Eulogy for Friend

Eulogy for Friend

The phone rang in the early hours of the morning. Rolf G. informed us that Michael had suffered a heart attack a few hours earlier and had not survived. My wife whispered a few words I could not hear, sat silently on the edge of the bed for a moment, then turned to me and said, "Michael passed away at the airport, its just not fair. He was doing so well."

No, it was just not fair. We try to share with Michael's family, with Kathy, Molly and Tom, Molly, Clint and Wendy and their families the grief they feel, but it is not really in our power to do so. We are compelled to measure the loss of our friend and colleague, father and husband each in our own way and turn instead to what we can share, the extraordinary life that touched us all.

I spoke with Michael several times well before we had actually met. When it was determined that Marilyn and I were coming to a university in far off Montana, he called us in Washington, D.C. to welcome us, to ask questions about courses I wanted to teach, shared information about students and the university. A few weeks after the Fall term began that year, he came into my office and asked me a question about a Native American tribe that lived in the Montana western border region. "How did they subsist," I think he asked. I replied that they hunted and fished and planted crops, they were a "seasonal people." He liked that phrase. "Ya, Ya" and then he was back to his typewriter. Some months later, the first addition of his book Montana: A History of Two Centuries, written with colleague Dick R., came out. He gave me a copy and I was perusing through the early chapters, when there in the middle of a discussion about Montana's native people, was "Historian Thomas R. Wessel refers to them as ‘seasonal people'."

It was a small matter that hardly enhanced his scholarly reputation of mine for that matter, but I came to learn it was typical. A quiet, generous gesture followed in the years we spent together in the Department of History and Philosophy, and after, when he climbed the administrative ladder to the President's Office. I would soon learn that I was hardly alone as a recipient of Michael's generosity and concern.