Charting the Course: A Father’s Legacy of Loss, Love, & Living Well

What does it mean to rebuild your life after unimaginable loss—and to keep choosing love, again and again?

In this powerful first installment of a two-part series, we sit down with our father: a Navy veteran, retired physician, and quiet hero who has lived through more heartbreak than most could imagine. He opens up about losing his 17-year-old daughter Laurie in a tragic accident, adopting the two of us (at ages 11 and 18), supporting our mom Marsha through multiple cancer journeys and the conclusion of her legacy project (The Boxes), and the courageous decision to open his heart again to love and blended family.

From growing up in post-war America to practicing medicine in the remote Australian outback, his story is one of service, surrender, and staying present—even when everything changes. Through it all, he offers a profound example of what it looks like to live with purpose, intention, and grace.

This is a story about fatherhood. About grief. About legacy. And the quiet strength it takes to keep showing up with an open heart.

Chapters

• 0:00 A Father's Path Through Unimaginable Loss
• 19:24 Growing Up in Post-War America
• 35:43 From Veterinary to Human Medicine
• 55:49 The Loss of a Daughter and a Marriage
• 1:09:52 Blending Families with Love and Intention
• 1:30:19 The Boxes Project: A Mother's Final Gift
• 1:38:27 Finding Peace and Purpose After Multiple Losses

Transcript

The Sisters: 0:07

How do you keep showing up for your family, your patients, your community, after losing your first born child in a tragic accident, the love of your life to cancer, and the future you thought you were building? How do you hold space for grief while choosing to love again and again with courage, generosity and grace? And what happens when the life you end up with, the one you never expected, becomes even more beautiful than the one you thought was lost? This is the story of a man who has walked through unimaginable loss, led with quiet strength and shown us what it means to love with your whole heart. A father, a healer, a captain, a navigator From the sky to the sea, from the hospital rooms to quiet hallways at home, he has been our calm in the storm and through it all. His legacy is one of presence, purpose and unwavering resilience.

The Sisters: 0:59

Welcome to the PIG, where we explore life, love, loss and legacy through real conversations and meaningful stories, with purpose, intention and gratitude. We're your hosts. I'm Erin and I'm Kellie. We're sisters, best friends, sometimes polar opposites, but always deeply connected by the life, love, loss and legacy of an incredible woman, our mother Marsha. And today we're introducing you to the man who helped raise us, love us and walk beside us through it all. This is part one of our conversation with our dad, our hero and forever our Pop.

Kellie: 1:53

Now hear this Pop so the question is do we jump forward and start with the now is this story and work our way backwards, or do we start at the beginning? This is a special father's day episode of the pig Pop. We're so thrilled to be having this conversation with you today. Our life is one of extraordinary connection and one of choice, and I think that that's one of the most beautiful things about our story as a father and daughters and our family as a whole. So thank you for sharing this time with Erin and I today. I am just so excited for where this conversation is going to take us. I am, too. This is absolutely a highlight for me.

Erin: 2:53

For sure, Kellie and I have talked often, Pop, in preparation for this, that we've had a lot of incredible guests on this show, and we have some really incredible guests lined up, but this one does hit a little bit different.

Erin: 3:06

This is pure joy for me. I know that we are going to have a lot of laughs and probably a lot of tears, but I am really looking forward to this time that the three of us get to connect. This is really special.

Kellie: 3:20

So, as we get started, one of the things we'd like to do, Pop, is have you share with our listeners, because we know you so well and our listeners do not, and so we would love to start with getting to know you, so going all the way back to where you were born, how you grew up, some of your favorite moments and memories. You were born in 1940. November 19th is the day that you bless this world with your presence and you turn 85 this year, which is something we're also really celebrating, and we're going to talk a lot about your involvement in your community, your history as a physician, but let's start at the beginning, so that we can get to know a little bit more about you.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 4:08

It's a real pleasure to be able to visit with you guys. We all live in different places and time on, and we all see each other as often as we can, and so it's a real pleasure for me to be here and kind of share this with you. Nobody ever knows how their life is going to unfold and how different events in their life are going to shape one thing or another. But starting from the beginning, I was born in Kansas City back in 1940, which is actually just a couple of weeks after the US got involved in World War II in a way, and so I don't remember those early years much, except I was born in Kansas City and my dad he, was a city boy. He grew up in Kansas City and he went to Kansas State University and got a degree in chemical engineering. But before he went to college he worked in Kansas City for Procter Gamble, which was having a big start in their soap making business, and the big cattle pens of Kansas City were an option in the place, because cattle fat and that sort of thing gets involved in soap making, which is the way they started. So he actually got started as a teenager shoveling lye in the Procter Gamble plants there in Kansas City and then he went on to get a college degree in chemical engineering at Kansas State and then he went back to work for Procter Gamble as a chemical engineer in Kansas City. But all that change of starting with Kansas City was preceded with going to Kansas State University where he met I think it was some kind of a party or something at Kansas State where he met my mom. But she wasn't going to Kansas State at the time, she was actually a farm girl from western Kansas and she had gone to college, a college in Missouri Park College, and she was a music major, you know, very, very adept at the French horn and piano, and at some party in there and I don't know the details of it. That's where she met my dad and they got married very soon after he graduated and then my mom graduated as well and they had gone back to Kansas City where he was starting his chemical work with Procter Gamble.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 6:18

When I was born and I remember the story they tell me that the hospital that I was born in burned down and that was about the time that World War II started. So the army grabbed my dad and because he would have been more useful to go to Europe to fight. They shipped him to well, shipped the family. You know I was only probably three or four months old. They shipped to Tennessee where he utilized his leadership abilities to run a department of a bomb-making plant in Tennessee, and so my first years were involved in living in military housing in Kansas City. And I don't remember much about that because I was about four years old when we then moved, when the war was over. Then my dad went back to work for Procter Gamble and they took him to Cincinnati, which is where Procter Gamble's headquarters are now, and they were then to continue his work as a chemical engineer. So he was basically working in the chemical part of Procter Gamble.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 7:15

And that's when we moved as a family back to a small town just north of Cincinnati Now it's totally incorporated by the mega Cincinnati growth, but it was a little town called Wyoming, Wyoming, ohio, and the first things I remember about my life there with my parents was that I can remember my dad would carpool to work and that was back in the days it was right after World War II and things were really in kind of the industries and everything else you know, right up to the war years and I can remember vaguely we were living in a place was like an upstairs apartment, and I can remember one of my first memories of that was my dad carrying ice up an external staircase to the house because we had an icebox and I was an only child. So we moved to a neighborhood in Wyoming and then I grew up we're talking now the mid-50s and so I was at a high school that started out. I started out in one building which was the kindergarten through 12th, and so I guess what I'm getting at is that the neighborhood I lived in as I grew up in the 50s was one of these tight neighborhoods which we really don't see nowadays that much, but it was clearly of the time when all the kids in the neighborhood and I had a lot of boys my age in that neighborhood, and so I never really grew up as being an only child, because back in those days, other than going to school, when we were home, we were not in the house, we were outdoors all the time and we were. We had big woods nearby where we were. So you know, it was just. It was, you know.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 8:51

And then when I got into high school, looking ahead, you know I've been involved in some plays and I've been involved with some young kids in these plays and we get to talking about things. And there was one place where we were supposed to dress up like it was in the 50s and the director told everybody that they dress up in clothes like Happy Days, which actually the story of Happy Days takes place in the 50s. But Happy Days was actually a film thing that when they were teenagers the ones that were in the play with me when they were teenagers they were watching Happy Days in the 60s and 70s. So they showed up with not clothes that the kids were wearing in the show Happy Days, but the clothes they were wearing when they saw Happy Days. And so we got to rehearsals or like dress rehearsals and stuff, and people were talking about what they're going to be wearing, what they're going to be doing, everything else. And I graduated from high school in 58, they're going to be wearing what they're going to be doing, everything else.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 9:45

And I graduated from high school in '58, which was Happy Days, that was what it was all about. So they'd show up in these Saturday Night Live, you know, disco kind of clothes and all that kind of thing, and I said you know, that's really not happy days clothes, it's the clothes of when you saw happy day. You know they were identifying with the fact what they were wearing back in the days that they watched Happy Days. And I said, "no, happy Days is going to be the Fonz days. I had hair at that time and I told him. I said you know what's going to be, the duckbill blunts and the leather jackets, the engineer boots, and then some of the guys would wear khaki pants with pink shoes and white bucks and pink carnations and all that stuff as the late 50s, and they would say, well, is that right? I said, trust me, I know I wore all that stuff. You know, at one time I had hair and I had duck tails, you know.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 10:35

And all that kind of stuff and and we had the flat top haircuts, of course, and the poodle skirts, anyway. So I remember that, as I look back on my days growing up in the mid to late 50s, through middle school and high school and you know I look back on it and it was in the neighborhood I lived in is it was just, it was an idyllic time and I wouldn't say it was anything different than it is now. We all have our own experiences. But I just remember growing up when, you know, we would come home after dark and we'd be out all day and we'd ride our bicycles everywhere, all that kind of thing, and the parents were always concerned of what we were up to, but it had nothing to do with some of the nasty stuff that's happened to kids now. They weren't worried about us getting kidnapped. They weren't worried about us getting into drugs.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 11:19

