Celebrating Dad: Listen online

For posterity - and for those who couldn't make the memorial, or for those who were in the overflow area and couldn't hear it all. Click HERE to listen to Dad's Celebration of Life.

PS - Dad was born on April 10, 1954. I knew that, but I mistakenly wrote 1956 (when MOM was born) on the life story. That was then transferred to the program and slideshow. Oops! Totally my fault :) 

Click HERE for Dad's Life Story.

Click HERE to read about Dad's illness.

💗

Filters

Hoping to encourage exercise and health, I started a "Workout Buddies" Facebook group for Mom, Dad, Eryn, and myself. The idea was to post your workout of the day to encourage each other and offer accountability.

I also encouraged post-workout selfies to go along with the post.

And then Dad discovered filters, and he never looked back! For those who didn't know, my dad could be a major goofball:

His last workout post - a Saturday walk with Mom:

:)

Dad's Life Story

These are the words I read at Dad's Celebration of Life, Feb. 24, 2018:

Mark Allen McKee was born April 10, 1954, at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkley, Calif., to John and Betty McKee. The family lived in Kirkland, Wash., where John worked as a flight engineer for Pan American Airways. John flew internationally for work, and Betty stayed with her parents in Berkley in the weeks before Mark was born.

He joined sister Pat, 9, brother John Jr., 7, and sister Cynthia, 4.

After four years, a job transfer to San Francisco Airport moved the family to Alamo, Calif.

Dad had fond memories of summers with his grandparents, Fred and Helen Fellow, in nearby Berkley. Fishing with Grandpa and watching baseball on TV with Grandma were favorite activities. Dad loved to travel on his father’s flights, flying around the world on 747s. He spoke fondly of the attention from the flight attendants – and all the free ginger ale! 

Dad graduated from San Ramon Valley High School in 1972 and then went on to George Fox College in Newberg, Ore. He studied business and economics and was a teaching assistant to computer professor, Dr. Remple, where he learned several computer programming languages.

Meantime, Dad’s family moved to Villa Park, Calif., near Disneyland. Dad worked at the Happiest Place on Earth during breaks from college, cleaning the park in the overnight hours.

He said they never turned off the music in the Enchanted Tiki Room, one of his cleaning assignments. For many years, he wouldn’t step foot into that attraction! 

Dad enjoyed pranking. During his sophomore year, Dad, Meyer Louie, and others, spent a night checking for unlocked cars in the Pennington dorm parking lot.

They rolled nine cars down the fire lane and into the canyon. Police arrived and thought it was a good prank. The guys were told to stop and there would be no repercussions unless someone complained. But one car owner “whined to his father”, who called GFC to complain. Dad and the others were suspended for the remainder of the week: midterms!

They had to leave campus, but home was too far to travel.  The parents of friend Jeff Rickey took pity on the boys, insisting that they stay at their house. They all ate pork chops for dinner, stretching it enough for everyone to have their fill.

During his junior year, a Newberg girl, Kati Fantz, started hanging around campus to see her friends. Mom was visiting in the Pennington dorm lobby when Dad came through after tennis class. As the group chatted, Dad mentioned his father’s Porsche, piquing Mom’s interest. Mom, still a senior in high school, looked older, and Dad thought she was a college student.

Later that week, a mutual friend told Mom that Dad was interested in going out. She also told Dad that Mom was interested in going out, though neither had actually said that! The two went bowling in McMinnville, and they were inseparable from that point on!

Mom graduated early from Newberg High and began attending GFC in spring 1975. The couple got engaged shortly after and was married that summer – about 10 months after meeting. Dad wore a powder-blue tuxedo with ruffled shirt, the height of ‘70s fashion!

Their first daughter, Elizabeth Ruth, was born the following June, and Dad took a variety of jobs to provide for his young family. Their second daughter, Eryn Lynn, was born two years later in May, 1978.

Dad was doing custodial maintenance when a job opened in the Tigard school district. Dad worked as the head night custodian at Mary Woodward Elementary School for many years while Mom returned to school to become a teacher. Dad was home during the day with the girls, preparing lunches and fixing ponytails, and Mom was home in the evenings. Dad loved working with the school children at Mary Woodward, including playing with the chess club. 

The family took many trips to Disneyland to visit Dad’s parents, starting a lifelong love of Mickey Mouse for his girls.

Many special occasions, including birthdays and anniversaries, were spent at Disneyland. Summers also included lots of camping trips and church- and city-league softball.

