Bill and Effie Enger, The Final Chapter

This is the blog I have been dreading but the time has come--the final chapter in the lives of two incredible people--my parents!
In 1960 my brother Billie and Ruth made a life-changing decision to throw in the towel on the farm life and they moved from Mora to Princeton, Minnesota where they lived for the rest of their days.  A very good move for them.  Billie went back to his former occupation as Auto Parts manager for Odegard’s garage in Princeton.  Ruth obtained her LPN license and worked in the Princeton Hospital until her retirement in 1990. Billie died in October of 1982 at age 61 after a difficult  battle with lung cancer, and Ruth continued her life as a widow until she passed away in July of 2011 at age 84.  Together Billie and Ruth raised six wonderful children who, all but one, live in the Princeton vicinity with their families and I have enjoyed my time with them so much when I go back East in the summers..

Gale and Cece stayed on the farm with Dad and Mom for several more years after Billie left, but in 1966 Father Bill was finally contemplating retirement  from the farm, and Gale started putting out feelers for jobs further west. That year he and Cece and son Larry packed up and headed for Palisade, Colorado a beautiful fruit-growing valley on the western slope of the Rockies.  Alan stayed behind to finish his senior year in high school before joining his parents in Colorado. Gale first worked for a lumber company in the mountain town of Colbran, quite a drive morning and night, and eventually was hired as manager of the Clifton Sanitation District where he stayed until retirement.

Bill and Effie’s last  home together at

3043 F ¾ Road, Grand Junction, CO

Meanwhile, Bill and Effie put the farm up for sale and Gale had talked them into coming out west to Colorado.  The farm market was bad at that time, but Bill finally made a deal with a buyer, had a huge and very traumatic farm auction where they sold the farm equipment and most of their furniture, and Bill, still the perpetual farmer at heart, found a six acre mini-farm about two miles outside of Grand Junction with a small two bedroom house.  He soon had horses, a few chickens, a tractor, and a garden, and Effie—once again—dutifully followed her husband in this new venture.

A challenge for Bill in this desert country was learning the ins and outs of irrigation—water was a precious commodity in the Grand Valley—and the irrigation water was jealously guarded and highly regulated.  My Dad, as usual, made friends right away with all the neighbors, dabbled in race horses, got involved in politics, wrote letters to the editor, started a taxpayers association and even sued the Grand Junction Port Authority for making million-dollar improvements at the Grand Junction Airport without a vote of the people.  He won!

All of us at Mom and Dad’s 50^th anniversary in March 1970, in

Grand Junction, CO; Gale, Billy, Mom, Dad, Dianne, Hope

Effie gradually retreated more and more into herself and in the early seventies began having health and anxiety problems.  She found a doctor who believed in treating every complaint with a pill, and gradually  Effie was taking prescribed pain pills, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, anti-depressants—all at the same time.  During one visit I made to Grand Junction my dear Mom spent most of her day sitting in the chair watching the clock for when her next pill was due. It was heart-breaking to see her in that state of mind.

Bill tried to get Effie away from taking all the pills and one time in frustration he flushed them all down the toilet, but somehow she was able to get more.  In the mid-1970's Effie began showing signs of paranoia about being left alone, so whenever Bill got in the car to go to town, even it was just for a newspaper or to fill up with gas, she would jump in the car with him.  During the Christmas of 1975 Bill went on a brief trip back to Minnesota to visit his brother Earle who was dying of cancer.  Effie didn’t feel well enough to go with him so he left her at Fort Morgan, Colorado to stay with Hope and Swede.  During her stay there Hope was alarmed by her mother’s mental state, and was broken-hearted when one day she asked Effie if she would make a graham cracker pie for Christmas dinner and her reply was “I don’t know how.”  That had been our whole family’s favorite dessert that our Mom had made for special occasions all the time we were growing up!

When Bill came back from Minnesota Effie clung to him like a child and said, “Don’t ever leave me again!”  We all knew something was wrong, but none of us could have ever envisioned the tragedy that was to come.

On a memorably infamous day in February of 1976, the phone was ringing as I walked into my real estate office in Quilcene, Washington where I was living with my husband, Don Kirst, (another story for later).  I answered and on the other end was the sobbing voice of my sister Hope. “Nonie, you’ve got to come right away, something terrible has happened, Mom shot herself!”  I was stunned, “Are you kidding? Hopie, that’s not funny!”  “No, it’s true and she’s not dead, she’s in the hospital, you’ve got to come right away!”

