Stephanie Reflections before and after Victor came into it

1. My Childhood

I was the second of eight children (four boys and four girls) born to Mary Jo and H. Lockwood Seneff, and I spent most of my childhood in a small touristy coastal town called Mystic, Connecticut, known for its history in the whaling industry. From the time I was 3 years old until I graduated from junior high, we lived at the top of a steep hill, on a street called Library Street. As you might guess, there was a big public library on that street, that may have been the early source of my love of reading. I can remember checking out all the books the library carried in the series called the Bobbsey Twins, about a family with two sets of twins and their adventures. I will return to the topic of libraries when I talk about my own children when they were young. We also could get to the quaint little downtown area of Mystic in a ten-minute walk down the hill, and we delighted in the candy store and the movie theatre, as well as the ice cream shop. And we loved to watch the bridge go up so the boats could get through, while the cars backed up almost to our house. In 1954, when I was six years old, we got hit by Hurricane Carol, and I remember well walking down the street after the hurricane had passed to see the downtown area completely flooded.

There was also a large forest called the Pequot Woods that I frequented as a child. I loved to wander the trails until I got completely turned around, but I always managed to find my way out somehow. I do remember one time when I had four of my younger siblings in tow, and I was the lead, and we got hopelessly lost. We had to bushwhack our way around the briars at the edge of the creek until we finally got to the place where I had remembered that the trail crossed over the creek. Several decades later, I was delighted to find that our condo in Winchester was a short walk away from the Fells - another vast forest with many trails and many opportunities to get lost. This time I had a cell phone I could use to bail me out, although I rarely used it.

Altogether there were eight kids in my family, and I had a lot of responsibility for my younger siblings. As a teenager, I did most of the cooking for a family of ten, sometimes with help from my dad, who taught me to cook. My mom never liked to cook, but dad enjoyed being creative in the kitchen, and he taught me to be adventuresome as well. I can remember one day when he was making a beef stew, he started browsing the spice rack for possible spices to toss in. He came upon cinnamon, and said to me something like, “Well, this could give the stew an exotic flavor,” and tossed some in. It’s ironic that, after I grew up, I no longer had to spend time in the kitchen, because both Victor and Puo Puo were very good cooks and were happy to do all the cooking, and I was happy to let them.

I realized, looking back, that my dad was fond of several foods that are actually quite healthy. Blue cheese, sorghum (a molasses-like syrup that comes from the sorghum plant), pickled herring, and sauerkraut were some of his favorite foods. He kept a running jar of “pickle juice” that he would periodically fill with cucumbers to make home-made pickles. He also had a little “factory” set up in the basement to make home-made beer, including the fermentation process involving yeast. Periodically, we’d be sitting at the dinner table when we’d hear an explosion as one of the bottles of beer stored in the basement got a bit too gassy. My mom had had a very bland diet growing up, but she did enjoy making hot fudge, which involved some skill in checking the temperature with a thermometer to make sure it wouldn’t turn out all grainy from crystalline sugar.

We also made good use of the wild berries that grew near our home. There was a wild blackberry patch just down the street from our house, which produced lush, tasty berries that were impossible to get at. The bushes left no room for trails, and you had to wear long sleeves and gloves to have any hope of harvesting them. I’d make a fantastic blackberry cobbler from the berries or just eat them straight up. I’ve always been disappointed when I buy blackberries since then, because they never taste as good as what I remember. There was also a wild blueberry patch up the street, and it took forever to get enough blueberries for a cobbler, because the berries were so tiny.

2. Meeting Victor

I left home after graduating from high school to attend MIT as a freshman. While at MIT, I met my first husband, Bill McCandless. We got married shortly after graduation, and I gave birth to two sons, Michael and Gregory, who were only 1 and 3 years old when I fell in love with Victor. My marriage was on the rocks for various reasons, but perhaps the biggest one was that Bill expected me to be solely responsible for maintaining the household and bringing up the kids. He “allowed” me to work outside the home as long as I would not sacrifice the home front.

I was hired by Lincoln Laboratory as a computer programmer with zero experience, but I found that writing computer code was fun and challenging. Victor was enrolled in the graduate program in EECS, and his advisor suggested he should do his research at Lincoln in order to have access to their superior computer facilities. Victor became my office mate. He was a good listener, and we became friends as I confided in him about my marital problems, and he in turn shared his struggles in his marriage. As I got to know him better, I became very impressed with his innate ability to treat women the same as men and to show respect for everybody regardless of their rank. He also quickly got to know my two kids and he instinctively assumed a parental role that they needed. His view towards a marital relationship was that both partners should equally share the load at home, and this resonated with me. While we broke up two marriages by falling in love, it was the right thing to do, and our lifetime commitment to each other shows that.

