This is not my usual year end letter but more of an unapologetic reflection on the passing of my Father and our genealogy.
My Dad, David Vaughan Goodlett (1931-2024), was 44 when his Father, David Kyle Goodlett (1894-1975), passed away aged 81. By contrast I was 63 this year when he passed aged 92. Even if I live as long as he did, I will have lived longer with him than without him whereas he spent half his life without his Father. This no doubt changes your perspective. As a child it seemed like every other weekend was spent on the farm helping my grandparents. That experience of “family vacations” certainly shaped me as did my many memorable lessons from Dad. Notably, he saved me from the miniskirt induced malaise of math of my early teens by drilling me on the basics or maybe he was just teaching me how to focus on a goal.
He fell and broke his hip while burning brush in the pasture just weeks away from turning 90 and not far from where he had been born. He had to crawl back toward the house where Mom found him in terrific pain. As a result he spent his 90th birthday in hospital. By then - December 2021 - we were only a few months over a year into our Canadian tenure and still mostly sequestered thanks to the COVID pandemic. I finally got home the next Spring, my usual time for visiting, and by then he had recovered physically. However, he had lost the ability to finish sentences, likely a result hastened by the pain medication that had him ripping out all his tubes in hospital. Older folk don’t metabolize medicine as well as they use to, which can cause all sorts of problems from dementia to simple confusion. So I suspect he was either allergic to the medicine or it was at an effective concentration much higher than intended if he wasn’t metabolizing it well. Regardless, by the time I saw him in Spring of 2022 for the first time since 2020, he shook uncontrollably when he saw me approach the car at the Huntsville airport. Startling, it was the kind of whole body uncontrollable shake when you have an overwhelming emotion come over you. I had not seen him so vulnerable since his brother’s funeral a few years before when he had me sit next to him. Touching as it was, he couldn't really converse much. Just said my name “David” as if relieved, hugged me and then fell fast asleep as soon as we began the 45 min drive toward the farm in Moulton. Prior to this, my weekly phone calls with Mom and Dad had become simply one on one with Mom as he was too confused to chat, which was worsened by being unable to hear well.
We did manage to converse a bit later that week when he was rested, but the prior year’s visit was the last time I recall having a coherent chat with him. We were seated out back of the house looking East out on the pasture that has been farmed by our ancestors since the Trail of Tears ripped the Cherokees away. We talked about the old barn that he and his Dad had built when my Grandfather returned to farm in the 1950s. They had failed to brace the walls properly and as they were working on the roof frame above, the walls bowed out and they sank to the ground. I remember the barn, Sam the mule and a tractor my Grandfather had. Apparently, before the red international my Grandfather had used Sam to plow. Hard to imagine, but he had been born into a very different world without mechanization and even cleared trees by hand in preparation for the Tennessee Valley flooding projects that electrified the South. Until this chat I had no idea that he had helped his Dad dress hogs after slaughter. I knew my Grandfather loved ham, kept pigs and had a smoke house, but I had no idea mine could dress a hog then pack the meat in salt for preservation. There had always been a strange apparatus hanging between two large trees in the pasture near a rock lined well dug in the late 1800s. At this place, between trees and near the well, which had been used for refrigeration of milk and eggs, etc, they killed and dressed hogs. Thinking of those two men, this week I made a porchetta for me and Graham to nibble on for Christmas week snacks. My Grandpa would have loved the garlic infused pork belly oozing luscious fat. I can’t eat ham without thinking of him, but my Dad loved fried catfish, chicken livers and oysters. The catfish often came from the pond - aka the cow's waterhole - near where he said he was born or at least lived as an infant in a “house” with no running water. Only the storm shelter dug into the earth remained by the time I roamed the farm in the 60s – 70s.
