Stan Pocock Way Enough p. 258
After we took Dad home, I moved in to be with him and give support to Mother as best I could. Mrs. Blix, a retired registered nurse, lived next door. Dear lady that she was, she came over every day to help. She was a great comfort to him as well as to Mother, my sister and me.
Though still very uncomfortable, Dad no longer suffered great pain, but found the reality of dying difficult to accept. I think he believed it a sin to admit to himself that dying was a possibility: One must keep on fighting. Finally he had to give in, passing away quietly the night of March 17, 1976. The nurse’s aide, watching over him, was reading the Bible to him when he slipped away. She said that the last word that she could make out was “Amen.”
Amen indeed, to a memorable life. He was my dearest friend and greatest supporter, and I was to miss him beyond words. Along with Mother, Pat and me, he left behind a host of friends and admirers. The positive influence that he had on all of us, young and old alike, during his lifetime can scarcely be assessed. Rowing and racing shells were the media in which he had worked, but Life, and how it might be lived to its fullest – was the lesson he strove to teach. I doubt that the world often sees the likes of him.
We were so busy at the shop that there was little time for me to dwell upon our loss. It was a long time, though, before I stopped catching myself thinking, “I should talk to him about this” or “I think this is a good bit of work; I’d like to let him have a look at it.” The questions I wish I had asked him when he was still alive are legion.
Such is the way many feel about Stan Pocock. In reflecting on the end of a memorable life, one speaker at the memorial summed it up with the rowers’ version of “Amen” – Way Enough.
We hope this series explains how honored we – and The Riverside – are to celebrate the only wooden Pocock shell ever to bear the name of this rowing legend, Stan Pocock.
Father and Son. From Way Enough by Stan Pocock