BOB IS DEAD [Sunday, 9-13-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Okay, I said it just the way he always wanted it. “Don’t say that I passed away, or passed on, or went to be with the Lord. Just say I’m dead.” 2:30 a.m. this morning, peacefully, with Kathy holding his hand. That’s a gift. In these pandemic days, so often people die alone. I give thanks that my friend did not have to.

Bob is dead. That’s not the end of the story, that’s the beginning.

Bob said, “Just say I’m dead,” because he was a no-frills kind of guy, a football kind of guy, a focused guy. That may seem strange to say about a guy who was always looking out the window and mumbling something incomprehensible, and humming the same tune over and over, and who seemed surprised that you were in the room.

His first wife, Sharon, was so convinced he was hard of hearing that she had him tested. No, the doc said, Bob didn’t ignore her because he was deaf, but because he was focused. His brain dealt with one thing at a time. If he were reading or thinking, that was it.

That focus came to fruit in his values. When Jesus said, “walk the narrow way,” Bob took him seriously, all the while being a cool guy. Not many can walk the narrow way and be cool at the same time, but Bob did.

I told him once, both in our 80s, that I admired his coolness. He didn’t deny it, just smiled a little. “Yes,” he said, “I don’t quite understand why people think I’m cool, but I sort of like it.”

Both personally and professionally, Bob’s focus was family.

He was a Mississippi boy. That Mississippi family defined him in so many ways. When he and Sharon divorced, it was to “Mammy,” his beloved great-grandmother to whom he retreated.

Bob was a Southern boy, a good, old boy, with a higher education. If I wanted to compete with Wm. Faulkner and Reynolds Price and Walker Percy, writing about southern men, I would just write the story of Bob’s life and call it a novel. It was easy for him to be a Hoosier, for IN is the MS of the north.

I think that focus of his, was part of his Mississippi background. He did things in the pace of Mississippi. With Bob, it was not so much about what, but how. Pace doesn’t mean slow pace, the way Southern pace is often characterized. It is about the right pace. Bod lived that pace automatically, a part of who he was.

One of his brothers once said that it was really their father who got the call to preach, but God tarried too long, and their father got busy with school teaching, so when the call finally came, it hit Bob.

All of us who were campus ministers in the 1960s wondered if we had mistaken the call, and many of us, including Bob and I, did graduate work, thinking about another profession. Bob found that other profession, teaching family studies at Eastern IL U, but he never lost that commitment to faith, commitment to the church, commitment to God.

He was still thinking and reading about matters of faith, and discussing them with the other renegades of The Green Room Sunday School class at Nashville UMC, right up to the end.

We met because he was a faithful member of Wesley UMC in Charleston, IL, when I pastored there. The friendship continued, even though we often lived hundreds of miles away. We often stayed with Bob and Kathy, first in Charleston, then in Brown County. We didn’t go places or do things on those visits, just talked…and regardless of how long the visit was, we never got all the talking done. Of course, part of that was because we told the same stories over and over.

He just enjoyed friends—fellow faculty members, fellow church members, tennis buddies. He wasn’t the jolly friend type. He was the faithful friend type, the kind who would load up my father and all his belongings in his pickup and drive him all the way from Bloomington, IN to Mason City, IA, just because we needed him there so we could take care of him, but were unable to get him ourselves because we were also taking care of grandkids.

Bob just never got quite enough football. Or justice. He cared about football for himself, which also meant the MS State U Bulldogs. He cared about justice for others, which meant those who got the least of it.

The obits will probably say that he was 87 years old, but he was closer to 88, so that’s what I will claim. I don’t want some obit writer to cheat him out of any of the time he was alive.

We have shared life for forty years: The end of his marriage to Sharon and the start and continuation of his marriage to Kathy. News about, prayers for, and sometimes the presence of, children and grandchildren. Overnight visits, sometimes for several days. Memories. The church-complaints and hopes. Discussions about faith and doubt. Hope and action for justice and inclusion of all. Food, usually prepared by Kathy or Helen, but sometimes by Bob—biscuits, chili, pecan pie. Laughter. Countless college football games.  

Bob is dead. That’s not the end of the story, that’s the beginning.

John Robert McFarland