He and Mom retired to the farm when he was 59 and she 54. This was right around the time Donna and I moved to Richland, WA after I finished my Ph.D. in biochemistry at NC state in ’91. Dad, ever a busy body like his Mom, started a lawn service, grew roses and pursued his passion for wood carving. His Mother, Sarah Elizabeth Holland Goodlett (1900-1998) aka Sallie Bet was still alive when they retired. She would soon fall though and spend the rest of her years in the Moulton nursing home where Daddy visited her daily for the 4-5 years that she lingered. A devotion equaled possibly only by my Mother’s devotion to him as he failed over the course of his last two years. No one talks about changing diapers of old folk as they linger, but this is how it goes. Exhausting acts of love. He maintained his health pretty well until his 80s. The radiation treatment for prostate cancer had saved him in his early 60s, but decades later had devastating consequences on his bowels. No one talks about this either I guess because everyone is happy to just have their loved one around and doctors tend to be more focused on saving life than quality of life lived. Regardless, I think his 60s and 70s were good for him. I remember him as robust during these years. Unfortunately, hormone therapy, which he began intermittently in his 70s, is one of the few ways to save someone from androgen-dependent cancer. Without adequate testosterone circulating through your veins, muscle growth is impeded and eventually contributes to confusion, which he had begun to experience in the years before falling. So the medicines and procedures that kept him alive for decades, eventually contributed to his demise. We are all grateful to have had him around for so long allowing him to get to know all of his grandchildren and great grandchildren, a luxury.
The eulogy by family friend, Rev Ken Jackson, was an amusing, thoughtful look back on Dad's life. At times the reflections were hilarious lifting the mood of everyone in the sanctuary. Sometimes lies, uh … I mean embellishments, were told but this is Southern story telling at its best. I have never seen a church so full for a funeral as his was. More like a wedding as there must have been a couple hundred folk present. Dad was extraordinary in his normalcy and decency. Would help anyone who needed it. Built habit for humanity houses. Cut lawns. Grew and gave away hundreds of roses. Grew a massive garden of vegetables just like his Mom and doing so right up through the Summer before breaking his hip. Even at 90 he insisted on going outside to work only to sit down and nap more than he worked. Remarkably, he was born on the same farm he died on and depending on the story you believe these seminal events took place within 10 or 100 yards of each other. Born into what would now be called more of a shack without running water than a house, he grew up in the depression days that forged the determination of his generation. He knitted socks with his Mom for soldiers during WWII and collected scrap metal and rubber. He made it to college thanks to the GI bill and his stint in the navy during the Korean War. As a result, he landed a good job in Montgomery and spent his working life supporting our family assessing loans for farmers for the US government. My sisters and I and our Mother all went to college thanks to this job. In hindsight, Dad and Mom practiced remarkable fiscal discipline to make that happen. In the end it probably wasn’t difficult for him to retire, which is something I am struggling with. Notably, he laid down the truth serum on me once when I complained about traveling the world by reminding me “Son, you don't have a job. I had a job. You travel because you want to, but I had to travel”. True. He had been on the road almost every other week of my childhood traveling the state to assess values for farmers requesting loans. The difficulties presented to farmers during the Carter years and thereafter led to the only time I recall disagreeing with him politically. He was not a fan of President Carter, blaming him for much of the suffering of the farming community during the high inflation period of the early 80s. However, he and President Carter shared one thing though – human decency. Not surprisingly, he was not a fan of Trump, a self-indulged, narcissist. So at least we reconciled around that shared disgust in the populism that gives Trump power and has forced women to carry dead babies until they themselves die. It is an unreconcilable feature of Trump’s supporters who feign Christianity to control the lives of others while hypocritically denouncing Sharia law. Mathew 7:3 "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”.
