This weekend was one of the hardest I've ever had. I flew to Montana to say a final goodbye to one of my oldest and dearest friends. He was diagnosed with colon cancer in May of last year and lost the battle on April 9. He was only 28 years old. He made a list of people he wanted to speak at his celebration service and I was honored to be among them. Several people asked me to post what I wrote so here you go. I hope that it will continue to honor one of the best men I've ever known.
I recently spent a day driving through the mountains of Georgia and North Carolina. I was struck by the old buildings still nestled in their hillside homes; remnants of the past, left to tell the stories. In the last few months I’ve also been struck by the remnants of my past and how often those remnants involved Todd. The number of stories that involve him amazes me. Todd has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. There are not very many memories of my childhood in which he did not play a significant part. From the time we could walk and talk he was my best friend. The goal of every summer vacation was to spend as much time together as we could manage. The Baar home was as much my home as my own was.
We spent our days building forts under every bush and tree and in every abandoned building on the farm. We took trips to the junk piles in the surrounding hills to return with chipped plates, cracked mugs and empty ketchup bottles and vegetable cans to line the shelves Todd rigged between uneven tree branches; a foreshadowing of his career to come. We swam in the canal and, having apparently watched Annie one too many times, ran through the fields as runaway orphans escaping from their evil guardians. And if we were really lucky Ely would be there, too. The three of us would haul out his old red backpack, pack a lunch and our swimsuits and head out across the fields for a day of adventures. We ate our lunch beside the Owl Tree or the Willows and alternated carrying the supplies and cooling off with a float in the swampy, but oh-so-cool water, letting the current carry us along. We ended the day with all three of us packed onto the fold out couch in the Baar living room giggling and talking until Ron was thoroughly fed up and would come stomping down the stairs telling us to be quiet “For the last time” for about the third time. We eventually outgrew the sofa bed and moved our slumber parties outside. However, not wanting to be woken by the car when Ron left for work we bypassed the yard and camped out in the cemetery on the other side of the fence. When I mention this to friends now they tend to find it a strange place for regular campouts but it was simply convenient and we saw nothing wrong with it.
There were Saturday night suppers at Grandma’s where the whole Westra family would gather for a big meal and then game after game of Beckon, Beckon, Capture the Flag or Moonlight, Starlight in the dark in which it always seemed to end with someone running into a branch of an apple tree or a full tilt collision. There were the Thanksgivings on the farm and then after, sledding in the draw and football in the snow. There were the weekends every month spent in Billings while Ron was in the Navy Reserves. With the bushes in the Anderberg yard off limits we were forced to build our forts using every available sheet and blanket filling the basement with linen palaces in which we hid out and watched movies and ate popcorn. Or the days where the floor was lava and we could only move around by walking on furniture, the results of which left me with ten stitches and a scar I carry to this day. Countless games of Blind Man’s Bluff and Twister on the playroom floor and always the plans for the months to come.
As we grew older schedules got harder and harder to accommodate. But he still came every month and attended youth group functions and school events. He came every year for the homecoming game and took me to dinner to celebrate my birthday. The summer trips to Ennis Lake to cliff jump and jet ski and Fourth of July pancake breakfasts out on the farm.
During my college years it was harder to find time together. School and work kept me busy and he was busy beginning his career. But the summer after I finished I spent 2 months in Bozeman working in the greenhouse and the Garden Center. I spent nearly every evening at his house having the privilege of getting to know the love of his life. I left that fall to teach in Scotland with the anticipation of having Erin just 100 miles down the road. But the love won out over the fiddle playing and instead of planning Scottish romps with me she returned to plan a wedding and a future with the man she loved. I in turn chopped several countries off my scheduled last European hurrah to return to Montana and be a part of the festivities.
My life has not been sedentary in the years since. The travel bug caught me and has never let me go. I don’t stay in one place very long. I’ve made and said goodbye to many friends in many different places over the years. I’ve not kept in touch with many, but Todd was always a constant. Their home was always open to me and time with them was always a priority on my trips home. It was always a place of rest because it was a place of shared memory. I looked forward to his smile, his laugh, and his hugs. He had very distinctive hugs.
The loss of that shared memory has weighed heavily on my heart the last few weeks. In our last conversation Todd spoke of his heartbreak that his kids would never have the opportunity of seeing all his favorite places with him. He asked me to take them to the Chalky Bank and tell them the stories of our childhood adventures. I consider it an honor and a privilege to share my treasure chest of memories with his precious children.
One of the memories that has been running through my mind for weeks is of walking through the pasture behind Uncle Dick and Aunt Hermina’s on our way to the back pastures and our days of adventure. The pasture was always full of cows and, being the city girl that I was, I was always afraid of the cows. Todd would tell me to wait, pick up his walking stick and run down the road yelling, scaring the cows out of the way. He would wait on the other side with an exultant smile on his face waiting for me to catch up. Running parallel to that memory is the ending scene from C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle. There has been a train wreck and the children are once again in Narnia, standing with Aslan before the door to the new world and eternity. And as they pass through the door, the book reads, “But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever in which every chapter is better than the one before.” And I see a skinny little kid with a red backpack and a walking stick, exultant smile firmly in place, crossing through the door, ready for the next adventure, and waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
