1968

During the turbulent times of the late 1960s in the United States, a family experiences death, and the dread of war.

BY R.J. CHISHOLM

IF THE SIXTIES CAME AS A SHOCK to most people, no year was more shocking than 1968. It was a year like no other in living memory, which shook the entire world not by a single cause, but by a series of apparently unrelated events which still seemed to spring from the same mysterious source. Perhaps it was the zeitgeist which in the course of one year gave rise to protests, assassinations, riots, rebellions, and armed conflicts all around the world. This turbulent spirit of the times also forced America to confront such issues as racial inequality and war and peace, provoking fundamental questions about the character of the nation. The national self-reckoning was undertaken not in a mood of sober self-reflection, but in something more akin to psychic breakdown.

1968 also brought forth a number of shattering developments for my family. Perhaps everyone felt the entire world was being transformed by a wild spirit of rebellion that threatened to overturn every norm people lived by. But with my oldest brother Rod training for an assignment to Vietnam, and my youngest sister Gina suffering from acute childhood leukaemia, the turmoil felt deeply personal. As the war in Vietnam continued to escalate, Gina’s illness continued to advance despite three years of intensive medical treatment. A sense of impending doom pervaded almost everything, and made it hard for us to imagine that things could ever improve. And as the year went on, they never did.

By early March, LBJ realised how unpopular both the war and his presidency had become when he narrowly won the New Hampshire primary. A few days afterwards, Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s brother and an increasingly vocal critic of the war, declared his presidential candidacy. On the last day of March in a nationally televised speech, a weary Johnson announced that he was no longer running for reelection and offered to halt the US bombing of North Vietnam as a good faith gesture for holding peace talks with Hanoi. It was a remarkable reversal, almost an admission of defeat. But Johnson’s overture also seemed to offer hope that the country would soon find itself on a more peaceful course. The hope was shattered a week later by the assassination of Martin Luther King jr. By terrible coincidence, the murder happened the day before Gina died in a Washington hospital.

I knew Gina was very ill, but she had been very ill before and always seemed to bounce back to relative health. I didn’t believe this time would be any different. My grandmother, who came to Washington to help out at home while my parents were occupied with Gina, tried to offer me a gentle warning. “Do you think this might be the end?” she asked tentatively. Thinking my grandmother wanted to be comforted, I assured her that Gina would pull through this latest bout of illness just as she had always done before. It never occurred to me that she might know more about Gina’s condition than I did. I had no idea Gina was about to die.

Within hours of King’s assassination rioting broke out in Washington’s black neighbourhoods and continued for the next three days. Troops were summoned to protect government buildings and help the police quell the violence. But even with such a formidable law enforcement presence, thirteen people were killed and over a thousand more were injured. Many privately owned buildings in black neighbourhoods were destroyed or damaged, mostly by arson which left some city blocks as devastated as a war zone. Rod and Barbara had the misfortune to be going to Gina’s hospital as the riots broke out, and were driving through a black neighbourhood just as it was hit by rioting. Those of us at home became more worried about them than we were about Gina. Luckily, they passed through the riot zone unscathed and returned home safely later that evening. But our relief was soon forgotten when Gina died the following morning.

For my mother, the last twenty four hours of Gina’s life was a period of increasing agony. Knowing Gina’s illness was finally reaching its fatal end, she felt utterly helpless. She also couldn’t help but be aware of King’s murder and of the rioting on the streets not far from the hospital. She had formed a bond with some of the African-American nurses who had attended to Gina in the last weeks of her life. But when King was killed they were reeling from a shocking loss themselves and were gripped with fear over the safety of their families in the rioting after the assassination. She felt torn by the grief they felt, and the grief and anxiety that were already beginning to overwhelm her. Yet, she still felt abandoned and thought the nurses had neglected Gina in her final hours. Gina’s illness had always summoned conflicting, sometimes unpalatable emotions in my mother. She could never see why her precious little girl had been afflicted with such a hideous disease. She wondered why God would let a child with such loving parents die when other children without parents to love them would continue to live in loveless misery. But then she would realise that children who had never been loved would suffer even more by dying alone, and she would feel guilty for her uncharitable thoughts.

Barbara and I were kept uninformed about the seriousness of Gina’s illness, so the news of her death came as a complete shock to us. Taken out of school before the end of the day, we thought Gina was coming home, and were excited to be seeing her after her long absence. But when we met my father, he wore a stony facial expression which remained unaffected by our high spirits. Dressed in his uniform, he sat in the front passenger seat as Johnnie drove our big, dark blue Oldsmobile in silence. Once the car was in motion, my father turned to face us in the back seat and, as solemn as an undertaker, uttered words I will always remember: ”Your little sister, Gina, died this morning.” Barbara and I burst into tears, sobbing concussively in disbelief. I experienced a brief moment of timelessness and observed our outburst as if disembodied. There was a violent quality to our weeping, originating from that abrupt sense of loss that drives some people to pull out their hair or beat themselves in paroxysms of grief. Death, a mere concept to us before, now became an unbearable reality. Our little sister had just died and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

We were still crying when we arrived home, and went straight to my parents’ bedroom where we found our mother lying in bed, weeping. Barbara and I lay down beside her and wept along with her, barely saying a word. Words seemed superfluous that day, and a household that was usually noisy with the clamour of family life suddenly felt the hush of a funeral parlour. Encountering each other in tender silence, we all shared a feeling of loss which could cause one of us to break into tears spontaneously. The only time I ever saw my father cry was when I found him lying alone on his bed with his upper body propped up by an elbow. Without any greeting, I lay down and wept in silence with him as we passed tissues to each other. My father had always been a strong and comforting presence for me, but I never felt closer to him than in this moment of shared grief. When we finished crying we separated wordlessly, and never once spoke of the incident to each other. Tears were all too common for my family that year.

Six weeks after Gina’s death, Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles immediately after winning the California primary, making it seem as if the violence of the year would never cease. Days after the slaying, I woke up screaming from a nightmare I couldn’t quite remember, though it was clearly connected with the death of Gina and the murders of King and Kennedy. Hearing me scream, my father came into my bedroom and comforted me as I wept. He said almost nothing, but his presence was enough to assure me that I wasn’t about to be swallowed up by an unfathomable darkness. Still, my nightmare had been based on the dreadful reality of recent events and would endure long after the night of my dream.

The annus horribilis of 1968 continued in November with the election of the devious Richard Nixon as president, an apparent omen of worse things to come.

As terrible a year as 1968 had been for my family and the country, it seemed possible that 1969 could be even worse as the war in Vietnam continued to escalate, and my oldest brother Rod would be going there to fight. The world still appeared in flames that would never go out.

R.J. Chisholm has had two books published by Triarchy Press: The Wisdom of Not Knowing [2016]; and, Uncovering Mystery in Everyday Life: Confessions of a Buddhist Psychotherapist [2021]. Born and raised in an American military family, he now lives in the UK and works as a psychotherapist.