Tribute: Edward L. Harvey, (1903-1996)

I’m feeling really lousy right now. Really, really lousy. Let me explain.
Since my mother died in 1987, communication in my family hasn’t exactly been at an all-time high. One could easily reach the conclusion that one person had been the glue that held our family together. Some within our own family have reached that conclusion as well.
One person I was in touch with quite a bit after my mother’s death was her own father, who lived in New Jersey. For longer than I can remember, indeed, longer than I’ve even been around to remember, he has been one of the very few members of my family to make a living at any sort of creative endeavour, so ever since my teens when when I finally gained something of a clear idea of where my life, interests and career were headed, he was something of a kindred spirit.
My grandfather won several awards and was one of a very select few to be named official photographer for the Victorian Society of New England, which meant he got to visit numerous stately houses and structures in that part of the country, and his photos of those places were published on many occasions in the Victorian Society’s official journals and elsewhere.
If one were reaching real hard to draw similarities, one could say that I was inspired by his work, but it’s more a case of coincidental similarities. Due to a rift between my mother and her father that started sometime in my infancy and didn’t end until a year before she died, my grandfather was not a big part of my life. I didn’t know much about him until 1986 when I finally got to see him for the first time since my second birthday. By that time, I had taken up writing, drawing and desktop publishing, as well as more than passing interests in music, science, and the idea of making a movie or a TV show someday. He seemed thrilled at the prospect that someone in his family wasn’t headed for an office job or the “transportation industry.” I was happy to find someone who wouldn’t try to steer me in those directions because it would make it easy for me to get a job on name recognition alone. That summer, he carted me around to the New York Museum of Natural History, to Hayden Planetarium, and quite a few other places. He had some pictures he needed to shoot, and while he advised mom and dad that they could go do some shopping, he made it real clear that his grandson was coming with him.
Not that I got the chance to take any pictures myself – it was enough of a treat to see that not all of the men in my family get old, fat and bald, slow down, and come to a quiet end. He was in his early 80s at the time, and he could beat his chubby grandkid across the street on a New Jersey summer day.
When my mother died, he didn’t come to Arkansas for the funeral, preferring instead to leave things as they were – they had finally broken their silence after twelve or so years, and I don’t think he wanted to deal with the cruel reality that he had just barely gotten the one final opportunity he’d have to see her alive and well. In fact, she collapsed at home the very night we returned to Fort Smith from New Jersey, the first sign of the cancer that wound up claiming her life the following spring.
I flew up, alone, to see him again in 1988, and somehow it seemed like there was a distance between my grandfather and I. I had become much more of a bookworm in the wake of events, and less of a teenager who’d get out and go do things. I got the impression he was slightly disappointed.
We were in touch on and off through the years, but when I dropped out of college in 1992 for various reasons, not all of them necessarily good, he seemed especially displeased. Anytime I talked to him for the next couple of years, the first thing on the agenda, just barely lagging behind “hello,” was how soon I was going back to school. Not much else seemed to matter.
I hadn’t heard from him since around 1994. My brother called me about a week ago and told me that all was not well; he flew up to New Jersey to see our grandfather, stayed for a few days, and came back late last week with the news that the doctors had determined that the illness was prostate cancer, and that there wasn’t a lot of time left. My brother had told him about my preparations to go back to school, about some of the word I’ve been doing and some of the recognition I’ve received for it. I was urged to call, to say something. I tried to call my grandfather last night a little before 7:00, and got no answer. The call from my brother a few hours later confirmed my gut fear – I had just missed my chance. Edward Harvey died on August 6th at the age of 93.
Second-guessing life doesn’t do anybody much good, but it’s still eating away at me. Just as I didn’t spend a lot of time with my mother right before she died, I didn’t give myself the time to spend with her father. Here was the one person in the family who was the most like me, and you’d think I would have spent a lot of time in his company, but circumstances prevented that from happening. I wanted to show him some of what I had done, and to see and hear more about what he had done.
Such treatment for a kindred spirit. Some grandson, I.