I didn't grow up being what sometimes people refer to as an only child being spoiled and everything else. Now I was spoiled in the sense that my parents and you knew them, you know, grandpa and grandma, that my parents never spoiled me in the sense of kind of, let me do what I wanted to do just because I wanted to do it because I was a spoiled kid, but they encouraged me to do things so that I got a taste of things that they just wanted me to be exposed to everything. You know, I had to take piano lessons. Well, you know, I didn't particularly like to take the piano lessons. My mom was well into music.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 11:55

Then I decided that, well, as I got a little bit older, like in the middle school, then they thought I would, you know, I should get in the band and so I started out with the trumpet and my teeth were not working right for the trumpet and so, you know, I got involved in rudimental drumming, snare drumming and things like that. And you know, and I was in marching bands and all that kind of thing and I really went a long ways with drums in the sense of not trap drums like rock and roll, but like rudimental drumming, like you would see a percussionist in a symphony or, and they had me take private lessons from the guy who eventually was a percussionist. He was a percussionist for the Cincinnati Symphony but he was also the percussionist and drummer for the Philip Sousa band. John Philip Sousa, you know stars, his drives, all that kind of music.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 12:39

And so, you know I got along in that, and then, when I got into high school, I've been taking these lessons. In fact, I was in the high school band when I was in the fourth grade, and so I went on and I developed this. But by the time I got into high school you probably don't know this, but this is the time that rock and roll began.

The Sisters: 12:57

Yes.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 12:58

And so I got into trap drums, because which is what you think of a rock and roll band. And so you know, we had a band and we played and we did all this kind of stuff. And that was in the time when rock and roll was just starting. It was the late 50s. It was Bill Haley and the Comics, which was Rock Around the Clock, which was one of the original songs of rock and roll. And then, you know, when you got into the late 50s, I graduated from high school in 58. And then I went on to college and so when I got into college I continued to live with the music.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 13:37

But also when I was in high school and middle school, my parents would introduce me to all kinds of things just to introduce me to it, and even though you know you had to stick with this for a year and what it was. And so you know my dad was working for Procter Gamble and all that kind of thing and he was an inventor in the sense of his chemical engineering. I don't know if you know this story or not, but when he was a chemical engineer, a research chemist for Procter Gamble, we lived in a neighborhood where other research chemists lived and one of my high school fellow girls. Her dad invented Tide, my dad invented Spick and Span. Yeah, you may know that.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 14:09

That's right Now he didn't invent Spick and Span. What he did was he invented the formula for something that would work on what's not around very much now is linoleum. They picked his particular formula to then become what was known as Spick and Span, and that happened a lot in that neighborhood. But my dad was this engineer, my mom was this musician and those different aspects they just never really held me back. I guess that's what I was trying to talk about about. You know, spoiled only child is that I didn't have that kind of upbringing. Either my neighborhood or my fellow buddies or parents. They wanted me to be exposed to different things and so I got exposed to flying, because my dad was involved in that, and I got exposed to music and I got exposed to all kinds of things.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 14:56

And then when I went to college I went to a small college in Southern Indiana which Kellie knows about because Kellie went there for a short period of time later on in my life. But I went to this small college and when I was there I really didn't want to play in the band that because I had so many other things going on. So you know, I would sort of go in sometimes for concerts and I would just play percussion after one or two rehearsals for them. But also when I was in college I got involved in really really outdoor activities. It was a small school but I got involved in cave exploring at a pretty high level, involved in campus life and things. But my major was because I always wanted to be was pre-veterinary medicine and this small school, which was actually an excellent school academically all of your pre-med, pre-vet and pre-dentistry, biology, chemistry majors, they all took the same classes so that when they finished and they graduated they would have all the credits needed to go to either to veterinary school with pre-med, or to dental school or to medical school. Oh, and then when I was there is when I met what would eventually be Scott's mom, Julie, and so I got married to her virtually two days after I graduated from college.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 16:15

But I had my degree in biology and chemistry and so when I graduated from college at Hanover I got married within two days and the next semester I started into veterinary medicine at Ohio State and I always wanted to be a vet. Well, when I got up there and I started vet school, I really enjoyed it. But I kind of realized that time has changed today, but at that time I wanted to be a large animal vet. You know, cincinnati is just north of Kentucky and Kentucky obviously has its bluegrass and its racehorses and I was enamored with that whole business and I wanted to be a large animal vet, plus the fact that I had spent a lot of time on a western Kansas farm which was my mom's homestead and so I would spend many summers out there on the farm and so I really wanted to be a large animal vet. So I went to Ohio State, which is a very good school, and I enjoyed it.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 17:06

But I got to realize at times when it's not so much with small animals, and also went out to the farms and got involved with the large animal vetting part and I got to realize that in veterinary medicine there was a part of it, especially large animals, where the caring for the animals was based more on finances of the animal than it was the fact that it was a suffering animal. For example, if you have a cow and the cow was pregnant and she was going to deliver and it was apparent that the veterinary medicine at the time and when you were out there is, there would be a big discussion with the veterinarian, with the owner of the animal of. Okay, do we have a choice we're going to sacrifice the baby or we're going to sacrifice the mom, and the decision was made on how valuable would either one of them be to the business of raising cattle versus the expense? Are you going to do a C-section on this cow, which is a very expensive proposition? Your whole treatment was based on what's going to be the final outcome for the business. You got a cow and a calf, or do you have just a calf or do you have just a cow because you sacrificed one of the others?

Lew Thomas (Pop): 18:33

Sometimes the format of the taking care of the animal was based on things other than let's do the best to try to get the best outcome. In other words, we're going to treat this animal based on things other than let's just get this thing taken care of and we'll worry about the cost later. Now, at that time, which was in the 60s, early, very early 60s human medicine wasn't run that way. Times have changed, don't get me wrong, but at that time, which is what I saw was that human medicine was let's take care of the issue the best way we can, and whether or not it's having a baby or a C-section or not, but just taking care of. You know the individual comes in and you know it's an auto accident and they come into the emergency room and it's all holds bar to do the best you can for them, regardless of how much it's going to cost or that sort of thing. So I decided that right at the end of my first halfway through my first year of veterinary medicine, I decided that I would go into human medicine and so I interviewed at Ohio State, within house, there, with their medical school, and interviewed two or three other places, one of which was the University of Cincinnati, which was kind of a natural for me since I grew up there. But I ended up going to the University of Cincinnati.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 19:51

There's some things when I think about those things and you're talking about, you know, growing up in this little town and what my parents did is, you know, they were always behind me, whatever my decision would be. But trust me, my dad would, would not grill me in the negative sense, but he would make sure that I thought of all the possibilities and he never held me back. He introduced me to a lot of things, but he also, you know, did some very soul searching questions about you know. What do you want to do? You want to go this direction, that direction, and even when I was a younger boy, that's the way he was. You knew him and you could see that At the same time my mom would be behind that, but she was always there, in the sense of my mom, as much as my dad influenced me on how do I treat other people. I think they were both influential, obviously with me, but you knew her and she could be fiery, she was a fiery redhead, but she always I think for the most part, unless she was really wronged always looked at the best side of people. And I think it's the same way.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 21:22

Eventually, down the line, when you guys came into the picture, if there was ever a person in my life that would be emotionally related to me for example, if I would have a girlfriend or I would get married or I would have kids they took my girlfriend or my wife or the results of that marriage, which would be children. Both my mom and my dad accepted them wholly. And it was the same way with my wife, julie, when we got married and then Julie and I had our first child was a girl Laurie was her name and then eventually we had Scott and obviously they took those two under their wing, but they were their own grandkids, as it were, biologically. But then, you know, eventually, when life changed my relationship with my new wife after that and maybe her children, so that all of a sudden they had unrelated grandkids, they would accept them. There was just no ifs ands or buts about it 100%, and so I just flashed back to the fact that then, when I went on to medical school this is all in the context of the fact that when I was in vet school, even when I was in college, vietnam was starting, and that was back in the days when all the younger people don't realize it.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 22:42

But there were some really ugly things that happened in our country between the protesters and the Vietnam War and everything else. I mean there was the Kent State massacres where they shot students and killed them and the National Guard, and there was a lot of racial issues going on. Then there were race riots in those days just as big as any of this stuff just goes on now. And then in the middle of all this was Vietnam going on. That was still in the days where the men were drafted. So when I went to college.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 23:12

The draft was in effect and the only people that wouldn't be drafted were men who they could go to college as long as they maintained their grades and they did a regular routine, so that in four years they would have a degree. Well, the military would give a deferment to those men when they went to college because they would prefer them to get a college degree, at which time they would instantly go into the service as an officer officer. So if you didn't go to college, you went in, you were drafted and you went in as enlisted, which is nothing wrong with that, except that if you went to college you would get a deferment until you graduated and then, when you graduated, you would go to Officer Kennedy School. If you went on after college to some advanced degrees, you would get a deferment while you were going through that. And in my case I got a deferment to go to college. But draft was there.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 24:08

When you finished college you knew you were going to go into service unless you got. You were accepted and you went into certain degrees. In my case it was medicine. So I was deferred all the way through medical school. But the day I started medical school the military came to each one of us and said okay, you guys are going to go into service, we're going to offer you a plan. You make a decision on what branch of the service you want to go into and you can enter into a lottery draw. That said, when you finish medical school, do you want to go in as a general medical officer, or do you want to go in as a specialist medical officer, or do you want to go in as a specialist like a neurosurgeon or a surgeon or some specialty?