Despite the current punitive political currents, he loved the state of Alabama and thanks to his travel that led him to every county, he knew more than most about its geography. He often lamented the fact that Georgia had grown around Atlanta while Alabama remained a bit of a back water. The same was true he would say for Lawrence county, which remains one of the least educated counties in the state, and relative to the surrounding counties has seen little to no economic growth. For my part this is not a bad thing as it means the area is not yet overrun by “progress”, but Huntsville only 45 minutes from the farm is now the largest city in the state. Our family came to Lawrence county with many other families from Greenville South Carolina in the early 1800s after the Cherokee removal. David Johnson Goodlett (1804-1878), great grandson of the Scottish indentured servant Robert Goodlett (1728-1804), purchased the original land of which 80 acres remains in family. He was part of the plantation society of the time and from that my Dad’s and my small bit of West African DNA is likely derived. I say this knowing he had slaves and because I have had several 4th cousins, which takes us back to D.J. Goodlett’s generation, who share < 1% of my DNA on Dad’s side and are clearly of African in descent who have reached out to me on 23andme. Surprisingly, even though he easily tanned like his Dad, he had no trace of indigenous DNA like Mom and I share. He did though embrace the tribulations of indigenous culture of the local area eventually carving a statue of the great Cherokee leader Sequoyah that’s located in the Oakville Indian Mounds museum in Danville, Alabama. This may have been the pinnacle of his artistic career. While I struggle understanding three-dimensional space, he easily envisioned it bringing ideas to life in wood. He could not though carry a tune to save his life. When as a young boy I realized this, I could no longer stand next to him in church as he belted out loud and proud praise with no connection to the underlying hymn.
While his retirement must have been a release from a thankless government job, which had served him and the family well, mine is perplexing. Other than odd jobs as a young man - mowing lawns or cleaning out barns of shit for my high school choir director’s husband or annealing aluminum tubing that would become radiators - as he said, I have never had a real job. So how to retire from a profession you love is something I’m struggling with. We have a plan, but to avoid panic in the lab, that plan will remain secret for now. Reflecting back on how I got into science, I realize that Dad’s frugality around repairing rather than replacing was a big part of it. When I first encountered mass spectrometry at NC State, we had to clean and reassemble the ion source that consisted of dozens of small parts. Get it wrong and you had to start over which meant another day or two of waiting to do an experiment. It turns out that Dad prepared me for this by forcing me to help him rebuild lawn mower engines, among other broken things. I hated it at the time, but clearly something about the process of keeping track of all those small parts took hold. I remember trying to explain to him, an Auburn University animal science graduate, what an ion was. Probably I failed, but I did end up working in the same department he had trained in when I became a technician after obtaining my chemistry degree at Auburn in 1982. Buried with an Auburn cap in his hand, he was a rabid Auburn football fan which eventually infected me and even carried over – is it epigenetics? - to my son David Minter Goodlett who has never lived in Alabama and is a University of Maryland graduate, but has the same character building affection or is it an affliction?
Notably, while I know my Goodlett ancestry back to the early 1700s when Robert Goodlett arrived from Scotland, I know less about my Mother’s side, but share 49.92% of her DNA and only 47.53% with Dad. Small differences like that 2% are roughly what one shares with a first cousin and such small differences in genomes make all the difference in our uniqueness; we are a remarkably homogenous species genetically. Not to diminish my Dad who could given enough time figure things out from first principles, his Father in law was brilliant in that regard. Whatever cleverness I have can more likely be attributed to Mom and her very clever Father, Richard LaFayette Robinson (1917-1996) who never graduated high school but was more clever by far than most who did. Mom’s family came from Burnsville, Mississippi eventually ending up in Sheffield, Alabama - where she met Dad - due to the consistent jobs available in the area. Like Dad, Mom was also born at home; in her Epperson grandparents house. When they retired she, Peggy Jean Robinson (1936-), taught school in Moulton influencing the lives of many. During one of the hospital stays with Dad, a nurse entered the room and said “Mrs Goodlett you won’t remember me, but your enthusiasm for science a la your NASA lessons inspired me to become a nurse”. As I tell my students, it’s not necessarily about what you do that will make the world better, but what those you help and influence do. Paying it forward without any expectation of reward was something Dad and Mom practiced likely without even thinking about it. No doubt this is a trait of those who grew up in the depression. If you could you helped everyone who asked, because you knew you would likely soon need help as well.
