Midwest mission, part 1

I have a photograph in my house that I inherited when my grandfather Donald Warfield Sr. passed away two years ago and it is his father Robert Graves Warfield when he was in the air force in World War One.

I started to ask my father a lot of questions about this man since he died in 1933 when he was 40. My father said, you should call my uncle Bob in Indiana, my grandfathers older brother, who is 94, and would be the only one left who could really answer some questions. I called Uncle Bob, and for 94, he is a remarkable man. He has his memory and does not suffer from dementia or Alzheimer's. I decided I should drive out and see this Mr. Bob, because he is 94 and although he insists on his 100th birthday he will be jumping out of a plane with a parachute strapped to his back he could die any day.

I wake up in Greenfield, Indiana and drive down the little strip that carries every restaurant that is available because in small town America there are no individually owned businesses anymore. You can expect to find a Long John Silvers, a Bob Evans, a Qdoba Grill and on and on in almost every town in America, so I knew there would be a Starbucks and I found it. I got a coffee and as I am leaving my phone rings and it is Uncle Bob saying, “Where are you? Where are you?” I said, “What? I am on my way now.” He said, “My wound..I need to go to the hospital...I am bleeding like a stuck pig!”

I hung up the phone and really quickly realized that this day might not play out the way I was hoping, where I would do a little family history research and take some pictures. Nope. I arrive at Bob Warfield’s two story house in Fortville, Indiana at 9:15am. It is a green house that he had built 39 years ago. The top floor has not been used or visited in about five years. Bob and his grandson, Bobby, who is severally mentally disabled are waiting outside for me. Bob is bleeding from his cheek through a bandage due to a routine procedure to remove a growth and there is quite a lot of blood. He is holding napkins to it and we get him in the car and we drive to the emergency room.

They try to stop the wound for three hours using various methods and eventually bandage it up and send us on our way. We go to a diner back in Fortville. Everyone in the diner knows Bob and Bobby. I start to notice that the white bandage on Bob’s face is slowly growing more and more red. It is making me sick to my stomach. He is struggling to be the same person that he has been all his life even when his body starts to not want to cooperate. It is obvious that it is pretty well saturated and it will soon drip down onto his blood splattered sweater. I tell the waitress that we are going to need to take this food to go. My visions of a walk down memory lane are starting to wash away and I call the hospital and they tell me to call his main doctor and I call the doctor and they have to call me back and they are all talking to me as if I am the caretaker, and as if I will be the one who will be attending to Mr. Warfield in the future. Each phone call is more heartbreaking than the one before.