Lew Thomas (Pop): 24:50

So I got assigned to the Navy as a freshman in medical school. So I knew that when I graduated medical school I would go into the Navy. But when you got to be a senior in medical school, you could not only apply for you were going to go in the Navy, but you could also apply to the government. There was a plan called the Berry Plan and the Berry Plan was you could say okay, I'm going to go into this lottery. Draw on the Berry Plan and says I want to be deferred for another two years or another four years or another six years because I'm going to go into civilian training to be a neurosurgeon or I want to be an obstetrician or I want to be a general surgeon. And so they'd say, okay, well, you know that's going to be another four years or five years or whatever it is. And so they go in the lottery draw. And so I went in for the lottery draw to be a surgeon. But by the time the lottery got to my draw they had enough of their surgeons. That would be four years from then, but Vietnam was going on strong. So I got a two-year deferment to be a surgeon.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 25:51

And so when I graduated medical school, I went and did an internship at University of Colorado in surgery. And then I went and I did two years of training in surgery. At that time that was transplant surgery, because what the military was doing then is we need docs for this war in Vietnam, but we need more docs in two years to be surgeons than to wait for four years to be full board eligible surgeons. So we're going to just defer you for two years and you will come out as not as a board certified surgeon, but as what they call the class D surgeon, which meant you had two years of residency training but you had to go in because they wanted people out there in the field that were trained surgeons quote but they weren't necessarily full blown certified, you know, general surgeons. So that's what happened.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 26:38

I went through medical school, I went through two or three years of general surgery residency and then had to go in the Navy. And I went in the Navy and I had a choice of where to go with my training and I ended up going to a very, very remote naval communication station in the middle of the outback of Australia. I mean, it was 900 miles to the nearest other doctor. Wow, and it was a large, it was a radio communication station. And because the US Navy had to get a special treaty with Australia to have a US doctor doing medical care in Australia, you know, without an Australian license or Australian training, and so that the treaty was such that, okay, well, we'll send.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 27:27

There were two doctors to this base, but in order for them to go there to this base, since it was a very small town that was associated with this base in the middle of nowhere, that little town of Australians didn't have a doctor Part of the treaty was that the Navy doctors could take care of the Australian nationals that were at the base. So Australia would gain something. But in order for them to do that, the docs had to go to Perth for three to four months to study Australian medicine, which is the same as US medicine in a way, except that they call everything different. You know at the hospital they're not nurses, they're sisters. And you know it's not a head nurse, it's a matron. You know it's not Demerol, it's not a pain medication, it's Demerol is pathity.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 28:08

So I would go down there for two or three years but getting into the weeds of it but it does have to do with me as a person and done a lot of different things is that there were two doctors at this US Navy base and one of them the Navy said one of them had to be a surgeon. So I went there as a surgeon, as a class D surgeon, right. But because that Navy base also took care of Navy dependents, because it was one of the bases where the Navy people could bring their families. So you would have a guy at the Navy base that was a surgeon and then you'd have the other guy at the base would have to be either have had residency training in either pediatrics or internal medicine. So then the Navy would then send, because of their treaty with Australia, before we even went there, they would send us to Perth and the fellow that was going to be the these were all men at the time, so I mean, except for the families, but the one doc which was me would go down to Perth and they would spend four months in a Perth hospital before they would go up to the Navy base because that would satisfy Australia's non-licensing or whatever for us to take care of the Australian people. But it would also be because I was the one doctor that was the surgery guy for the Navy.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 29:29

So I studied for four months OBGYN. I was at the King Edward Memorial Royal Hospital for Women in Perth for three to four months. So I did nothing but OB. I did C-sections, I did deliveries, I did all that stuff and then I went up to the base and I was the surgeon for the base. But I was also for the community and for our dependents. I was also the obstetrician, gynecologist and the surgeon for the base and the guy that was the internal medicine pediatrics guy would go to Perth and he spent three to four months get this studying anesthesia. So when we then went up to the base, when we did general care, all of us did kind of general practice of taking care of both the Australian and the American families and if we had to have any surgery being done, I would do the surgery and my partner would do the anesthesia, or if there was a baby's need to be born, basically I would do all that stuff. And this was 900 miles from the nearest other doctors. So it's interesting is that that little Australian town there, the little hospital, was also the hospital that was serving the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 30:46

Now you don't know much about this, but across Australia they have these huge expanses of ranches that are massive and mostly sheep a lot of sheep, but also cattle. But these were so isolated that years before I got there they started this thing called the Royal Flying Doctor Service and these outlying ranches would have, they would be associated by radio with the nearest other physicians and they would have on the ranch a box that would have, you know, numbered pills, numbered this, numbered that and everything else, and if they had an issue on the ranch they'd call in hundreds of miles away to their support group and they would say OK, well, it sounds like little Johnny's got the measles, you know, give him this pill and give him that pill and watch his fever and if something happens, give a call back. I'll make rounds with you tomorrow, sort of like house calls by radio. If for some reason the people needed to be evacuated to a bigger medical facility, for whatever reason, the Royal Flying Doctor Service would contract with small planes. It would fly out to the ranch, pick up the people or take the doctor to see if they could and then fly them back to this place.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 31:50

It turns out that this little hospital up in Northwest Australia in the middle of nowhere was a Royal Flying Doctor base. So we were the docs that would go into the hospital, get on the radio, talk to these ranches about their issues and everything else. But along with that is that area of Australia had a very large Aboriginal group and the Aborigines would utilize our hospital via the Royal Flying Doctor Service to take care of their needs. I mean, I have stories I can tell which some of you may have heard, but I took care of these Aboriginal people. I can tell which some of you may have heard, but I took care of these Aboriginal people and I guess what it amounts to when my service was over two years later and I came back to the States and I walked into being the ER resident at Denver General Hospital, the knife and gun club and all that stuff.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 32:42

when I first started down there after I came back from Australia, it was like we didn't have anything in Australia. I mean, I had to. Sometimes we'd order a hundred bags of IV fluids and the box would come in and it would be light bulbs, you know, oh my goodness. We would call on the radio sometimes when we needed to talk to a specialist down in Perth, 900 miles away, and we'd get on the radio and say, oh, we just delivered this lady and she's you know, she's got she's RF, rh negative. And then we need to give her antibody shots and stuff like that back in those days. And so we say, what's the result of the test? We flew it down there two days ago and they get on there and says, yep, results are. You want to be? You couldn't understand them. So it was a.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 33:22

It was an incredible experience of taking care of people, liver babies, taking care of all kinds of stuff remotely. It was all the stuff, like you know. You know, take care of people old fashioned medicine, you know. I mean it was really. They got quality care but we didn't have a whole lot of backup stuff. So then when I went back to Denver General and I'm in there like this, and you know the guys, you know something comes in and the other docs, you know, say you know, order this, test, get that. You know, order that, get this and that and everything else. And you know I'd sit there and say, well, that's all well and good. But you know, doesn't it help sometimes to look at the patient, you know? You know actually hands-on, and because of that experience, no matter what direction I went in medicine, I've always felt strongly about that sort of thing.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 34:05

So I was into surgery for a couple of years, kind of augmented between surgery and urology, which is a type of surgery, and at some point I decided that I was having trouble with taking care of patients, operating on them, doing this and that. And then when it was time for me to get the know, get the weekend off, I just couldn't leave the patients out of my personal life. And you know, even though they were getting taken care of well and somebody else was covering and all that kind of stuff, I guess to some extent that's when I decided to switch to anesthesia, which is then what I trained in and you know I was doing when you guys came into my life. But that's sort of my professional training doing when you guys came into my life, but that's sort of my professional training. But after we got married, then when I was a freshman in medical school, I had my first child, which was Laurie. In fact, of our class of 100 in medical school there were only two women in our class of 100. Wow, but between the whole group there were only three that were married as freshmen. And the first ones that married that had a child as a freshman in medical school was me. I was one and the other one was Keith, who was, you guys know, uncle Keith Right.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 35:14

So here I am, you know, with Julie and we were in medical school, or I was in medical school and Julie was. We had a new baby girl and then when I was a senior in medical school, I had Scott, so he was three years younger and then I went on, you know, after medical school I went on my internship and residency in the military and all of that stuff, when I went to Australia one of the reasons that I was doing what I was doing there but I was allowed to take my family. So Scott, lori and Julie, my wife, we were all there in Australia for two years Now. Scott was very young at that time. He was only like a year or two years old, so he doesn't remember any of that.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 35:50

But Laurie was by the time we left there she was like six, seven years old. So she was very involved in the Australian lifestyle. She was into Australian brownies and all that stuff. And then we came back and I guess I'm just kind of rambling on and on, but that's kind of professionally how I went along. But I also think that my professional stuff and the decisions that I went and my parents, I'm interested in so many things. That's number one.