In the remainder of this memoire, I am just going to reflect on some fun times over the course of our life together.

3. The Winchester Library and the Ducks

I have always enjoyed reading books to children, beginning with reading to my younger siblings when I was growing up. When my kids were little, we were lucky that the Winchester Library was just a short walk from our house in Winchester. We had a ritual for many years of walking down to the library every other Saturday with a bag full of bread to feed the ducks, which were nearly always hanging out in Mill Pond next to the library. This was especially entertaining in the winter when there was ice on the pond and the ducks would have to slide on the ice in a race to get at the whole slice of bread we threw out in the middle of the pond. We’d return a stack of a dozen books and spend quite a bit of time browsing the stacks to find another dozen to take home.

We also had our own private collection of children’s books that I read so many times that I had practically memorized them. Some of my favorites were the Dr. Seuss series, especially Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches the Egg, and Bill Peet’s books, such as Cyrus, the Unsinkable Sea Serpent, and Pamela Camel. Whoever Heard of A Fird? was a very creative book about a “two-feature creature” named “Fird (half fish, half bird) who set out to find a “herd of Fird.” After many exciting adventures, including some scary drama, he finally comes upon “Bish” (half bird, half fish), who spends her time “bunching in the bushes with the boring bishes.” They of course fall in love at the end and go off on their own to live happily ever after. Some of the other books I remember are “Three Big Hogs” and “Fox in Socks.” The three big hogs get abandoned on the farm and have to figure out how to become wild hogs. Fox in Socks was a real tongue twister – “Freezy breeze made these three trees’ fleas sneeze.” I feel that today’s children’s books have become too sanitized, and they often seem stilted and boring to me. It seems that psychologists today believe that children should never be exposed to stories that might traumatize them.

4. MTV

One fond memory I have is when MTV became a hot new channel on the TV. If my memory serves me well, Cory was just a few years old when MTV came into being, and Mike was in high school. On many days, I would arrive home after a hard day at work, grab a beer and wander into the family room where the kids were all curled up on the sofas watching MTV. Victor and Puo Puo were slaving in the kitchen preparing dinner for all of us, while I was enjoying a few moments of relaxation with the kids. Michael Jackson was a real sensation with his “Thriller” and his moon walk, and his emphatic wailing of “The kid is not my son!” Madonna was also fun to watch, in MTV videos such as “I’m a virgin” and “Papa Don’t Preach.” And then of course Weird Al Yankovic’s farcical songs such as “I’m Fat!’ (take-off on Michael Jackson’s “I’m Bad!” and “Like a Surgeon (Cutting for the very first time!)” reworking Madonna’s “I’m a Virgin.” Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start the fire” appeared on MTV in 1989, when Cory was 7 years old and Mike was probably already off to college. I recently heard that song again, and it speaks as well to these times as it did to those.

We had a full house in Winchester with four kids and the grandparents on the third floor. Those days when the kids were young flew by, but I have many fond memories of both the ordinary days at home watching TV and the big adventures out on the water or in the wilderness. They gave us some challenges here and there, as teenagers are wont to do, but they all grew up to be very successful in their careers. We feel very fortunate that they all launched smoothly into adult life, and together they have blessed us with eleven grandchildren.

5. Family Vacations

While the kids were young, we tried to do one “grand” vacation every year, with some memorable trips to Hawaii (deep-sea fishing comes to mind) and many trips out West where we would fly into some city that was a two-day’s drive away from my family in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and then do a road trip to Idaho Falls and back, seeing the sights along the way. Three times our vacation was a houseboat experience - one on Lake Mead in Nevada, one on Lake Shasta in Northern California, and one in the California Delta near San Francisco. The kids probably remember the excitement of “where’s the spoon?” on the California Delta excursion after our boat had some engine trouble and I got off the boat and thumbed down a capable man who taught us how to get it started with a spoon!

