. It started with a slight tremor I think in the left hand, as I remember, as early as 1968. This was a very slow developing neurological disease. It’s still very rare. And it has all the nasty characteristics of MS and Parkinson’s combined. It tends to […]
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He wrote to me. I think in Paris. Yeah, we were in Paris and he wrote to me that they were not sure whether it was Parkinson’s or something else. No, it wasn’t glum. It was a matter of fact kind of letter: I’ve been diagnosed with this, progressive neurological, and that’s what it was. […]
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We rented the Romosers’ house in Eliot, Maine, for a couple of months after we returned from Europe in 1969 and I first became aware Bob had a problem when he drove up one weekend to visit us…Phyllis Kinzer, who with her husband Dave also participated in the course in Sweden, called me up and […]
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One night senior year, in the fall of 1970, he asked maybe half a dozen students to come to his house. We didn’t know what it was about but he wanted to talk about having been diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness. This was another time you took your shoes off. He probably still had […]
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Well, he announced that he was ill and basically throughout the question was how could he use it as an educational device? He had a group of people over and sort of announced it. I just remember being stunned that he was obviously a teacher to his core, that he would seek to give meaning […]
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As alone as he was in personality, it does not surprise me that he would reach out that way. I think Bob intuitively, instinctively knew that if he reaches out, people will reach back to him. The very fact that he wanted to talk about it, that is a reaching out in incredible fashion. It […]
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We’d leave in the morning and get to Boston–the appointments wouldn’t take more than an hour or two–and then we’d drive back. He dealt with these doctors the same way he dealt with students. “What do these marvelous machines do?” And the doctor would explain and he’d say, “Well, doesn’t it do more than that?” […]
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It’s still only identified by the name of the two researchers, the two physicians who described it – the Shy-Drager Syndrome, a degenerative neurological disease, about which hardly anything is known. My wife Esther or I, or both of us together, would drive Bob–we were not the only ones–to Boston, where the research was going, […]
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When he was going to California, I said “Bob, you should tell your family what your health condition is.” I’m guessing, ‘72. So he got off the plane in California. He could hardly walk down the ramp and his family was absolutely blown away.
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