The Sisters: 36:17

Yes, you are. And two is we love that about you.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 36:22

I always, I guess I always want to learn something new. If I get interested in something, I go whole hog and learn about it, and you know whether it's flying or it's you know anything, you know I just I want to learn everything I can about it. So I think that all kind of goes down to my mom and dad on. I think they instilled in me for some reason. I don't know how much of it's natural or the way they handled me as I grew up, but it was always to be inquisitive about everything. And I might be inquisitive about to a point that I'm not interested in it, but if I get inquisitive enough to be interested in it I'm going all out.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 36:58

So then I finished my residency and we moved to Grand Junction and I went on the staff at the hospital. I think when I got there there were like five people doing anesthesia, one of them retired soon after I got there. But it was a very large hospital for the size of town and the reason was it was in the western Colorado and the nearest other facilities even close to it in size were to the west was Salt Lake. To the east was Denver. To the south was getting down into maybe Flagstaff, but down into central southern Arizona. So they had specialists at this hospital that was far larger than you would expect for the town that it was in. So I just had a wonderful practice and so I was there and you know, I was raising the kids and when Laurie was just finishing her junior year and Scott was, you know, three or four years behind, that's when Laurie died in a car crash.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 38:24

She had just turned 17. And I really had a very, very good relationship with my kids, with Scott and Laurie, but Laurie was the well you know, Scott was younger and he clearly was the love of my life too, but she was the love of my life. There's just nothing like a girl dad, when you have an accident like that. You lose a child, anytime. You lose a child, don't get me wrong, but just out of the blue, a teenager who's? You have all these dreams for any of your kids, but to abruptly just be gone.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 38:58

You know you never think you're going to say goodbye to your child when they go out the door and say, oh, I'm going to a party tonight. You know you're not worried about maybe she's doing this or doing that and everything else, but you never, ever think that that's the last time you say goodbye to you. They're gone. And that one instant, which you know, everybody has their moments, but in that instant my relationship with Julie and my relationship with myself, my world, changed 360 degrees. That's all I can say, because that started, you know, to go from that moment to my relationship with Julie, the mom, and, obviously, my relationship with myself. Then that's when a lot of things in my life took a turn. You know through stages, but it took a turn. You know, in a lot of things in my life took a turn.

Kellie: 39:47

I was thinking, Pop, about that specific time of your life and I was spending some time thinking about this conversation and all the layers of history and experience professional, personal, everything and one of the big things that struck me was the age that you were I'm fast forwarding a little bit to when mom passed, because you were 53, getting ready to turn 54. I'm 54 now. Mom was 47. Erin's 47 now, and by that time of life you had had all of these experiences and you had the sudden loss of Laurie, the loss of that first marriage, and then the loss of your wife. And I find myself sitting in this chair at my age, having come close to losing a daughter in a car accident, having lost a baby at birth, but all in all, everybody's been pretty healthy and I've been pretty fortunate to outside of losing grandparents that I love dearly. I haven't experienced the depth of those losses and sometimes I find myself saying I just can't imagine.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 41:06

Well, I think a lot of people say that and I struggled with that. Obviously I had some very serious struggles with her loss. But also on the heels of that, within literally months, and not long months, is when Julie, her mother, decided everybody handles grief differently she decided that she didn't want to stay married. So a divorce occurred within months of that and also, for whatever reason and everything else, and it was not anybody's fault. The gain was mine in a way. It got to a point where you started getting after divorces. You got things like custody battles right, and we're talking in 1981 that we not only had the divorce but I got this is 1981, I got full custody of Scott, a minor child for a man to get full custody where she had visitation, obviously, there's no question about that, but full custody was unheard of. So all of a sudden, I'm a single dad.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 42:13

Well, society in those days without even thinking of the details and everything else is the society and support groups for single dads was not at the same level as it was for single moms. Single moms it was tough, Don't get me wrong, but sometimes the emotional support for a single mom by society was completely different than the emotional support for a single dad and it was tough for me because I'd be at work and for some reason something might go on with Scott, whatever it was with my child, and I couldn't take off. I couldn't take off. That's not the fact that he wasn't being taken care of, I couldn't take off, whereas at the hospital I've had many, many of my nurses, that is, the female associates, and remember there weren't a lot of female doctors, but just for me they could get together and one nurse would cover for another nurse, so you can go home. You know, I got to go pick my kid up at school. Okay, well, I'm still on the clock, but I'll go and say, okay, that's fine. I couldn't do that and whether or not I could or couldn't, the societal support for the single dad was different than societal support for a single mom and I never felt bad about that, except the things that I wanted to do or could do for him was more of a challenge than it was for some others.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 43:36

And I remember going to a divorce workshop after it all started to happen and there were about 15, 16 people in this workshop and it's no surprise, except for two or three of us, they were all women, men, wouldn't go to a divorce workshop. It was unheard of. And we get in there and they were talking to us about things we can do to kind of move forward in our lives and all that kind of thing. One of them was getting to the point where she couldn't understand why I was having a problem with feeding my kid. I come home at night and it would be a problem with feeding the kid. And she said I have a problem feeding my kid because I don't have enough money to buy potatoes. And I would sort of say, well, yeah, I got enough money to find the potatoes but I don't know how to fix them. But it was important to me because I wasn't, I wasn't able to support my child in that one thing without getting in the fact that I could do it and I could learn, I could do all this kind of thing. But the concept was, looking at her, feeling like she couldn't support her, couldn't feed her kids, was a different reason than mine, but emotionally I felt just as inadequate as they did.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 44:38

So it was this divorce happened so close to Laurie death that then for years, years, including the years after I got involved with your mom For me to separate the issues of the whys or hows or whatever bag of weeds you want to get into, for me, to separate the profound meanings and issues of the difference between losing Laurie and losing a marriage.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 45:09

The issues were so confused in my head that I struggled with accepting any of it. How to handle it, those demons as they were the demons with all the stages of grief. You've got to go through the stages of grief, no matter how serious the problem is. You've got to go through the stages of grief. And if you don't get through one of the possible stages, even though you think you did somewhere down the road years later, it's going to come creeping out from the edge of the carpet. And that's what I struggled with for literally years after Laurie death and the concept, within months, of the loss of my marriage and to try to get some I don't mean to understand it, because you never really do, but to get enough peace that you can sort out moving on without having this rubber band behind you, kind of pulling you back all the time. Does that make sense?

Kellie: 45:58

It does make sense.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 45:59

Especially since you saw the struggles I went through for years.

Kellie: 46:02

I did, we did and we navigated all of that together as a family, after we all came together and became a family. When you look back on that period of your life now, Pop, how do you think you managed those multiple layers of grief and do you think that there was extra pressure on you because you were a medical doctor to pull it together and to be strong and to? I don't know if I'm asking this in the correct way, but I think you understand where I'm going with this. Did you feel the pressure to force your way through it versus allowing yourself to grieve through it? And this was a not just a personal loss within your own family, but also a community loss, because Laurie died with her two best friends. All three of those girls at the end of that year of high school died together that night on Good Friday.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 47:03

Well, that's all true what you're saying.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 47:05

I think the pressure of a profession at that time there's a couple of things that tie into it.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 47:10

One of them was just talking about the confusion I had of having Scott and being a single dad and being a physician and this concept of the divorce workshops and everything else that I was talking about that kind of support.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 47:24

I think if my profession and being a doctor in the town and anything else in reality is that looking back on it indirectly it turns out in that town was small enough, even though the medical community was pretty large, two or three of my very best friends were there to support me and they supported me in such a way. It was very difficult for them because they were very busy physicians but they would go out of their way to come to me in need to support me one way or another, without getting into a lot of details. So I don't think the fact that I was a physician had much to do with it. They were just good friends and that was the community we're in. But I don't think I had a lot of pressure, at least knowledgeably, to sort through this thing. I think from the medical community side of it is that I got tremendous, tremendous support. There was just no question about it and support for years.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 48:16

I think the medical community at that time was very supportive, except that it was very demanding of my time. In other words, when I went to work, 99% of the time I couldn't leave work. You're doing a case of anesthesia and you're involved in it. It's about the only person involved to all extent, except maybe the surgeon that can actually turn around and walk out of the room. You just can't leave. I mean, you cannot leave, and I felt sometimes that was frustrating to me. Not that I couldn't leave, it's that I couldn't take care of issues that my heart says I need to take care of, that were outside of that, like maybe an issue with Scott. As I look back on it. He was having his own problems. He wasn't having so much, I don't think, problem with the divorce concept. His mom was still around, but clearly he did have a loss and that was his sister and I just don't know. I'm sure he had his issues going on. He had a lot of support.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 49:13

