HOMILY:
The best quotes I could use came from Bill and Jeanne. Bill said, “I guess I can manage to die all right -- my ancestors have been doing it for generations.”
And Jeanne said, after Bill’s death, “All his life he wondered what was behind that crossing, behind that door, where death is. I guess now he knows and he will be pleased to know.”
Bill had clearly worked out a theory of what life and death are all about, as Unitarian Universalists are supposed to do. It was much informed by science, especially the part we call “natural history,” and by his strong connection to family, black sheep and all, which is also a kind of history. I think some of this was due to his mother, lively and vivid, whom we buried in a spring snowstorm like a lace curtain with a meadowlark for a choir. And some was due to his father, who must have been much like Bill, and who collected antique books. I mean, remarkable books, one with a homemade wooden cover. In the last days, Bill carefully divided the last of the books into three bundles, one for each daughter. Before that, with equal care, the family had sorted and divided the marvelous wild flower portraits his mother had painted. Conservation and creation were two watchwords.
One of the stories he told about himself was when we had a UU meeting at the Sacagawea Inn in Three Forks. His family moved from Deer Lodge to Three Forks, and while the grownups were unloading furniture, small Bill went exploring the town. When suppertime came, he’d gotten a little turned around about where their new house was, but somehow he decided that they must be going to live at the Sacagawea Inn, so he went there and sat on the broad steps out front until his family came looking for him. He wasn’t scared, or worried about starving. He knew his mother would send someone for him.
Bill loved women, which was lucky, and useful to him when he was an elementary principal. His teachers were mostly female and the dynamics could be like a henhouse. Bill kept the pecking down by always dealing with problems directly, on as simple and human a level as possible, and with enormous attention. He always reminded me of the Chinese philosopher who recommended that a head of state rule as delicately and with as much attention as a person frying a small fish. I often turned to him for advice in the early years of my ministry. When it came to social action, he didn’t make a big fuss -- just showed up regularly to walk women into clinics where they could receive needed care. Not only did it help to keep the catcalls and accusations down when someone so tall and dignified escorted them, but also few would dare violence.
When this fellowship was in its early years in 1982, we considered naming it the Big Sky UU Fellowship and Moving Company, because we were mostly young and growing families who were in transition. I vividly recall Bill standing in the middle of a little girls’ bedroom where he had just taken about thirty frilly pastel little dresses off the clothespole by sandwiching them between his big hands -- but now he was wondering where he would put this frothy gauzy double-handful with hangers sticking out the top. He was the one who shook his head over the young mothers’ ability to take everything out of one house and know right where it went in the next house. They explained that you always put the glasses next to the sink, the frying pan next to the stove, and the breakfast cereal and cookies over the refrigerator where they will stay dry and out of the hands of short people. He actually listened.
Finding Jeanne was the best of luck. He said he needed to have a second partner who would be willing to sleep sitting up on the train to save the cost of a hotel room, and who could be happy with a meal of bread, cheese and beer. Someone young enough to be enthusiastic about touring Europe or hiking in mountains. He was very much aware of the limits of his own life and energy, and I don’t think either of them dreamed that they would do as much or hike as far as they have. Fourteen years is a long time.
On one trip, Bill sent me a postcard of Hadrian’s Wall, a stone wall built across Britain, just south of a terrible swamp (like the one in “Lord of the Rings”) which gave cover to the barbarians of the north. The point of the wall was not to protect against those invaders. Rather, according to Hadrian, it was meant to mark the limit of Roman Empire. “We can responsibly govern up to this line,” declared Hadrian. “Beyond it, we would be stretched too thin to be good governors.” This was another of Bill’s secrets to success. He did what he could -- when he hit limits, he changed his plans. When his scheme for early retirement (which depended on selling a system for inventorying one’s home and contents) proved impractical, he quietly went back to work for a few more years. He relished his two years at NASA, partly because he loved science and adventure and partly because he was in an environment full of “guys” and got to do “guy things,” like shooting pool, horsing around and telling terrible stories. When he was diagnosed with the ultimate limit, stage four renal cancer, he knew what it meant and became a team with Jeanne and the doctors. His courage was amazing.
A couple of summers ago Bill came through Valier and stopped to see my tumbledown house. He gave me some tips about how to manage asbestos siding (You use a cutting wheel to sever the heads of the nails, then lift the whole piece out. It’s undamaged and can be replaced. Much better than busting the siding off in pieces as many people do. Conservation again.) Then we went off to the Blackfeet Reservation to look around.
Bill had been there before. In the Seventies there was a Free School -- actually, the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop -- and Bill was sent with an OPI committee to see whether or not it was bogus. The school was housed in an old Bureau of Indian Affairs warehouse which came with a bank of empty filing cabinets. The girls of the school, many of them mothers, had converted the filing drawers into cradles, the babies tucked in with pillows and blankets, sweetly content. Bill harked back to that often, partly because I also knew that Free School. The committee certified it.
This more recent summer we went up to Heart Butte to look at the school dug into the top of a hill and then we went on an old two-track road I knew about from teaching there. It wanders way back through a valley and comes out onto a wide meadow behind the butte. Spring comes late up there and the grass was ablaze with wildflowers. Hawks veered across the sky. Wind teased our faces. We just hung around and soaked it up for a while.
Jeanne said, “All his life he wondered what was beyond that crossing, behind that door, where death is. I guess now he knows and he will be pleased to know.” What I think Bill found on the other side of death was something very like the hidden back side of Heart Butte, except that his family and friends -- those who went ahead -- were there to meet him. You just can’t do much better than that.
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