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The 72-year-old history professor is living with a terminal case of lung cancer that was diagnosed last October. He has been enrolled in hospice care since February and already has outlived his six-month prognosis.
Eight months ago, a severe reaction to chemotherapy drug treatment forced Hitchens to say goodbye to his campus seminars and lectures that brought American history to life in colorful and unconventional ways to thousands of students over his 49-year career, including 41 years at Evergreen.
Now he’s conducting a much different kind of class from the master bedroom of the west Olympia home he shares with his wife and best friend, Joan Hitchens. There are no tuition fees or books to buy or paper diplomas to pursue. Friends, colleagues and family members just show up at his bedside to share laughter, tears and stories with a man who is showing people how to die with dignity, peace and humor.
“I’m still teaching,” Hitchens said during a two-hour visit I had with him recently. “I just never would have predicted it would be in this way.”
“He’s teaching us how to die,” said Tom Foote, a longtime Evergreen professor who met Hitchens in 1972.
Among the frequent visitors to the Hitchens home is fellow Evergreen history professor Tom Rainey, who first taught an American studies class with Hitchens in 1972 and filled in for Hitchens when he had to leave Evergreen suddenly this year. He’s not surprised by Hitchens’ ability to take on this end-of-life journey with his spirit and intellectual curiosity intact.
“He’s taken it with a natural stoicism one would expect from a good historian,” Rainey said.
For those unable to visit in person, the Hitchenses have created a website (www.davidlhitchens.org) where visitors can learn more about hospice care and Hitchens’ life. It’s also a place to read and enter messages to Hitchens.
Most of the written accounts are from former students scattered all over the world. There’s a theme in these missives, which total more than 80. Hitchens guided, taught, counseled and prodded them in ways that transformed their lives.
Saed Hindash, a 1992 Evergreen grad and photojournalist for The Star-Ledger newspaper in Newark, N.J., had this to say:
“When I couldn’t find anyone to sponsor me at Evergreen, you saw value in my career, stepped up and took on that responsibility as a sponsor,” Hindash said. “You believed in me and my future. I am extremely grateful.”
And this from former student Dreva Mower: “You inspired me perhaps more than anyone in my entire life,” she said. “You helped guide me through my first year of college and I will always remember you for that. You truly are a gem.”
Friends are weighing in, too, including Burt Meyer, who played mandolin in a bluegrass band with Hitchens – he played guitar – that Hitchens dubbed Snake Oil nearly 40 years ago.
“We are blessed to have Hitch with us, still importing both wisdom and balderdash,” Meyer wrote. “And we’ll try not to squander the time that he and we have left.”
The tributes pouring in make Hitchens a little uneasy, although you can see in his eyes that it brings him joy to know that he has touched so many lives so deeply.
“It’s stunning what people have to say,” he said. “I’ve never quite known how to handle praise.”
Born in Oklahoma to Native American parents in 1939, Hitchens grew up in a home where his Indian identity was camouflaged, not embraced.
“I didn’t know I was an Indian until I was nine,” he recalled.
An avid reader – he read “Moby Dick” at 12 – and curious child, Hitchens knew from an early age that he was bound for college.
“With my mother is wasn’t a matter of if I went to college; it was when you go to college,” Hitchens recalled.
Hitchens has established the David L. Hitchens Scholarship at TESC in memory of his mother, Frances Marie Rasmussen. He expects it to be fully endowed by 2014, helping students who are the first in their family – like he was – to attend college.
A natural-born storyteller, Hitchens gravitated to history as his major and his life’s work. But even as a young teacher bouncing around from one small college to another, he chaffed at the traditional education model that had disciplines taught in isolation.
“To be a decent historian, you’re going to need to know about a whole lot of different things,” Hitchens said. “History is an interdisciplinary course.”
At 31, he was the youngest member of Evergreen’s 18-member planning faculty and the first to arrive on the yet-to-be-completed campus in July 1970 to map out an education model that shunned grades and top-down learning in favor of an interdisciplinary approach that fit the bearded, free-willed Hitchens to a tee.
He was also the last of the planning faculty members to retire, despite three bouts with cancer than began in 1989.
Hitchens is also known for leading the charge that ousted former TESC president Joseph Olander for falsifying his resume. The faculty paid its respects to Hitchens by naming him faculty commencement speaker in 1990.
His take-into-the-world message for the graduating students concluded with Hitchens encouraging them to let truth, honesty and integrity guide their lives.
Former Gannett News Service reporter Bob Partlow was at the commencement exercise, having chronicled the Olander story, relying heavily on Hitchens as a source.
“They broke the mold when they made Dave,” Partlow recalled. “He stuck by his guns and prevailed in the end.” The decision to enroll in hospice care followed a family meeting last winter that included his wife and six children, five from a previous marriage.
They all accepted his wishes to have medical care that focuses on pain management, comfort and quality of life for the time remaining, rather than trying to treat the cancer. No more trips to the hospital or the doctor’s office. The hospice workers tend to Hitchens’ needs in his home, in his bed, often with his cat, Troubles, by his side.
“It’s the best thing we could have done,” Hitchens said of opting for the care provided by Providence SoundHomeCare and Hospice. “We’re at a moment where we have to say we’re facing this the best I know how.”
(For the record, my partner is a bereavement counselor for the Providence hospice program. I’m also a 1976 Evergreen graduate, but never took a course from Hitchens.)
As the days and months pass, including a birthday this month, Hitchens has turned the experience into a celebration of life and opportunity to tie up loose ends.
“It’s given me time to repair some frayed relationships with my older children,” he said. “One of the things I’ve learned is that I wasn’t as bad of a father as I thought I was.”
The decision to chronicle the act of dying so publicly with the website rests largely with his wife, Joan. She is a hospice volunteer and founder of a bereavement writing program called Storybooks for Healing.
The website is sprinkled with facts about hospice including that the median time someone spends on hospice is just 17 days, which isn’t enough time in most cases for the patient and the family to find closure, Joan Hitchens said.
Here’s another interesting statistic: A study presented in the New England Journal of Medicine last year found that terminal lung cancer patients who turn to hospice care shortly after their diagnosis were happier, more mobile and in less pain as the end approaches, living some three months longer those without hospice care. Spiritual but not religious, Hitchens said he is far less fearful of death than he was during some of his previous bouts with life-threatening illness.
“I do believe that there’s a life force that infuses all living things,” he said. “At the end of life, I’d like to go exploring – put my mind on a space ship and shoot it out into the universe.”
The other day he asked his hospice nurse, Jeana Noble, if she thought he would live long enough to mark the one-year anniversary of his terminal cancer diagnosis – Oct. 29, 2010.
Noble said she wouldn’t be surprised if he lived another month or more. But then again, the answer is cloaked in a mystery that Hitchens is willing to accept.
John Dodge: 360-754-5444
jdodge@theolympian.com