The thing I tried to do was like I did with you two girls, is I stayed very much in part of his life, clearly, and I was there, maybe not as much as I would have liked to have been or maybe as he subconsciously wanted me to be, but I was there pretty strong in his life. Maybe I had trouble fixing potatoes for him, but everything else. We did a lot of things, a lot of dad-son things. Of course, I raised both those kids, and when you guys came into my life is that I always took time. I felt like I did meaningful time, not just with the kids but with each one individually. Although we did things together, there was always something. I tried to do it at that individual level at least once a year, something with just the two of us. And I did it with Laurie. Maybe it was a day, maybe it was a weekend, maybe it was a trip, maybe it was something like this, but it was not necessarily a family trip or an event. That was just, without any interruption or any outside influence. I took Laurie when she was like three years old. I took her up for four days up into the mountains of Colorado, you know, just camp with her, you know, in a tent, you know with her alone. But I did that, you know, and she was just, and she would just sit her up on the picnic table and it was a cold morning and wrap her up in a blanket, looking around and I do that all the time and I did it with you and at one point Scott and I moved out of the house and we moved into an apartment, we did things. We had an exchange student it was a boy of an exchange student in our place and you know I was dating around and I think you know this is getting into where I met your mom. This is the story that I always like to tell. So I was dating around, everything else and still full-time practice. I was really busy and you know I had Scott. Scott and I were very involved in skiing, as our family was. Before that we were very involved in skiing and that's. You know, that's an issue involved with Laurie and everything else and Scott.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 51:37

But at one point there was a group of women in Grand Junction who were single and they one of the gals or one or two of them had moved up from Texas, a big city I think it was Dallas, I'm not sure and when they arrived at Grand Junction they realized that they wanted to start some kind of a ways to meet. You know, not just the usual going to a bar, kind of hooking up kind of thing, but to kind of do something which they had done in Texas and that was that they started this group in Texas called Phoenix, which is, you know, growth out of the fire, the ashes, and the concept was they reintroduced it with several of their new friends that they had met over the years. In Grand Junction there was this group of gals and they were all single and they were middle-aged, I'd say maybe 30s and 40s, and they would send really beautiful invitations out to eligible pastors in town that were known respectable guys in town, to like an event where they would, you know, like they would meet in a party room in one of the local watery holes on a Friday afternoon, let's say at five to seven o'clock, and you know they'd have hors d'oeuvres and things like that. It was like a get together, but they would also expand it into sometimes parties at one of the girls' homes, and so I got one of those invitations and a couple of my friends had them too. I went to several of those things and one of them one time we were going to watch the Broncos play, and so you know we'd go there and you know people would bring their food and we'd have a little gathering and everything else and it all split up and at one time, right around Thanksgiving, one of the gals was going to have a Christmas party at her place.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 53:19

I remember going to this party and I noticed there was one gal I can still remember what she wore, which is a green and red outfit for this Christmas thing and she was in the kitchen talking with four or five other guys. I don't remember exactly what happened, but I caught my eye and at some point she and I were visiting. And then a couple of weeks later she calls me up on the phone. It was a little bit more aggressive than most ladies were in those days. She sort of said let's get together and do something, and I can't remember what we did at that point.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 53:51

That's how, in my mind, is the first time that I really noticed your mom. Turns out, as you probably may know, that it was before that time actually I don't know exactly how long before, but I think it must have been a year or two at least that she had breast cancer and she had gone in to have the various levels of the surgery for that. And I found out later, after we had met, that she remembered that I was the guy that did her anesthesia, anyway. So that's how we met. We started dating and I got introduced to you two girls at that time. I think at that moment Erin was five, maybe six, and you were seven years older or something like that. So you were like a preteen or almost an early teenager at the time. Kellie.

The Sisters: 54:39

Yeah, I believe that, Erin. You had just turned six and I was just 13.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 54:45

Yeah, when we first started dating, when I met you two I don't remember a lot of the details, but I remember at one point when we were definitely more of an item your mom had to go out of town for a few days and so I was sort of babysitting you guys and I made a cake. Of course I made a big frou-frou out of making the cake and everything else and I remember you and I ate and everything else, and so when your mom came back you were just telling her and you know, probably or that time I don't even know if you called me Pop then but you know that I had made this cake for you guys and she says, oh, you know, she was really moved by it and everything else. And I said, yeah, and I made it from scratch and and made a cake for him, and I was so proud of myself and you guys thought it was wonderful. And she said, but that's.

Kellie: 55:34

Well, you had to add the oil and you had to add the eggs and you had to add the water.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 55:40

Yeah, that's right.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 55:42

Well, I told her. I said what do you mean? That wasn't from scratch. I said you know you had to mix all this stuff together had to mix all this stuff together.

Erin: 55:50

Yeah, I made it at home it's homemade.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 55:52

I just remember that. That was early in my relationship with you guys too, anyway. So I just fell for her, you know, and we dated and she was dating another fellow in town who I knew. He wasn't a friend of mine or anything, but I knew who he was. But I think that that relationship was probably waning anyway and the timing was that I have to be there at the time. But I think when I met her it was very quick that the two of us had a relationship, more than just, you know, just dating and going out and doing things. There was a definite deep, experiential or whatever it was blending of the two souls, as it were. And you two guys coming into the life was at this time.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 56:33

Scott was, he was in high school, but early on she and I, both of us, incorporated into kind of our daily life the three of you. And so I remember she and I decided that we would get married, but we decided that on a secret. And I still remember that Scott and I had invited, or I had invited, marcia and the two of you over to our apartment and I had fixed dinner and we were all still sitting there at the table when she and I had decided that we were going to announce to the two of you and to Scott that we were getting engaged, and I just remember that scene she and I for some reason had to leave the room. I can't remember what it was. The two of you and Scott were sitting at the table. In some of this stuff probably Erin, probably only remember from stories. You may not remember because of your age, but Scott says that at some point, when Marcia and I left the room before we had said anything, what happened to you?

Kellie: 57:33

Scott turned to me and do you remember this, Erin?

Erin: 57:37

No, I do not. I am so excited to hear this story because I do not remember this conversation at all.

Kellie: 57:45

Yeah, you were so little, so sweet and so little.

Kellie: 57:49

I remember, Pop, where the kitchen was in that townhouse that you and Scott lived in, and then the stairs were up and there was a little bit of a loft over the kitchen. So I remember Scott's back was to the kitchen. Erin and I were on the side of the table facing the kitchen where you and mom went and as soon as you got up and left and said we're going to get food or dessert or whatever it was you were getting, and coming back in, Scott held up his left hand where his ring finger was and he winky winked and he's like ha ha ha, like they're gonna get engaged. We were all kind of on pins and needles and, sure enough, To me, that was really the beginning of our instant family, was that moment in time? Because we had all been together at the house that we were living in as the three little pigs and the house you were living in as two bachelors, and that was the moment that I think everything really changed and we truly did become that instant family and the rest is history.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 58:55

Well, the other thing that I remember leading to your mom is that I knew that she had had breast cancer and I knew that she had, you know, had the appropriate reconstruction surgery after that. I don't remember when I learned that she knew me back when I really first started getting interested in her and she was getting interested in me, I don't know when I heard that she already knew who I was because I had done her anesthetic sometime before that.

Erin: 59:25

For her original mastectomy. You had done her anesthesia.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 59:29

Yeah, but I knew it and it's interesting because, getting back to Uncle Keith, when I was sharing with Keith that we were going to get married and all that kind of thing and he lived in a different part of Colorado, we had a very strong relationship it's still due to this day and he was a practicing general surgeon over on the eastern slope of Colorado, north of Denver, and I visited with him about the fact that she'd had this history of, you know, breast cancer and he said, you know, he said it sounds like she's really doing well and all that kind of thing. And it was all positive From then on. It was you know, we're going to make this work and we did. We got married and that started that phase of my life and your life. So we got married and we lived.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:00:09

All five of us lived in the same place, in the same house. You know Erin was the little sister. You know we were blending a family. That was the first blending of families that I was involved in and then eventually as maybe from anybody that's listened to the podcast from Katie, which eventually that marriage occurred after your mom passed from the breast cancer and that was a blending of another family. I mean I can remember so much about in that house with the three of us, scott and everything else. Scott was in that house for about a year before he graduated and went off to school. I think Was it about a year, maybe a little more?

Kellie: 1:00:45

I think it was too, because he was 16. He was driving, so it was a couple of years that we were all together.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:00:52

You know it was a great family.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:00:53

It was during that time too that this difficulty with me, with these little rearing the heads of, you know, going through grief, that to me was unsettled, that there were times when I was just struggling still with Laurie death and that, you know, wasn't so much a divorce in my mind but it was the loss of Laurie and I had to get some really professional support to get through that.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:01:18

And it was the time when the three of us were all there Actually Scott, when I really started had to really get a hold of those demons was Scott was off to his first year of college at Colorado College, but you and Erin were still in the house. But during those years Erin was the little sister. I mean by what? Seven years for you, Kellie and Erin, and for Scott it was like 10 years difference and it was clearly as much as you can imagine it was two sisters and a brother living in the same house. The three of you were going through all the really kind of healthy, normal crap of teasing one another, getting mad at one another, whatever it would be for that age group of two girls and a boy, you know and.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:02:03

Erin got the brunt of a lot of it.

