Lenora Givens's death

Lenora Givens's death from pancreatic cancer in 1938 was a defining loss in Ben Givens's childhood and a lasting reference point as he faced terminal illness himself. Her final days brought together the limits of medicine, the burden of pain, and her conviction that raising her sons was work she had not yet completed. The memory does not resolve those tensions: it preserves both her fear and her faith, and the family and community gathered around her as she died.

Background and Diagnosis

Lenora Givens's beliefs were closely tied to work and family. A committed Presbyterian, she understood work as an expression of love for God and as a means through which people came to know themselves. She had taught her sons that a life contained worthy tasks fitted to a person's purpose. That conviction gives particular weight to her later feeling that her own work remained unfinished.

Ben Givens was twelve, just after Christmas, when he noticed a yellow cast in his mother's eyes. She had noticed it too and had already been urged by her husband, Wright Givens, to consult Dr. Williams. At first, the cause was uncertain. After New Year's, Dr. Williams examined her again as the change became more pronounced, and by February she had also seen specialists in Spokane. The family eventually learned that she had pancreatic cancer and could not be cured. The diagnosis brought a clear limit to the doctor's power: Ben, still a child, challenged the news on the grounds that Dr. Williams was a doctor, while the physician acknowledged that medicine could not make him a magician or cure her.

Care and the Limits of Relief

As Lenora Givens's condition worsened, she spent much of her time resting at home. Dr. Williams visited twice a week to provide tincture of opium. The family faced not only the certainty that she would die but also the uncertainty of how much pain she could bear and how much medication was appropriate. When Wright Givens asked whether there was an amount that would be too much, Dr. Williams left the decision to the family's judgment. The exchange offers no simple medical answer; it records the distress of having to make decisions at the edge of what treatment could accomplish.

Care was shared among neighbors, churchwomen, and the family. Mrs. Emery came first, followed by Mrs. Fisk and Mrs. Elginhurst, while women from the church took turns helping during the day. After orchard work, Ben Givens, Aidan Givens, and Wright Givens took over in the evenings. The arrangements made Lenora's last illness a sustained family and community responsibility rather than a private event. She often looked out toward the trees and river, while those around her continued the practical work of caring for her.

Lenora Givens acknowledged both faith and fear. She told Ben Givens that she believed in God but was frightened, particularly of pain. She also explained that the problem was not simply being confined indoors: she missed the world, and felt that her work on earth—raising Ben and Aidan—was unfinished. Ben suggested taking her bed outside, but her answer made clear that a change of setting could not address what troubled her. The exchange connects her religious understanding of purposeful work with her attachment to her children and her awareness that her life was ending.

Death and Burial

Later that week, Lenora Givens died at 6:35 in the morning on June 28, 1938. Ben Givens, Aidan Givens, and Wright Givens were beside her, sitting on kitchen chairs brought into the room. As her breathing stopped, Wright Givens leaned close and said her name. The account marks the death through this intimate family vigil, after the uncertainty and repeated care of the preceding weeks.

She was buried on a knoll above the river. Relatives, neighbors, and members of the surrounding community attended, including the Fisks, Coles, Robinsons, Knoxes, Elginhursts, Emerys, and Dr. Williams. Twenty-three members of the Givens family came from communities along the river, from Kennewick to Kettle Falls. A thunderstorm passed over the grave that evening. The funeral thus joined the family's private loss to the wider network of people who had known them and helped during Lenora Givens's illness.

Aftermath and Continuing Memory

The following summer, the family worked the apples with a hollow feeling, and the orchard fell into decline. The loss changed the texture of ordinary labor: work continued, but it no longer carried the same assurance of continuity. Wright Givens spent long hours hunting birds in the willow canyons and returned at dusk to prepare what he had brought home. These details register the altered household after Lenora Givens's death without suggesting that grief followed a single course or disappeared when daily tasks resumed.

Years later, Ben Givens's own diagnosis made his mother's illness newly immediate. As a physician, he understood the progression of his cancer and the suffering he expected; the knowledge did not make death controllable. His recollection of Lenora Givens's fear of pain and the family's dependence on limited relief sits beside his own deliberations about how to face a terminal illness. The parallel is not an equivalence between their circumstances: it shows how the experience of caring for his dying mother remained part of the knowledge through which he understood his own prognosis.

Her death also shadows Ben Givens's professional identity. He had once approached medicine as a physician able to intervene, while recognizing that some outcomes lay beyond his command. The childhood memory had already shown him a doctor stating plainly that a patient's cancer could not be cured and a family confronting the decisions that followed. In that sense, Lenora Givens's illness is both a personal bereavement and an early encounter with the boundary between medical skill and mortality. Its lasting force comes from the particular things left unresolved: the pain she feared, the work she believed unfinished, and the care her family could offer without being able to save her.