And Lake Mead was where we had the adventure of rescuing a young couple whose tiny motorboat had capsized in an afternoon storm. It was only because my brother Geoffrey had left his shoes at a stop we had done earlier in the day that we were even still out on the water, as it was getting past the time when we should have been anchored on shore. She couldn’t swim and was clinging to the capsized boat for dear life. I don’t think they would have held on ‘til morning if we hadn’t come by at that time.

The lake was at the mouth of the Grand Canyon, created by a dam that flooded the river valley. Navigation on that lake was impossible because it had a lot of branches to nowhere and they all looked the same. When we gassed up, people got a kick out of my shirt which had an image of the Galaxy and an arrow pointing to a spot in the galaxy that said, “You are here!”

6. Mama È!

When Cory was just 3 years old, we had a family vacation that involved driving around in the American West, stopping at various national parks along the way. I particularly remember our hikes at Bryce Canyon and Zion Canyon National Parks in Utah. Both of these parks were breathtakingly beautiful, with majestic natural rock formations that are impossible to describe. Because I didn’t expect to have any more children, I was probably being too generous in letting Cory get by with being carried. He had invented an expression “Mama E” (or “Mama Uh”) which means “Mom is hungry” in Chinese (“È” is pronounced like the u in “hug”), but which came about because of the grunt I made when I picked him up.

So, early on in the hike we took through Bryce Canyon, Cory came to me, arms outstretched and said “Mama È!” I of course obliged, as I always did. But after another 20 minutes or so had passed, Michael could tell that I was getting tired, so he volunteered to take over on carrying Cory, and I happily handed him over. The whole time while Mike was carrying Cory, he was talking to him: “Mama bú è!” (“Mom’s not hungry” in Chinese). “You’re a big boy now. You’re not a baby. You should be able to walk by yourself!” The next day, we did a six-mile hike in Zion National Park and Cory walked by himself the whole way.

Cory never again asked “Mama È!” And he never again begged me to carry him!

7. The Invaders

I have nothing but fond memories of the many times Victor’s band, the Invaders, came to our house to practice for a gig, and often stayed for dinner afterwards. I’d hide in the other room romping around to the beat of the music, sometimes with a small child in my arms. The band performed multiple times for our CSAIL off-site boondoggles on Cape Cod, and the CSAIL crowd really grooved with the music. Peter Blankenship (bottom left in the photo) and his wife Susan became our best friends up until we moved away from Boston during COVID.

8. Puo Puo

I can’t write a memoire without talking about Victor’s mom. She came into our lives very early in our marriage, and I found her to be a wonderful asset in our busy lives. She and Gung Gung (Victor’s dad) had a mini apartment on our third floor.

Puo Puo loved to cook, and she especially loved to make something special for someone who appreciated it. She was a Godsend for the kids after school, while Victor and I were still at the office. She often had dinner ready for us when we got home, and she was a great cook. The kids appreciated the mantous (Chinese steamed buns) and other goodies she’d have ready for them when they got home from school. I had lots of conversations over a cup of coffee at the dining room table with her, speaking in “Zhonglish” and not understanding everything she said, as she shared with me her recollected war stories or updated me on the latest happenings in the soap opera, All Our Lives, that she watched every afternoon, and I watched with her whenever I was at home (usually because a child was sick). What Chinese I know I learned mostly from her.

9. Victor’s Health

We have had many challenges through the years around Victor’s heart problems, which seemed to be a lingering thread for the second half of our 50 years together. I may not get the details quite right, but Victor has asked me to write a section on this topic, so, here goes!

As I recall, it began when the kids were still young. I remember we were at Disney World in Orlando, Florida when he first complained of a feeling of a racing heart. It was hard for me to take him seriously, because I mistakenly thought he was much too young to have heart problems. But it turns out that the doctors diagnosed tachycardia, an arrhythmia that can become serious, and at that time they just prescribed a drug to treat it (I think it was the beta blocker, Atenolol).

Neither Victor nor I can remember whether there was a triggering event other than a routine physical check-up, but we were caught by surprise one day in November 2007 (I think) when he took a stress test and flunked it. The doctors felt there was some urgency to get him on the operating table, and we were completely blind-sided. The operation involved inserting a stent in the “LAD” (lateral anterior descending artery), otherwise known as the “widow-maker.” The operation was smooth and uneventful, but what left me very unhappy is that the heart doctor prescribed a dosage of statin drugs (Lipitor) four times the standard dosage that he was to take for the rest of his life.