In a virtual daze, I ran across to the Quilcene Café where my husband was drinking coffee with the usual crowd.  I called him outside and told him I had to leave for Colorado right away.   I was like a zombie, packing my suitcase, the two hour ride to the airport, the flight to Denver and the shuttle to Grand Junction.  All the while the thoughts were rolling around in my head, “It must have been an accident, she must have been moving Dad’s gun and it went off. I’m sure the bullet just grazed her and she will be all right.” I didn’t allow myself to utter the word “suicide” or think about the possibility of her death—that is until that night when I walked into that hospital waiting room and I saw my grief-stricken father sitting there with his head down and his hands over his face.

The story I pieced together is that on that fateful morning Dad had come in from outside and told Mom that he was going to run to town and to the gas station, did she want to go?  And for once she answered,  "No I think I'll stay home this time."   Dad was surprised but also happy to think that maybe she was starting to feel better.  He was gone for less than an hour, and when he got in the house he found her, on the floor, with a bullet wound in her head.  She was alive but unconscious, then the ambulance came and took her away.

When I arrived at the hospital, after consoling my father, I was directed to the  hospital room where they told me my mother was.  There were four beds, and I  first walked up to the wrong bed where there was white-haired lady.  That wasn't my Mom!  My sister led me to the bed  of an older woman with a bandage around her grotesquely-swollen head and two black eyes.  She was unrecognizable, but that was her.

 For the next 24 hours we talked to the person in the bed who didn’t look like our beautiful Mom,  we listened to the mournful sound of the life support machine which I wanted to smash but I knew it was the only thing that was making her chest rise and fall..  It was surreal, like some horror movie but it was real life!  The next day the doctor came to us for a family meeting and told us point blank, “Your mother is brain dead, if she survives she will be in a coma, perhaps for years, and be like a vegetable.  It is the family’s decision whether or not to take her off of life support.” 

 None of  Effie's children could bring ourselves to say the words, and we left the decision up to our Dad.  He knew that my Mom would never want to be left in that state, and he finally  gave the okay to the doctors to remove her from life support and let her die peacefully.  From that moment on I watched my father slowly fade away and turn into a small frail old man until his death six years later.  Bill and Effie were just one month away from their 56^th wedding anniversary when the tragedy occurred and he was never the same. Somehow we got through the funeral which all of us thought, for obvious reasons, was to be a closed-casket service.  But just before the end of the service the funeral directors walked up and opened the lid for a viewing  The funeral home had done their best to make my mother presentable for viewing, and when my father saw her he thought she looked so beautiful (compared to what we had seen at the hospital) that unbeknown to us he had asked the minister to have the casket opened at the end so everyone could see her. One of  her grandchildren fainted!

                                                                Effie’s Memorial on March 3, 1976

Her untimely death was a shock to all who knew her!

Bill tried batching it on his own for a couple of years after Effie was gone but he became increasingly more lonely and sad, and due to a few “mini-strokes” which affected his speech and his driving ability, he finally decided to sell out—the house, his beloved  horses, the household goods—everthing but a few keepsakes, and move in with daughter and son-in-law Hope and Swede Reyman across the mountains in Fort Morgan, Colorado northeast of Denver.

Hope and Swede did everything they could to give him a good home and to make him happy.  They encouraged him to go to the Senior Center to play cards, which had always been his passion, but Bill seemed to have lost his zest for life.  He just didn’t want to do anything.

My Dad came out to stay with me in Washington a couple of times while he lived with Hope, the last time in the fall of 1979.  He would spend most of his waking hours sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, a bottle of wine, and his cigarettes.  He would check the balance in his checkbook over and over.  Since he had liquidated everything he owned, his money was all he had left to worry about. 

He was always a chain smoker but now he was dangerous.  If he took the cigarette pack out of his pocket first and the matches next he was fine; but sometimes he would take the match book out first, and then light a match, set the match book on fire, and throw it on the floor when it flared up.  We found that we didn’t dare leave him alone.

Iconic pose of  Bill after Effie’s death, by the kitchen table with

red quilted jacket, Stetson hat, cards, wine bottles and ashtray.

My father had always been a great story-teller—all my life I had loved listening to his tales of years past—but now he would tell the same story over and over.  He would start telling about an incident that involved his mother and his two sisters, and by the end his story it had evolved to his wife and two daughters.  Everything was all jumbled together in his mind and he was definitely in the throes of dementia. 

Because of the  TIA's  (small strokes) sometimes the words Bill wanted to say just wouldn’t come out of his mouth and he would start stammering.  If we tried to guess what he meant and we were wrong he would get really mad at us. (He never forgot the cuss words!)  The funny thing was that my youngest son Donnie, who was just six at the time, always knew.  He would say, “Don’t you know what Grandpa is trying to say? It is (whatever)!” And he was  right.  Those two had a special bond!