Wanting to get away from working nights, Dad began a 30-year career in warehouse/distribution. His last assignment was 10+ years at Medical Teams International, where he was so proud to be shipping medical equipment to those in need around the world.

Dad retired when MTI went through reorganization, allowing time for him to care for his elderly parents who had moved to Friendsview Retirement Community in Newberg. He was happy to connect with his father after a distant childhood.

Dad loved watching sports, especially his beloved San Francisco Giants and 49ers. He and Mom had a goal of visiting every Major League Baseball stadium and frequently traveled with their daughters on summer baseball trips. They only missed a few cities.

Dad had a propensity for numbers and puzzles, and he collected jigsaw puzzles from his world travels. (ERYN got those puzzle genes – I did not!) He enjoyed Sudoku and frequently impressed his daughters by doing math in his head. He also loved playing games, usually beating everyone else in the family.

Growing up flying around the world, Dad loved traveling, especially air travel. And it wasn’t just about the destination but also the journey. Dad would purposely choose flights with multiple stops – to save a buck but also so he could get more takeoffs and landings.

Sometimes he would meet the family after taking several flights around the country while the family flew straight there. He collected Pan Am memorabilia and could name plane models as they flew overhead.

Dad loved eating, especially sweets: chocolate, cookies, black licorice ice cream, milkshakes, root beer floats, angel food cake. But he wasn’t very adventurous, often ordering his standards: cheese-and-onion enchiladas (double rice, no beans) or ham-and-cheese omelets (with hashbrowns and English muffin).

He didn’t like most vegetables – especially tomatoes! His drink of choice was brewed iced tea (not sweet tea) or orange juice.

Dad enjoyed shopping and gift-giving. It was all about making other people happy. Holidays were special, as he loved the decorations, traditions, music, and happy times. He humored his daughters every year by getting up at 4 a.m. for Black Friday shopping.

The day always included Christmas tree headbands and a top-of-the-lungs Bing Crosby singalong in the car.

Dad was handy and mechanical, always taking on projects around the house, yard, and garage.

When Dad and Mom built their home in Tigard, he installed all the plumbing and electrical systems himself. In recent years, they bought a duplex in Newberg, and Dad managed the income property. He loved working with his hands and enjoyed using his gifts to assist friends, family, and co-workers. This extended to our Tigard High School family. Dad was a familiar face at Tigard High, assisting Eryn in the library, fixing things in my alternative-ed kitchen, and helping Mom with classroom and band projects...

...from repairing instruments to building props to moving equipment to driving the truck to helping students with rides home. His help was invaluable.

He just liked helping people. If anyone needed a hand, Dad was there.

Above all, Dad loved his family. He would do anything for Mom and his girls.

His favorite times were spent playing cards, watching movies, traveling to Disneyland, quoting National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, hiking and biking, and just being with family.

That included his four-legged family. Dad was a super-softy when it came to his kitties.

Mark died Feb. 12, 2018, at age 63.

Mark's Illness

My dad died unexpectedly last week. Mom wants to share their story. These are her words:


CONTENT WARNING:
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Depression, OCD, mental illness, unexpected death, suicide, related issues

Please, if any of these issues are triggers for you, make the healthy choice to move on to another post. Choose to stay mentally healthy - choose what is best for you.

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On February 12, my husband Mark died unexpectedly. His death was an unintentional overdose; he did not intend to die that day, but it was as a result of his illness. It is important to me that his death not be whispered about or dealt with in a hush-hush manner, so I have written about his illness in a straight-forward manner and my daughter has published it here. It is my hope that we will continue to bring mental illness out of the shadows and into the light.

**************************************

***Trigger warning***

I’m going to talk frankly about chronic mental illness, as someone who has intimate knowledge.

My husband had life-long, debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder, exacerbated by depression. I walked his journey with him for 43 years, as he fought to focus on all the many and wonderful positive things in his life, and to not spiral down into the over-focusing that is OCD.

Depression is not being sad. OCD is not counting your steps, or straightening pictures. Chronic depression includes being overwhelmed to the point of inertia, sometimes by the most simple things of daily life. OCD involves over-thinking, which can lead to getting stuck in a loop that repeats over and over. OCD is not a punchline, nor is it a plot generator for a situation comedy or a movie. It has always infuriated me that a show like Monk would be so well-received, with their running jokes about the title character’s tics and rituals. I cannot imagine a comedy based on the cute trials and tribulations of a person with cancer or type-1 diabetes, but it was apparently OK to take a light-hearted approach to chronic mental illness. There is nothing light-hearted about chronic mental illness.

