DEPARTMENT:

A Time to Plant

My mind is humming with one of the Old Testament’s most quoted passages, Ecclesiastes 3. In the King James translation, this haunting poem begins, “To everything there is a season; A time for every purpose under heaven; A time to be born and a time to die, A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted...”

These verses began resonating with me after the death of my husband, photographer Jack Titchen, in March last year.

It’s not the “time to die” part of the poem that’s on my mind, though. It’s the poem’s quirky, succinct, ancient wisdom about balance in life, and especially the planting and plucking.

Lately I have been planting. Before Jack passed on, we had started repairs and renovations to our home, partly to make it safer as we aged. Among other changes, we planned a backyard patio, with solid stairs up a slippery grass slope. On impulse later I added a lily pond and waterfall, and a new tropical garden of bananas, papaya, ti, pineapples, ferns and flowers.

Kapahulu resident Kathy Titchen (inset) remembers her late husband, Jack, a renowned island photographer. Photo by Lieutenant John K. Titchen, U.S. Coast Guard.

I wish Jack were still here to enjoy all this. But gradually I realized I was also planting the seeds of my future without Jack. This transition—from wife to widow to single senior—can’t be rushed, I find, no matter how I try to impose deadlines on the process.

I used to say Jack had more lives than a cat. In his last years he battled several kinds of cancer and other health problems. He bounced back from illnesses that have killed younger men. In days he would be taking pictures again, riding the bus to visit his former colleagues at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, testifying at hearings on community issues that concerned him, working part-time for the U.S. Census Bureau and at the polls on Election Day, volunteering to help other seniors with their tax returns.

In the end it was not cancer, but a heart/lung condition he had since his boyhood in Sydney, Australia that did him in.

At 13 he was run off the road on his bicycle in a thunderstorm, fell over an embankment, suffered broken bones and a punctured lung, and contracted a nearly fatal lung disease. In his youth, bronchiectasis hadn’t been named, and the antibiotics to treat it weren’t discovered yet.

A young doctor who had lived on a Montana Indian reservation used the tribe’s herbal medicine to treat the disease, which was familiar to them. Jack survived, but lost most of one lung, and physicians said later his heart was damaged at the same time. My brother, an internist, studied Jack’s X-rays years later and said, “He has a time bomb in his chest.”

Given that diagnosis, Jack’s life was a tribute to the resilience of the human body and spirit. He won his first amateur photo award at 13. In high school, he was already having his pictures published regularly in Sydney newspapers. A radio operator in the Australian Merchant Navy in World War II, he was “borrowed” by the U.S. Merchant Marine, spent most of his wartime service in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, met and married his first wife, Edith Maxwell, in New York and stayed in the U.S.
For the next 60 years, Jack lived in New Hampshire, New York, Washington D.C., Florida, California and Hawaii. He photographed the prominent and famous, including all the U.S. presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton; won more than 40 regional, national and international awards; documented local cultures and events; and traveled a fair bit of the globe. He hiked, swam, played tennis, rode a bike. At 70, he pedaled from Hawaii Kai to Kapiolani Park just to prove he could do it—a pretty good run for a guy who was almost written off at 13 and carried a time bomb in his chest for 70 years.

We met when I joined the staff of the Star-Bulletin in 1969 and married in 1971. We were an odd couple—the blunt-spoken Aussie World War II veteran and the young reporter 20 years his junior, influenced by the 1960s counterculture. We fought constantly and loudly but were alike in basic ways, notably in our disregard for material possessions, false authority and status symbols, and our love of gypsy-like travel, exploring new places without being “locked in” to itineraries, reservations and schedules.

The house seemed eerily quiet after Jack’s passing. I would sit on the sofa watching the news and expect him to walk up the front steps any minute, home from a photo shoot, with his camera bag over his shoulder. At the supermarket, I would automatically reach for his favorite candy bars. Sometimes, when I made decisions I suspected he would disapprove of, I could almost hear him snap, “Be reasonable, Kathy.” I would talk back out loud. “Shut up, Jack. You’re not here now. It’s my decision.”

While I ponder where I am going from here, I embrace the time to plant.—Kathy Titchen

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