My Dad was in Washington with me on his 80^th birthday, November 19^th 1979, and we invited some friends and family over for a birthday party.  The next week was my 40^th birthday and Dad had stayed in bed most of the day as he wasn’t feeling well.  I didn’t think he even knew it was my birthday, but by the time my husband came home from the office that afternoon Dad was up and sitting at his usual spot at the table.  He said to Don, “You have to take me to town because I have to get something.”  That was a slight problem because in Quilcene, Washington where we lived the “town” consisted of a grocery store, two gas stations, a small appliance store, and a tavern.  The next town for shopping was 30 miles away!  So that left only the appliance store for the shopping trip.

Bill’s 80^th was celebrated in Washington, November 19, 1979

The scenario, as I heard it later, went something like this:  The Quilcene Appliance owner Herb Nylund showed my Dad several small appliances such as mixers, toasters and the like, but he didn’t want any of those, and he was getting disgusted with the two guys that were trying to help him.   Finally he spotted a microwave oven, and his eyes lit up. “Hopie has one of those,” he said. “I’ll take that one!”  So here they came back home with my very first microwave, a Deluxe Amana RadarRange which covered a huge piece of the kitchen counter.  That was the last present I ever received from my Dad and it was so special to me that I couldn’t bear to get rid of it for nearly 30 years, long after I had stopped using it.

One other time on that last visit, my husband Don was trying to get Dad interested in doing something and asked him if he wanted to go out and cut some wood for our wood-burning fireplace and a wood stove in the kitchen.  Don figured that since my Dad was an old lumberjack that it might bring back memories for him and he would enjoy it.  A couple of hours later they were back with a trailer full of wood, but Dad had only thrown in a couple of pieces and had sat in the Scout the rest of the time. 

The next week Don said, “Well Dad, do you want to go cut some more wood?”  Bill looked at him with a glare and said, “The hell with you!  How much does a cord of wood cost?”  Don told him about $30 a cord.  “You call them up and tell them I want two cords!”  When Dad went back to Hope’s house in Fort Morgan he told her, “I fixed that guy out there;--he wanted me to work but I fooled him, I just bought two cords of wood!” 

Back in Fort Morgan, the dementia, his health and his behavior became increasingly worse.  Even though he was only allowed to smoke at the kitchen table he would sneak the cigarettes into his bedroom and light up, and the ashes would fall on the bed or carpet.  When Hope would take him uptown to the bank or to a store he would cuss out the tellers and the clerks, one time because they didn’t have the right underwear that he always bought. Finally a very difficult decision was made—mostly by his doctors—that he be admitted to a local nursing care facility in Fort Morgan. 

The next summer when I visited him he didn’t know me at first, and then he finally said, “Oh yeah, you live with that guy out there. He was a cop, and he made me work!”  (That memory stayed with him!)  He didn’t know my brother Gale when he came either, after they had been together in the lumber yard, the farm and Grand Junction—Gale’s entire life.  That was a hard pill to swallow for my brother.  He just couldn’t bear to go there again.

Bill’s last birthday at the Fort Morgan nursing home,

November 19, 1981.  He passed away May 26, 1982

In the meantime Hope was at the nursing home every day making sure that Dad was well taken care of.  In the spring of 1982 my husband had been hired as a deputy by the Clallam County Sheriff’s Department and we had moved to Sequim, Washington.  In May I talked my sister Hope into coming out for a brief visit, and Swede promised that he would watch over Dad and visit him everyday.  On May 26, 1982, towards the end of Hope’s visit, the phone rang in the late morning and Swede had to give us the bad news that our Dad had passed away in his sleep.  Hope was devastated (and still is) that she was gone when he died but for her sake I have always believed it was better for her that she wasn’t there.

Bill and Effie's grave in Memorial Gardens, Grand Junction, Colorado

Rest in Peace Mom and Dad. I love you always!

So there ends the Saga of Bill and Effie Enger.  How two such unique and totally opposite individuals stayed together for 56 years is a wonder—the dynamic, volatile, impulsive, fun-loving, entrepreneurial husband and the quiet, stoic, poetic, artistic and long-suffering wife.  But one thing is certain—the two of them together were the most wonderful parents any child was ever blessed with. 

That’s all for now  I have been working on this blog for weeks, but when I would come to the bad and sad parts I couldn’t make myself go on—the memories were just too painful.  Today I decided it was now or never.  Every story has a beginning and an end, but the good part is that the story of Bill and Effie Enger never really ended.  They still live today in the minds and the hearts of those of us they left behind, and I truly believe that they are still together in Eternity.
Love you always, Mom and Dad!

Your daughter, Nonie