“Invictus” and Paul Christensen

January 24, 2001

Today Dad and I were in search of a cure for his swollen eyelids and swollen mouth. He has been suffering from a cold, a sinus infection, and eventually some other awful symptoms. We saw Dr. Isaacson and Dr. Kelly Hubbard (Don Holdaway’s new partner). After Dr. Hubbard examined Dad, he said he needed more information and would be back soon. Dad was snoring by the time he returned. Dr. Hubbard has just come from the Mayo Clinic. He had called the department head there to see if he had ever seen angioedema with Stevens Johnson syndrome. He had, so Dr. Hubbard and he concluded that is what Dad may have. He suggested we report back to Dr. Siler (Dad’s eye doctor), which I did. We also talked to Reed twice and he talked to the allergy specialist at Tripler. So we have information from six doctors.

Still, Dad is suffering. Earlier this week when his eyelids were inflated balloons, we thought it was bad. Then he got cankers and his lips were swollen beyond recognition. Even now eating is nearly impossible because of pain. He takes food through a straw.

While we were first waiting for Dr. Hubbard to come into the room, Dad said, “There’s a poem that keeps going through my head these last few days. Clare used to sing it.”

“Say it for me,” I encouraged, suspecting which one it was. I hope I will always remember the scene. With effort he formed each word around the obstacles in his mouth. He began,

Out of the night that covers me.

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

He paused, carefully swallowed the emotion, then moved on.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed. . . .

He was looking straight ahead. I was sitting beside him, studying his misshapen, guileless face. He wasn’t performing–just carefully remembering each meaningful word.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul.

(“Invictus” by William Ernest Henley)

Bernard Niels Christensen

Bernard Niels Christensen, our grandfather, is another of those people that “I have loved long since, and lost a while”.

Maud’s Life History will be more meaningful if we share a bit of Bernard’s beginnings.

Bernard’s mother died in 1894 when he was 17. As the oldest son in a family of seven--with three children younger than 12--he felt a large responsibility. He worked summers at Saltair--something of an “amusement park” in its day.

Two years later more sadness came. His Danish grandmother, Ellen Poulsdatter Christensen, died.

“By the time his grandmother had died, Bernard had grown to be six feet in height. He told his father that he was going to get a job at the sugar factory in Lehi. Niels said, ‘Oh you can’t get a job, they are not even hiring married men.’ Bernard was a man of no small determination. For the next seventeen days, he was at the factory twice each day. On the morning of the seventeenth day, someone was ill and Bernard was hired.

For more on Bernard, click here.

Life of Maud Rosalie Driggs Christensen

by Herself

It was the 25th of October 1877, when I first saw the light of day in the small city of West Jordan, Utah. My father was a merchant in this smelting town and I was the fourth child of Benjamin W. Driggs and Rosalie Ellen Cox--the other children being Frank Milton, Howard Roscoe, and Leonora.

Although only four years old when we moved away, many incident of those days were vivid to my young mind. We lived in what was called “The Factory House” with three apartments and agreeable neighbors, among them the May family. I remember our dolls and chairs on Christmas, the fun we had digging wells in our pasture near by. Then our baby Clarice died of whooping cough, leaving a broken-hearted mother.

To see all of Part 1--Click here.