Once Victor started taking the high-dose statin drug, I noticed many complaints he was making about aching muscles and muscle weakness (he could no longer open a jar). His personality also changed, where he would flare up with behavior one could characterize as “road rage.” I immediately dove into the vast literature on the Web on statin drugs, heart disease, and the cholesterol theory. I even redirected my research at MIT towards studying the side effects of statin drugs and got one of my students involved. We did a statistical analysis of side effects of statin drugs compared to those of all other drugs in an age-matched comparison cohort, based on patient data scrubbed from medical web databases. The results were terrifying to me, so I started harassing him to get off the statin drug. The doctor (associated with Mass General) said he would refuse him as a patient if he stopped taking the drug, so we fired the doctor and switched to someone else (affiliated with Brigham and Women’s) who was more tolerant of his desire not to take it. To this day, I cannot believe that it makes sense to take a drug that poisons the liver so that it cannot synthesize a molecule that is essential for human life.

Nearly another decade went by before we got hit by another panic situation around Victor’s heart. He was in Taiwan at the time, in a conference in a poorly ventilated room probably with poor oxygen supply, when he felt a general sense of malaise and possibly impending doom. It never got to the point of an actual heart attack, but he was admitted into the hospital in Taiwan where they did a cardiac catheterization test to confirm that he had some major heart blockage issues. He had been doing some consulting work for Bruce Chang of Delta Electronics at the time, and the company was very gracious to pay for a round-trip business class ticket for me to travel to Taiwan to be with him and to bring him safely back home. I was at a conference in Denver, Colorado at the time, but I was able to redirect my flights, and fortuitously I had brought my passport with me to the conference. All of this happened in May of 2016, I believe.

I remember that I checked into the hotel in the evening and immediately went over to see him in the hospital, thinking I could only stay for a short time given the visiting hours. However, they said I could stay in his room with him full time for the next couple of days until he checked out! I hadn’t even packed a bag! They offered to operate on him, but he wisely decided to go back to Boston and consult with his own doctors before deciding what to do.

Once back home, Victor consulted his cardiologist, who at first had some good news. He was of the opinion that the blockages were not that bad, and that nothing needed to be done just yet. However, once he got the two surgeons involved - one who specialized in stents and the other who specialized in coronary artery bypass graft surgery – his heart doctor somewhat reluctantly changed his mind. A big blow for us was another stress test which Victor (predictably) flunked yet again. I remember it was a bittersweet waiting game for the six weeks between the decision and the actual appoitnment for the open-heart surgery. Both Mike and Tim had complicated things going on in their lives at the time, so I figured we were on our own in dealing with the heart surgery. However, Cory out of the blue completely surprised us with the words, “I’m coming!” All the way from South Africa! We were both thrilled and very touched by this commitment. True to his word, Cory was there for the entire operation and the week after Victor was sent home. It was a Godsend for me to have Cory with me in the waiting room during the five-and-a-half-hour operation. I remember Victor’s first words when he woke up were “Piece of cake!” And, back at home, Cory cooked some Chinese meals under Victor’s directions and assembled a Web page (victorsrecipes.com) showcasing several of Victor’s recipes.

Another seven years passed before Victor experienced another crisis around his heart problems. Over a period of a couple of weeks, in the summer of 2023, he slowly swelled up, steadily gaining weight. It came to a head when he discovered that he could only walk a few hundred yards before becoming completely out of breath. He also seemed mentally confused. For me, it was quite terrifying to see. We ended up driving to the hospital in Lihue at 4 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday. They were able to give him some drugs (diuretics) to reduce the swelling, and this led to a dramatic improvement in his symptoms. An echocardiogram revealed the bad news that his left ventricular ejection fraction was only 15% - severe heart failure. I was frankly afraid that Victor was dying, and our kids were, too! A wonderful side benefit was that all four of our sons made time out of their busy schedules to visit us in the Fall.

Fortunately, Victor was able to consult with a friend who is a cardiac specialist at Mass General and a tenured professor at MIT, Colin Stultz, a wonderful doctor who gave him specific instructions on how he would treat a situation like Victor’s with pharmaceutical drugs. Remarkably, Victor’s doctor in Kauai, Dr. So, was willing to go along with Colin Stultz’s recommendations. The drugs seemed to work quite well, and slowly his heart function improved up to 35% (where over 50% is the norm). And he was able to take the normal walks that we do twice a day with no difficulty. So now life goes on, with every new day’s dawn being taken as a blessing to indulge in and appreciate.