Erin: 1:02:05

Yes, I did. I still do.

Kellie: 1:02:08

One of my favorite memories, Erin, is the camera. Do you not want to go there?

Erin: 1:02:14

I knew exactly what you were going to say.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:02:17

What was it? Erin, Tell me.

Erin: 1:02:19

Awful, I was tortured. I had my own little camera with disc film. I remember disc film and Scott. I mean I'll blame him solely, but Scott and Kellie had found my camera and they had taken a I don't know some kind of index card piece of paper. They had written a little sign that said hi, Erin, and put it in the toilet and they took a picture of it with my camera. Well, I didn't know that until I got the film developed.

Erin: 1:02:51

I mean again the old days of disc film and having to get film developed. So I got these pictures back and I see this photo of a sign in a toilet that says Hi, Erin, I got so mad because I knew they had taken my camera and so of course, I probably went screaming and yelling to Scott and Kellie, complaining, crying about them stealing my camera. Well then I huff and puff off into my closet, crying so mad at them. So what did those jerks do? They took my camera and came into my bedroom and took a photo of me crying in my closet. So then I had to get that film developed and I have that photo. Yes, we'll have to post it on the website with this episode for fun. Yeah, so anyway, that's the story.

Kellie: 1:03:42

We did it out of pure love. There's so many memories that I have of that house and all of us being together.

Kellie: 1:03:50

Bilbo the cat who Scott taught to go to the bathroom on the toilet. That was back in the days when you could order items out of a catalog versus going to Amazon and having it delivered in two days. And I remember being in the kitchen and Scott had brought this magazine of this train your cat how to go to the bathroom on the toilet contraption and he wanted to buy it. And mom said if you will buy it and it works, I will reimburse you, but you're paying for it. So Scott bought it. It arrived, he put it on the toilet which was right next to the in that bathroom, next to the kitchen, through the laundry room, and one day mom was cooking Obviously, papi said she was a gourmet cook and so she was cooking and we were all milling around the kitchen getting ready for dinner and Scott was notorious for going in that bathroom and going to the bathroom without closing the door.

Kellie: 1:04:50

And so we're all there and we hear somebody going to the bathroom in the toilet and I remember mom, Scott Thomas!", and she was so mad at him and he came around the corner and he said what? And we all looked at each other and we all ran to the bathroom and I remember watching Bilbo Baggins, the Siamese cat, sitting up on the toilet just peeing away. Bilbo Baggins, the Siamese cat, sitting up on the toilet just peeing away. And then, of course, molly Brown, the chocolate lab, and Schmeagles, the Himalayan cat. All of our Christmases together. So many incredible memories of that home and all of us together from 1984, when you got married to 1994, when mom passed and she had gone through two more cancer diagnoses. At that point, when you look back, Pop, what are some of your favorite memories from that time of all of us together?

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:05:47

Well, that story, that's one. At one point we were all there. And then Scott, when he graduated from Colorado College I think, Kellie, you were still in the house, you were like a senior or something when he went to Antarctica.

Kellie: 1:06:08

I graduated from CU the summer of 1992, at one point he had come back from Antarctica and had gone to work in the Caymans as a dive master.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:06:20

That's another side of his story. But when he was down there he had his buddies that were doing this thing and at some point you went down to visit him and he got to meet his friends.

Kellie: 1:06:30

November of 1993.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:06:32

And one of his friends was a girl that worked in the nearby pub and you guys all kind of hung out together doing all kinds of stuff. Most of them were dive masters of one sort or another, but one of the girls was Emma. And then you went down there and you went diving with them and came back. All of us were sitting eating or something in the dining room when Scott called. I can't remember all the details, but it was something about the fact that he was getting engaged or he'd gotten engaged or something like that. But he actually didn't say it. But you and Erin and Marsha were sitting over at the table and without any names being named or anything else, it was just the fact that you know I may have said enough, so you could hear at the table that you got engaged or something like that, and you immediately said Emma.

Kellie: 1:07:16

I did. Yeah, that was a given.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:07:19

Which brings us a little further along here, is that you had gone off to college. Erin had gone to high school like a freshman or something like that at Grand Junction High School and I remember Marsha was not pleased with your efforts in school. You know you were doing OK but constantly getting reports from the teachers that you were just not applying and Marsha was getting very disturbed by that. So finally Marsha decided, in disgust with me, that we would send Erin off to a private school. So we looked around and we ended up with Erin going to Fountain Valley and she went kind of kicking and screaming but she decided to go because they had a very good equestrian department there of horses and they had absolutely a world-class soccer field right and you were really getting into soccer at the time. So you went and it turns out that that was a wonderful experience and that experience goes on and melds itself into Katie. But so Marcia was there and Marcia had decided, with some of her friends, to go on a dive trip. Three girls, they all went on a dive trip and when they came back I think she had some kind of a minor reason for this, but she went into the hospital to get an x-ray of her chest. I think it was a routine follow-up on what had been a negative cancer follow-up, and I knew the radiologist and he said they like to repeat the x-ray, which they did. And then afterwards it was over. They came out and asked me if I'd come in and look at the film and her lungs were just full of cancer and she'd actually been feeling pretty good. But that's when her journey of radiation treatment and all that sort of thing started.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:09:25

You were at Fountain Valley, Erin. Well, several things happened there, Erin. You had an exchange student that came back to the States to stay with you and Marsha was getting pretty sick. And so that's when I took your exchange student from France and flew you up to Jackson. We saw Yellowstone, yeah, and we were going to do the wedding for Kellie right, we're going to do it in our backyard and Marcia was getting very, very sick and I remember so much about that wedding.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:09:53

But that was when Marsha was really getting very sick. I mean, this all happened within months. And then Scott was going to get married down in the Caymans and Marsha was very, very sick. Marsha wanted so bad to be at the wedding. So the only way we could get Marsha to the wedding was. We chartered a jet which was all funded by my father and Erin. You and Kellie and I and Marsha on a stretcher, essentially on a bed, was hauled out to this plane. We flew down there for the wedding and then we flew back and we got her back and I think Erin was back at Fountain Valley and Kellie, you were married, but were you at home when I went back to the bedroom?

Erin: 1:10:39

I was home, I had come home.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:10:41

You'd come home and she was really, really getting sick and I think I was actually sitting on the couch with you then when we heard a gasp and I went back and she was gone at the house. A gasp and I went back and she was gone at the house. We knew she was in the final throws because she had really been hit hard with radiation because it had all gone up into her brain and she had radiation effects from her brain. I remember her when I wasn't functioning right and all that sort of thing and she was under hospice care. I had stopped working during this period of time basically to be her full-time caregiver. And you know, we went in there and she passed and it wasn't a shock that you passed because she'd been so sick. You know, it's not a secret, it was going to happen, but it's always a shock, you know when it does happen. But it was a tough time for all of us, obviously.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:11:33

But I had so many, so many emotions going on because I was listening to the podcast that Katie had with you guys. Is that that was the beginning of? I really wasn't sure, not right at that exact moment, but within you know, a period of time, weeks and months, whether or not I wanted to kind of get involved, you know, with another relationship. And one of the things that was an issue that came up when it was bothering me was the fact that I was having a hard time because, except for my mother, every female that I had entrusted my full emotions had left me. And the divorce from Julie was so closely related to the death of Laurie that, except for my mother, all women that would be you know, Laurie, your mom, Julie and the divorce they had left me, not necessarily intentionally, for different reasons, but they had left my life. And so I remember when I started dating again because I cherish my relationships that I had with women at all levels. When I finally started dating again, it was more of kind of a mechanical dating until I met Katie and we talked about it I think Katie brought it up in your podcast I wasn't to let any, any lady get into my heart because I didn't want to lose it again, um, but at any rate so that the concept that when laurie died, my whole world, at a lot of different levels and at this particular one, was the ability to kind of let emotionally into my heart another female after Marcia died was like, you know, we're going to go out and have a good time, but I'm not going to go anywhere even close to the next step until I met Katie. That kind of brings it up to then, when Katie came in my life and if you've been listening to the podcast, you've heard her side of that story, but I think you know.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:13:32

Getting back to Laurie death, it's interesting because if you saw the podcast with Katie, you know that she and I got eventually married and and then all of a sudden we had her four kids and my three kids, even though none of us were in our home except Erin. You were still in our home and directly. You were in college but you still had a distinct bedroom at our place. But we had a new blended family and for some reason and there's good reasons, I'm sure, but you know, when I married your mom, all of a sudden we had a new blended family that would be Scott and you two. And then when I married Katie, there was this new blended family of seven. But Laurie not just me remembering her, or Scott remembered her or anybody else remembering her. She, at every level except life, was part of our family.