Here in Victoria, BC, which due to its mild weather is one of the most coveted retirement locations in all of Canada, we are counting the days until we retire. Lots to do both here and on the farm before that happens. In the lab we have been working on a Terry Fox Research Institute award to delve into the mysteries of how cancer cell metabolites differ from the surrounding healthy tissue. If you don’t know the Terry Fox story, look him up. He died from cancer while running across Canada on a prosthetic leg to raise funds for cancer research. While prostate cancer is now almost as difficult to die from as HIV is to catch, this is not so with ovarian cancer. The focus of one of our research streams is in fact ovarian cancer where there is much greater need for early detection. In the last 30 years since Dad was diagnosed, and with him as a prime example, early detection and treatment has pushed survival rates above 90%. Not so with ovarian cancer which remains deadly due to our inability to detect it early enough. To try to improve this, we are using mass spectrometry and associated techniques to examine differences in tumor metabolites. Unfortunately, the miracle antibody drugs, called immune checkpoint inhibitors, that turn your immune system back on to kill cancer naturally, do not work well with solid tumors. So we have an associated research theme to understand why this is and if differences in metabolism are responsible.
Twenty years ago, thanks to connections I made when at the University of Washington in the late 1990s while keeping Ruedi Aebersold’s mass spectrometers safe from his untrained horde of well meaning folk, I got my first “job” as a Professor at the University of Washington. Dad also got The Job that he raised our family on in Montgomery at the Farmers Home Administration through a prior connection. Life happens through such connections and I prefer to hire with this crutch more so these days when a single job advert can raise hundreds of enquiries from strangers. Knowing someone who knows someone gives that certain someone an instant stamp of approval that will most often avoid wasting your time. Also 20 years ago my first PhD student, Shawna Mae Hengel, took a chance on me as her advisor and almost certainly my last PhD student, Angela Jackson returning to school at 50 after having raised her daughter, has done so recently. My Mom, who went to college after we were old enough to be home alone after school let out, could have easily obtained a Ph.D. in education, but did manage to fit in an M.S. degree.
Four years into my tenure at the University of Victoria my research in inflammation due to Gram negative bacterial lipids continues with a whole new crop of students. They are amazing each in their own unique ways and will no doubt make contributions to better the world that I will never see. This is fine. This is life. You pay it forward without expectation. If you read this far, sorry, but there is no prize just a few extra family stories. Mint, still in Baltimore, but now living with his lovely partner Jasmine Maghari, continues in tile sales. He is anxiously waiting to finding out where she will work after finishing her M.S. degree in genetic counseling. It seems that much like his Mom he is primed to follow his partner on her professional journey. I hope he can find a satisfying job as well and that like his Grandfather he pursues his artistic talent - in this case graffiti art - on the side. Having the gift of gab like his Mom means sales is probably his strong suite. For the last year, and still with us, Graham has been under the care of a new physician, B. Robert Mozayeni of Maryland, specializing in vector-borne infections. Still suffering chronic fatigue, Graham has taken up cigar smoking, an expensive habit for someone with no job, but c’est la vie what to do with the 48% or so of my income that the Canadians don’t take but to buy a few cigars? Donna who often wonders out loud why I haven’t retired yet - that is - until holidays where I’m home all day cooking and sassing her, has begun weight lifting again. They say muscle mass and VO2 max are two of the best predictors of healthy aging. Given she continues walking Milo a few miles per day no matter the weather, her VO2 max is I think fine. This hardiness in all conditions is something I admired in her when in the time before children we traveled wilderness areas and she was the only one who could start a fire even in damp rainy conditions.
All the best to you and yours from me and mine.
