What Gary Hansen said that day was one of the most shocking things that elected official has ever told me. The setting was a winter morning at the Red Lion Inn at Jantzen Beach where we met to discuss my application to work in the upcoming 2005 Oregon Legislature. As the restaurant dining area was closed, the waitress moved us into a
I really didn’t know Gary then. We had had only briefly met twice before. He began the conversation with routine job interview questions and legislative small talk, but then ten minutes surprised me by abruptly stopping, and saying, “you’re hired.” He then grew somber, and confided, “and I don’t want to talk about politics anymore.”
Gary paused for a few seconds, and then asked me, “Have you ever heard of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross?” I answered that I knew of her work on death and dying. Gary then asked, “Do you know what it’s like to sleep in the same bed with someone for 30 years and then they die, and every night after that, there’s no one next to you?”
That stopped my breath. No one in my 40-year career in journalism had ever said anything to me that raw and real. I wasn’t sure where the conversation was going, but I decided to go there with him.
I’ve been recently thinking about that conversation because Gary died May 24. Our last conversation was ten days earlier, when we met in the sunny backyard of his Vancouver home, where he moved after a 24-year-long career as a Multnomah County Commissioner, Metro Councilor and Oregon Legislator for North/Northeast Portland.
“The reality of dying hit me real fast, when the doc said they found a growth mass on my lung,” he explained. The cancer has since metastasized to his bones. The name Elizabeth Kubler-Ross came up again, and the five stages of death she identified as: denial, bargaining, anger, depression and acceptance.
“I don’t have any anger,” Gary said. “I’ve been incredibly lucky to have lived to 81 years of age, had two wonderful marriages, a son, grandchildren, and served in elected office.
I’m not alone. I can’t think how scary it would be to go through this by yourself…I’m thankful that I have good insurance.”
He is working on final acceptance. “There are a lot of different views of what happens next. If there is something after life, it’s beyond our capacity to understand, although I’m very interested in what it might be.”
Gary’s story began in a working-class neighborhood of Tigard in the 1940s. He became one of Tigard High School’s most noteworthy students as counselors did not know what to make of the boy with stellar marks on academic aptitude tests, yet only middlin’ grades.
The answer would prove to be a form of dyslexia that has given Gary a lifelong adversarial relationship with spelling and grammar. But he’s never had an adversarial relationship with the truth. His talent and grades helped him fit with an equally unconventional schoolmate of his, the future acclaimed novelist Katharine Dunn
His next step was Portland State University where he took Honors classes and nearly made the PSU team that won NBC-TV’s GE College Bowl debate championship in 1965. But the cost of college forced him to leave college before graduation to take a union plumbing job to support his new wife, Sandie, and baby-to-be. The young couple settled in the Piedmont neighborhood near where Sandie had grown up.
They later moved to Overlook where Sandie taught at Ockley Green School, and Gary rose up the ranks of the plumbing profession and also became a Multnomah County Democratic Party leader. He won election as the Metro Councilor in 1988 where he made a lasting difference.
The issue stunk, literally. If in 1988 you asked anyone, anywhere in Portland, “Where St. Johns was?” Their likely answer, “It’s where the dump is located” because the City of Portland and surrounding communities had funneled the region’s garbage to the St. Johns Landfill in the wetlands just north of Columbia Boulevard for one-half century.
Many Portlanders would derisively refer to the community of St. Johns as synonymous with the “St. Johns Dump.” Fortunately, the newly created Metro Council had sweeping powers over all garbage disposal and recycling over the three-county area, and rookie Councilor Hansen came up with an idea to close the St. Johns Landfill…for good.