Erin: 1:14:24

Absolutely. Yeah, it's actually really interesting. When you and mom got married got married, I was six it's right before my seventh birthday so I was so young that I didn't have even the recollection of Laurie death and that impact on the community. You know that Kellie was talking about and Kellie remembers the accident right and remembers that time, and I just don't. But it's always been heartwarming to me to hear you talk about this and even today to have this conversation, because I was so young when you and mom got married that I clearly never knew Laurie, but I feel like I was raised knowing her as my sister. You know there were pictures of her in our home and you always, you know, shared stories and very much kept her memory alive and so, even though I didn't know her, I have always felt connected to her in that way and I've always felt like she was my sister. So when we're doing things is Katie and I didn't felt like she was my sister.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:15:36

So when we're doing things is Katie and I didn't have seven kids, we had eight kids, absolutely. I remember one time Katie and I were getting a boat and we were thinking about a name of a boat Actually, names of boats with Marcia is another story, which is fun because when Marsha, when Marsha had her funeral, the little thing on the back of the funeral, uh, the remembrance page it has you know what the funeral service is going to be and everything else, and on the back of it was a poem that had to do with the horizon. She's not gone, she's just over the horizon. And my dad had gotten a boat in florida and, uh, named the boat specifically horizon after that. So give takes a few years after that, katie and I were at a point of getting a boat. We were thinking about what we were going to name it, and because one of the boats that was looking at was kind of a piratey looking boat, and so we got to thinking about it and we were saying there's a famous quote called a piece of eight and and so we thought, well, let's name it pieces of eight, which meant our eight kids. Clearly that was in that thought. It turns out that we was a reflection on the horizon, which was my dad's boat horizon.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:16:58

Somewhere in my wanting to learn more, I became extremely interested in celestial navigation, I mean very involved in it, and so Katie and I decided we would name our boat something to do with celestial navigation and the stars or anything else. And of course, a very important part of celestial navigation has to do with the horizon. So we said, well, horizon be great, except my dad's boat was named horizon. So we went on and went down the line of naming the boat a celestial thing, but it wasn't horizon. So you know, it's all these things like mars's death and our young family, that is, Kellie and a and Scott, our Christmas trees always, even to this day actually, but our trees, when we had our first tree as a family, had decorations on it with lorries Anyway. So we've gotten up to you know, kind of Marsha's death and then for me going on and finding Katie, but before Marsha died, during all this time when she was so sick and we were having the wedding coming on and all the stuff I just reviewed, you know, the going down to the wedding for the Caymans with Scott, your wedding in the backyard and Erin, you're going up with your French exchange student and everything else.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:18:18

All of those moments she was very, very sick and so at one point her office and my office were in the basement we're right next to one another and she'd work in there and do her stuff with her busy radio business that she was involved in successfully, might add. And at one point she called me in and she said I want to talk to you about this thing and I got this project I'm working on. And I said fine. So we sat down and talked. She had all these little boxes, a whole stack of boxes. They're small little boxes, various sizes, and she starts to tell me the story of what she wanted to do with these little boxes.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:18:53

A prelude to that story is that before we even knew she was sick and all you kids were off doing your things, she and I would go up to Aspen a lot. We had a place up there. It was an hour and a half's drive from Grand Junction. We were up there one time, just the two of us, and we went into a very nice jewelry store and we were just poking around looking and she was intrigued with these silver baby rattles and they were all different kind of rattles. One of them was like a little dumbbell kind of shaped thing, and one was I always think of it like a little Pop handle, and one of them was shaped more like a rattle, which you might think of a classic looking baby's rattle, and at this time, of course, nobody had any kids obviously because she died right after Scott got married and you got married, Kellie, and she had this idea that why don't we get?

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:19:45

Well, we had the chance and there was these beautiful rattles. Let's get a rattle for the firstborn of each of the kids. So I went into the office and she unfolded this story to me of what she was doing. Her concept was she was going to make a box and put in the box a rattle and a little handwritten note in the box that says this rattle is for your firstborn. Then she would wrap the boxes, turns out all the boxes in the same wrapping paper, and she had nine boxes.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:20:16

And then she said what she was doing is she'd make a list of what was going to be in each box.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:20:22

She put a separate handwritten note into each one, knowing who that box would go to at what point in their life.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:20:29

And the majority of the boxes were personal things from her to the new girls other than the rattle.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:20:34

For the most part it was either something very dear to her or it was something dear to her that I had given her or we'd gotten together like the rattles and that each box would be given based on this list, at important times of your life and I still remember sitting there with her telling me what she was going to do with each one, and she's putting these notes in there Eventually. She asked me if I would distribute those according to the instructions on the numbered boxes, and of course I said I would, and then that was the last I knew about it, except that at some point she told me where the list was and where the boxes were, and then she passed within days actually. So that was arguably one of my last really emotional talks with her. You know substance abuse Erin got married at some point, Kellie had a baby and Erin got a baby and Scott got a baby and events happened, you know graduations and all the events of life that she wanted to be sure she was a part of.

Kellie: 1:22:09

I was going to say.

Kellie: 1:22:10

You know I recall one of the things that troubled mom the most after her third and terminal diagnosis and the conversations that we shared during those final days, weeks and months of her life, was her sadness at barely being 47 years old, of all of these milestone moments that she was going to miss and just all the adventures and fun and laughter.

Kellie: 1:22:36

I mean as a family. That's what we really built our family on was fun and adventure and connectedness and togetherness. And I know it was sad for her, as it would be sad for anybody facing the final days of their life, even though we all know that none of us make it out of this alive. So the fact that she did this legacy project and that you agreed to be part of it to me is one of the most profound things that two human beings could do for each other in those final moments and it's been an extraordinary gift in our lives, kind of our little family secret that we've kept and held all of these years. But we're really going to unpack that boxes story to really help everybody understand, number one, what the boxes project is, what it means, why it's so important to us and how it kind of unfolded.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:23:37

Yeah, it's interesting talking about the boxes and the little office things, I looked around kind of flashing back to our family up to that point with the three of you, but how there was so many things that because it was a blended group just laughing like a normal family with the kids and everything else, I mean you were talking about stories that we were talking about with Erin and her age difference and the pictures that she took and everything else. But there were others that involved Kellie, you and Scott, that I remember constantly about the three of you and Marcia and I and things we had all done. It's interesting because I remember we were out to dinner a couple nights ago with some friends of ours. They were talking about they had just heard the podcast with you, with Katie, and I said I think they're going to be doing one with me and it's obviously going to involve since this thing involves loss and legacy and their podcast and that they're going to be chatting a bit about Laurie. And he turned to me and he's a close friend and he turned to me and he says how are you going to get through that?

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:24:40

And although I wasn't as emotional as I am right this moment, looking back on it and I said you know whether it's hard to get through, it is all a definition of what's hard to get through, even though it may be sad, emotional and all that kind of thing and the crying and the tears. I looked at him and I said there's no question in my mind about how getting through it is that every time I tell the story it might be hard to get through the story of a loss of your child and the things that go along with that. But I told him, I said I think of her every day, mm-hmm. And for me to have to tell the story or be asked about it or whatever it is, it's not how I'm going to get through it, it's not a matter of getting through it, it's just that it's nothing I do on my own personal level. Almost all the time Everybody has their losses, everything else. But as Katie well knows and I don't know if she brought this up less so than I used to, and I'm sure anybody that's lost a child, it could be any child. But you lose a child, and one, especially if they're young. It's hard to lose a child if you're 100 years old and your child is 80. But imagining your child growing up. The last memory I have of her is 17,. Even in pictures. The last picture that I have she was alive. So there's no pictures of her when she was 25, 30 or her grandkids or whatever it might be.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:26:04

But I find myself almost subconsciously and Katie sees this, and this isn't strange. It's not like I'm psychotic or anything, but I'll be walking down the street and I don't break down and everything else like I'm kind of right now. So don't, don't get me wrong, but Laurie had red hair and it was. It wasn't a cure up top red hair, it was just she was pretty gal and her hair went along with with her. But I could see somebody, like we're in a restaurant or we're walking on the street and I could be with Katie, she, she sees that there'll be somebody, say, on the other side of the street, a woman walking along. You can't really see her face, but she's got a red air, she's walking along.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:26:45

It's not that I stare, but I will position myself sometimes like even walk across the street, just to kind of look. It's not so much that I'm imagining it's her. You know, you hear these stories about people that you know lost on a river somewhere and all of a sudden they appear, but it's. It's like you know that. You know that's a 50 year old woman. Excuse me just a moment. Is that what laurie would be looking like today?

