June 15, 2021 update on Erika
The Lord took Erika home late in the afternoon of June 14, 2021. She died peacefully and without noticeable pain after being in a deep sleep all the time I was with her in the morning and afternoon on June 14. In fact, I was with her every day all those weeks in the hospital as she went through early weeks of being conversational to later weeks where she could hear but not speak to the final days where she was in 24-hour sleep each day.
It was her long standing request that she be cremated and have no funeral service, although she will be prayed for and sung for in our Sugar Hill Community Church. I want to thank the many members of the church who made repeated visits to her room to converse with her and pray with her. I also want to thank our other friends who either visited or phoned or both. Special thanks to the daily visits of our good friend Bill Mellekas and the many visits of our minister Ned Wilson and his precious wife.
I'm also thankful that her two sisters from Wisconsin and brother from Washington State were able to visit along with later visits of her three children and all her grandchildren before Erika was hospitalized.
I want to thank the Littleton Regional Hospital doctors, nurses, and other staff who were magnificent in their weeks of care and control of her severe pain. She was placed in the hospital's finest room --- a special room designed for a dying patient.
She suffered more than we will ever know, pain beyond her episodes of extreme sciatic pain and her Stage 4 pancreatic cancer pain. In the past 10 years she tolerated more pain and suffering than she ever let on even to me. Erika tried her level best to carry on working with pain that never quit except for the relief she got when sleeping, and sleep did not always come easy to her. My vision of Erika is working in the house with a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a cane in the other hand. The pain pump embedded in her spine helped, but it was no magic bullet. In the hospital it took a heavy mixture if Katamine and morphine IV drips to control the pain.
Erika and I met at a dance nearly 37 years ago. She was a good dancer and tried in vain to teach me.
Somehow we knew from that first encounter as Strangers in the Night (our love song) that we were meant for each other. We decided to get married two weeks later when my parents were passing through San Antonio on their way from Donna, Texas where they spent about six weeks every winter. San Antonio was on their way home back to Algona, Iowa where they lived most of their adult lives and where I grew up aside from my early years on the family farm.
Our lives together were unbelievably filled with love, respect, trust, Christian faith, and happy times. Her son David came to live with us and graduated from Macarthur High School in San Antonio. Our house was only a half block from the Northeast Baptist Medical Center where Erika continued to work handing instruments to surgeons. I continued to be on the faculty of Trinity University. We were very close to our neighbors Tony and Lottie. Tony was a navigator on a B-17 in WW II and later retired as an Air Force physician. With Tony and Lottie we became part of a "gang" of retired military couples that met at least once every week for card nights, dining out, and parties in the officers clubs of the five largest military bases in San Antonio (Randolph, Brooke, Kelly, Lackland, and Ft. Sam Houston Army Medical Command and Hospital). What I'm saying is that we never lacked for friends and fun times to go with our hard work.
Because of my lecture invitations we had many trips to Canada, England, Holland, Germany, Sweden Finland, and New Zealand as well as over 300 universities in the USA. We nearly always took extra days to tour around, especially in Germany were we often met with Erika's old country family spread across various cities in the south.
I plan to create a picture memorial on the Internet about the life of Erika. In that I will provide more details of her 80 years plus 10 days of life on earth.
I had a hymnal in her final days in the hospital. I sang (choked in tears) some hymns and whispered others aloud.
The hymn that I sang over and over the most times was Softly and Tenderly, especially the third stanza.
- Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
Calling for you and for me;
See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching,
Watching for you and for me.o Refrain:
Come home, come home,
You who are weary, come home;
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, O Erika, come home!
- Why should we tarry when Jesus is pleading,
Pleading for you and for me?
Why should we linger and heed not His mercies,
Mercies for you and for me?- Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me;
Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming,
Coming for you and for me.- Oh, for the wonderful love He has promised,
Promised for you and for me!
Though we have sinned, He has mercy and pardon,
Pardon for you and for me.
Please don't stop by our house for a time --- it's a complete mess since when Erika was taken by ambulance for the second and final time. I spent my days in the hospital and never once tried to pick up the mess at home. It may take a year to sort through all the piles of stuff Erika crammed everywhere possible in her home.
You know me. I like email messages of condolence that make it easier for me to thank all of you out there. Please forward any pictures that you have of Erika that I can put in her memorial.
Bob