Over the years, Mark used a combination of psychotherapy and medication to manage his symptoms, and there were some times that were very good. But there were some times that were not good. Times when the depression would become the focus and he would start to spiral downward. I could usually spot the beginnings of a spiral, and we’d work through it with the strategies he had learned to use.

The last year was especially difficult, dealing with such disparate things as the current dreadful administration and the decline and death of his father. His spirals were more frequent but recovery was also more swift. A couple of weeks ago, Friday was a very bad day. He considered going to St Vincent’s but after talking it out with me he decided against it, and he accompanied me to the drumline competition on Saturday, helping move the kids on and off the floor and hanging out with me in the directors’ room. We went out into the neighborhood and walked for about a mile and ½ and it was a very nice walk - positive and pleasant. Sunday was a good day, getting a few things done around the house, planning the next week, and evening church. At church, we were the greeters and Mark was the head usher. We collected the offering and then he decided to wait to go put it away, because he was appreciating the songs and what our guest speaker had to say and wanted to participate fully. When we got home, I checked in with him and he said things were much better – again, a fairly quick recovery. Monday morning was a good morning, with Mark getting up right away, taking care of our cats, fixing my oatmeal, and doing his exercise bike shakeout and stretches. He had plans to hike at Tryon, to help my dad on Tuesday, a list of things on which he was making good progress. And then something happened that got him stuck in a loop. He took his medicine – all of it. I could not find a triggering incident – there was no email, no phone call, no text, no note. My best guess is that he started to over-focus on something and took his medicine to make it better, and then got stuck in taking it over and over, questioning whether he had taken enough, until he became disoriented.

Here is what I know for certain – he did not take his medicine for the purpose of dying that day. If so, he would have emptied the medicine cabinet. He would have taken my medicine, and the 500-tab bottle of Tylenol, and the bottle of aspirin all people over 60 are supposed to take, and everything else. He took only his own medicine, which he used to help with his symptoms. I know he did not plan to die that day. Mark was incapable of being duplicitous – he truly WAS having a good morning, not just pretending to have a good morning. Those of us who know him know that he could not have planned and hidden a plan – he was incredibly transparent, and self-control was never something he did well. And he did not undergo a sudden personality change – that’s the stuff bad TV and movies are made of. And yet, he died. From an overdose of the medications that, for years, had helped him manage the awful combination of depression and OCD. Nothing about the day pointed to an intent to die. When Mark had a meltdown, it was messy. Monday was not a messy day, in any way. And when he had intrusive thoughts, he could not keep them to himself. There would have been a call, or a text, or something. He did not plan to die that day. And yet, he died.

Mark fought depression his entire life. Childhood school records show indications that OCD came along early as well. He fought long and hard and well. The OCD made it so that he could not ignore the symptoms of depression. The depression made it difficult to manage the over-thinking of OCD. Together, the two diseases were a formidable opponent, and he fought long and hard and well. He trusted deeply in the love of God and the grace of Jesus and he believed God’s people have a moral imperative to work diligently to help right wrongs, here and far away. And his life reflected that belief. When he was not in a downward spiral, he was helping others. Those who know him, know this as the biggest defining factor of his life. Not the OCD, and not the depression. Helping others. Helping. Others.

It is imperative that the rest of us need to continue to shed light on mental illness, so that those who are affected are not afraid to get help (we would NEVER suggest someone needing dialysis should just “try harder”). To not make fun of those who are affected, but to be there to support (we would NEVER make fun of someone fighting cancer). To never let any aspect of mental illness become a punchline (we would NEVER create a comedy around the trials of someone with chronic pain). To help people understand that mental illness does not mean violence. To help people understand that mental illness does not mean weakness. To not look at evil and instead call it mental illness. 

Resources to help:
Crisis Text Line
National Alliance on Mental Illness - Crisis Services

Washington County Crisis Services

No. 3, 4

No. 3 of the year was David Baldacci's The Christmas Train:

 I listened to this one on audiobook while doing chores and cruising around town. It kinda freaked me out, as I've had some bad luck with trains. But I did like the Christmas theme :)

No.4 was Elizabeth Lee's Nuts and Buried,  the third in the Nut House Mystery series:

:)