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:27:10

We celebrated her birthday here not more than a month or so ago, but she's like 60 or 61 years old and I still try to imagine in my mind what she would look like, not just what kind of person she would be. How does she treat people, what would her children be like, what would any loves in her life be like, what would be her interests in anything else? All of which I think about. But what she would look like almost haunts you and I think about that every day.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:27:40

I guess that's what I was just saying when I told my friend it's not going to be too hard to get through this thing, because the hardest of it, if you think it's hard, is it the memories, is it the tears? You know that can happen to me anytime, right, if my mind wanders off that way and I don't I don't want to not confront that, because if I'm afraid that, if I don't confront it, I don't want to forget her anyway. In a way, that's sort of the reverse, but the same concept of Marsha wanting to be sure that in some way or another her family doesn't forget her, she doesn't become. You know, my mom passed and that's it. She would be worried that all of a sudden. I think at some point it's been brought up in some of our discussions that she was always worried that she would just be a picture in the drawer somewhere.

Kellie: 1:28:32

Yeah, that was her worst fear was being a picture in the bottom of somebody's drawer.

Kellie: 1:28:38

I remember the day she said that to me and how hard that was.

Kellie: 1:28:43

And as I think about that now, Pop, with the story that you shared of the timing of the introduction of the boxes, they probably came very much at the same time, like maybe the pieces of that were all coming together for her. At that moment, as you were talking about Laurie, I was thinking about my own feelings as a teenager as we became a new family and you and I had a lot of conversations about this during the time that we were blending, because I was turning 11 and lived just up the road from where that accident happened in 1981. So I remember that accident and the impact of that loss. Even though Laurie wasn't yet part of my family, part of my life, she was part of our community, and this was a small community. And then fast forward through mom's divorce, the three of us moving out, mom going through her first cancer, and then us all coming together as a family. That was a standout memory for me. I was also approaching the age that Laurie was when she died.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:29:58

That's right.

Kellie: 1:29:59

And I remember the intensity of the feelings that I had as a girl, a teenager, an adolescent, not wanting to take Laurie place, and you were teaching me how to drive and parallel park and drive in the snow all those wonderful things that a father does.

Kellie: 1:30:19

And I'm a very sensitive, empathic soul. My whole being is very sensitive to energy and I always felt very energetically connected to and close to Laurie, even though she wasn't with us. So I would love to hear from you, as a father Number one, what Scott and Laurie were like as children, because we didn't get to grow up with them, we didn't have that privilege but then also how it felt for you to welcome because we were welcomed these two new daughters into your life. It felt like to me at that time that we were all filling a really big gaping hole in each other's hearts. And then, fast forward, you chose to adopt Erin and I, and we were 11 and 18. I had actually graduated from high school, was in between high school and college. That summer that we were legally adopted, which was, hands down, one of the greatest moments and greatest experiences of my life of my life.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:31:31

I guess to start that when Marsha and I started dating and getting serious about this. You know she and I talked about that, of course, and Scott was involved as well, and when we got married and everything else, there's no question in my mind, in your mom's, that you two weren't a replacement for me or Scott a replacement as his sister. But when we got married, on a more practical level, you got a teenage boy and a preteen girl, and one of the things that we talked about. It goes a lot of different directions, but one of them is that, not as a replacement, but Scott, he was used to having a sister and I was used to having a daughter, maybe not two, but having a daughter.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:32:18

So having two young girls in my family, I didn't see you two as a replacement, but it was comfortable to me to have daughters running around the house, and so it's not so much that you guys filled a void with Laurie being gone, it was warmth, it was comforting, I could tell. We told stories about Erin and Scott, but we got married and blended our family in the summer and that fall I may be a little bit off in my timing, but I think it was that fall. It might've been next year, but I think it was right then. It wasn't too far along is that they had this the Junior College World Series in Grand Junction.

The Sisters: 1:32:58

It's happening right now. Memorial Day weekend it starts.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:33:02

You were just getting old enough that you could go to the evening games without your mom or dad or somebody like that. You could go with your girlfriends and just hang around at the game and of course, scott went Prior to our getting together. You never had a brother, so you tell the story, but I'm going to go ahead and tell it anyway, even though you're there, because I've embellished it enough so that it'll make a better story. At any rate, you were there with your girlfriends and you were hanging around and there were these kind of sleazebag teenage boys underneath the darkness of the stadium were getting very inappropriate with you girls and it was becoming uncomfortable for you. And all of a sudden Scott was a senior, you know, and all that, with a couple of his cronies, walked around the corner and everything kind of diffused very quickly and I remember you saying, wow, it is nice having an older brother around.

Kellie: 1:33:57

There were several of those moments through the years with Scott and to this day I am eternally grateful for the gift of an older brother. He will never probably know in his lifetime how much that relationship means to me.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:34:12

And I will remember a story about Erin and the big brother there were several Is when at one point we had a family group and we went down to the Southern Caribbean on a cruise ship. So you were a fairly new diver and Scott was down there and you were a bit nervous anyway. So he comes around behind a coral head or something like that and looks you straight in the face and ripped his mask off.

Erin: 1:34:36

Yeah, gave me this big cheesy smile, and then I was laughing and choking on water. Yeah, that was a mess.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:34:46

So, at any rate, I think that you know, I mean it's maybe it's not as unusual as it sounds, but the blending of brothers and sisters was almost seamless because we had both experienced that Over the years. You know it's had some moments, but I don't think the moments were a whole lot different from any brothers and sisters as the years go on in their life, and I think the squabbles that we had as a blending family were not necessarily because of blending families. Some of it was just because that's what brothers and sisters do, right.

Erin: 1:35:18

Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that completely. It's so interesting and, Pop, we've maybe talked about this a little bit, but as Kellie and I have been especially working on the Boxes Project with Chris and all the months that we've been doing this podcast and had so many conversations is, it wasn't until we started having these conversations that we realized how differently we experienced so many of the same life events. And for me, this is one of those moments where you know I'm realizing that, even though we've had conversations about it, that Kellie and I haven't necessarily taken a really deep dive into having discussions and conversations about some of these milestone moments and how we experienced life so differently, life so differently. So, for example, you know, being only six years old when you and mom got married, I have very few childhood memories that don't involve you.

Erin: 1:36:26

I have only a handful of memories of kind of my early years spent on the farm and was so young when mom and Alan divorced. I don't remember that first cancer diagnosis. I was too little and so even for this I was so young when you entered our lives. I don't remember that conversation at the dining room table when you and mom got engaged. You are just part of my earliest childhood memories. So it's so interesting.

Erin: 1:37:05

There's so many things that I'm thankful for and so many incredible moments in my mind and memories. But you've just always been there, and so it's so interesting for me to think back on even you and mom getting married and the blending of our families is that I was too young to necessarily know any different, and so for me, I think I'll forever be grateful for the example that Kellie and Scott set for me as siblings of just helping to show and teach me what that looked like and as an example to follow, because I just didn't know any different. You stepped into our lives when we needed a dad and loved us unconditionally, while you were building a life and a relationship with our mom, and I've never imagined that it could have looked any different than that, because it was just always. What I knew was just this I am yours and you are mine, and we are a family in every sense of the word. So I'm really grateful that you and mom had those conversations that you did and that you very intentionally created that environment. I'm just grateful.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:38:29

I'm grateful that I was able to be there. I wouldn't be able to be there if it wouldn't have been other events, and I said this earlier. I use this phrase but I talk to some of my friends sometimes based on stories. I, essentially in my mind's eye, I raised three kids four actually and I'm a guy and I have a son and we have our relationship.

Lew Thomas (Pop): 1:38:51

It's wonderful, it's marvelous, but I think there's a real difference between having a son and having a daughter and I think you know I raised a daughter before you came into my life that I always feel that it's different, special and there's different ways people pull it off is that I absolutely, in my heart of hearts, enjoy being a girl dad, absolutely, in my heart of hearts, enjoy being a girl dad, and I've had the choice of being a girl dad three times. I've been enamored with this tv series called 1883, if you ever saw it and we talked to people about that show. You know he was a girl dad and I always felt like as a dad, especially a girl dad, that when my daughters come to me that I've got my girls backs yes, you do you know, it's a easy as I can put it, and I'm I'm blessed with the two of you and this is where we pause just for now.

The Sisters: 1:39:49

There's still so much more to uncover in part two of our conversation with Pop, including his life not just as a father, but as a grandfather, great-grandfather, every student's favorite bus driver and perhaps one of his most meaningful roles the keeper of the boxes. Be sure to join us in two weeks as we continue this unforgettable journey through life, love, loss and legacy B-I-G B-I-G. Hearing the stories of others helps us create a more meaningful connection to our own. We hope today's conversation offered you insight, encouragement or even just a moment to pause and reflect on the story you're living and the legacy you're creating.

The Sisters: 1:40:51

If something in this episode moved you, please consider sharing it with someone you love. A small share can make a big impact. You can also join us on Instagram, facebook or LinkedIn and connect further at thepigpodcastcom. And if you're enjoying this podcast, one of the most meaningful ways you can support us is by leaving a five-star rating, writing a short review or simply letting us know your thoughts. Your feedback helps us reach others and reminds us why we do this work, because the PIG isn't just a podcast. It's a place to remember that, even in the midst of grief, life goes on resilience matters, and love never leaves. Thanks for being on this journey with us, until next time. Hogs and kisses everyone.