A Life Celebrated - Bill Horn

Bill is over 91 years old, or as we like to say in pediatrics, 1,100 months old. He is an insulin-dependent diabetic that recently underwent his second partial foot amputation -- a common complication. He has prostate cancer, an enlarged/weakened heart causing congestive failure, dangerously low blood pressure, kidney failure, and wound infection caused by the worst bacteria ever -- MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staph Aureus).

Bill has also been 99.9% deaf for many years. He could probably hear a siren if held to his ear, but basically, he now lives in a world that is silent, although Bill is far from silent himself. He has vocally refused all life-prolonging efforts, including resuscitation. Bill is my father-in-law and he is dying.

As I write this Blog, my wife is at his bedside. At my suggestion, she is using a large white-board to communicate with him. His brain is functioning wonderfully and he often forgets that he talks very loud. Although his body is rapidly failing him, he does not hesitate to say what he thinks -- another privilege of age. One of the first things he said to my wife was, "I would really like to die, but I don't know how." The second thing he said was that he wanted some vanilla soft-serve ice cream from Fosters Freeze, something he has not eaten in years because of his diabetes.

Before the ravages of age and disease took their toll, Bill was a vibrant and active man. He played golf twice a week and enjoyed playing cards at the Indian Casino. Unlike many recreational gamblers, Bill did win a new Ford Mustang a few years ago at the Casino. He took the cash value of the car instead, hoping to take a cruise. He never did make that cruise. I suspect the Casino eventually ended up with most of the cash again.

Bill loved his garden and fruit trees. On his little hillside home, he grew an impressive amount of produce, including grapes, kiwis, oranges, tomatoes, beans, and even a few stalks of corn. Many years ago, we bought him a pair of canaries. He loved his birds so much, that he built them an outside aviary, bought several more pairs, and continued to raise them successfully until a big, black snake ate every one of the birds one night.

Bill ate a very modest and often odd diet. His current Chinese wife would feed him just about anything made with leftover restaurant food, and he would just eat it. Bill secretly loved good 'ol fashioned American meat loaf, beef stew, and an occasional steak. Even with his poorly-fitting dentures, Bill was able to wolf down a good man-meal when he visited with us.

Bill is a WWII Navy veteran. Recruited out of UC Berkeley after Pearl Harbor where he finished his civil engineering degree, Bill became a hard-hat salvage diver and successfully brought up many sunken US warships so they could be used again in the war effort. After the war, he took a job with the California Department of Water Resources. When he retired, he was the Director. Under Bill's leadership, the peripheral canal that provides water to the Central Valley, allows many of us to be eating lettuce today. Without the Department's efforts to construct the Folsom Dam, I would not easily have electricity in my rural home and people in the Sacramento valley would always be in fear of a flood.

Bill loved the outdoors. As Water Resources Director, he would always assign himself to the annual Sierra snow measurement team. They would load up their pack horses and supplies and head off into the mountains to measure the water content of the winter snow. He admitted to me that others could have done this job, but he liked to camp out in the winter. Everyone deserves to take a break from their desks. What the Department now does with a room of computers, these post-war civil engineers did with a pencil and a slide rule. The work that he accomplished in those days is still honored and respected. Bill even co-authored a book on dealing with natural disasters. He was now facing his own natural crisis --one that he predicted but cannot be overcome.

When his children were young, Bill was a Boy Scout Leader. With this knowledge of hidden Sierra lakes, we have many pictures of my wife and her brothers holding strings of huge trout, swimming with the kids in cold mountain streams, or making s'mores over an open camp fire.

Bill and his first wife, Betsy, had five children, including one daughter that is my wife. Two sons have died, another son, born with severe mental retardation from PKU (a now detectable and treatable genetic disorder) lives in a Sacramento area care home. His son, John, also at his side today, lives in San Francisco. After Betsy's unexpected death when my wife was in her 20's, he retreated from the world and his family for many years, working civil engineering jobs in the Philippines and Korea. He traveled alone to exotic places like Morocco and Egypt. Several years later, he remarried a Chinese woman living in the Philippines. Oi Mie has remained his wife for the last 25 or more years.

Bill has been retired longer than anyone that I know. He has been receiving his State Pension for over 35 years; longer than he worked for the State. He was always puzzled by the fact that my wife and I still worked. Actually, he was puzzled by anyone who works at or beyond retirement age. Bill really enjoyed his retirement years, but traveling North America in his motor home until it was no longer safe for him to drive anymore.

Bill is not afraid to die. At 91 and dealing with health problems, he has been expecting it for years. His excellent genetics have protected him. He has two elderly sisters, also with diabetes, that are doing well. Jean lives in the Washington, DC area; and Betty in Napa, CA. On those very rare occasions when they are all together, it is a wonderful to hear their childhood stories and share their joy.

My wife just called a few minutes ago, and Bill has peacefully passed away.

Even wonderful lives must end, but the re-told memories of a life celebrated will live on forever. He was an ordinary man who lived a long and extraordinary life, and we will miss him.

I suspect there were several empty ice cream containers on his bedside table.