Bill Cochran, 1938-2015

What in the world are we to think about death?

Bill Cochran, a “titan,” as his daughter Elizabeth described him in her beautiful eulogy yesterday, seemed to be of two minds on the subject, right up to the time he died, on New Year’s Eve. Bill looked forward to another life, even while living this one as if there were no tomorrow, let alone any eternity.

“He was a seeker,” Elizabeth said of her dad, who died while swimming at the Y, at age 77. “I can just see him, swimming into the light.”

Both Elizabeth and her sister, Jean, spoke of their father’s spiritual journey over the last decade or so, as did pastor Todd Jones, who presided over the funeral at First Presbyterian. They described someone preoccupied, even obsessed, with finding the right way to live, even after having already lived a long life of passionate engagement, kindness and generosity – of service “in the light of the living God,” as Jones put it.

Of late, Bill had been an enthusiast of Lectio Divina (Latin for “divine reading”) of Bible texts. In “channeled prayer,” as Dr. Jones called it, the practitioner reads a passage, and then meditates on it, contemplating its meaning while simultaneously praying. You could call the process, I suppose, “talking to God.”

What did Bill talk to God about?

His family had asked the reverend Jones to read some of Bill’s favorite passages, which Jones said had been marked with Bill’s notes, comments, underlinings and other scribblings. One of them was Psalm 39:

“Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.

“Behold, thou hast made my days as a hand-breadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee…

“And now, Lord, what wait I for? my hope is in thee…
“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears; for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.

“O spare me, that I may recover my strength, before I go hence, and be no more.”   

The communicant asks God to take away his vanity (the psalm says that “verily every man at his best is altogether vanity”), and Jean noted that her father had made progress in that regard, although her mom, Anita, Bill’s wife of 55 years (!), had reported that “he wasn’t there yet.”

Psalm 138 was the next selection. It’s a song of praise and thanksgiving; it acknowledges that vanity is an ever-present peril (“the proud he knoweth afar off”), and it ends on this note of supplication: “Forsake not the work of thine own hands.”

After reading from Proverbs 31, about the good wife (“His children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her”), Matthew 22 (love God, and love each other), and Matthew 23:12 (“And whosoever shalt exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted”), Jones invited the assembly to reflect in silence for some minutes while the organ played. I thought about my history with Bill Cochrane.

I was 24 or so when I met Bill. He was pushing 40, and still playing basketball at the Y, which I thought was unseemly. I told him so, repeatedly, in insulting terms, my message being that basketball was a young man’s game. (I got my comeuppance 20 years later, when I was still insisting on playing, to the chagrin of the young guys at the Y.) Bill took the high road: He handled my assaults with dignity and forbearance. I’ll always remember that, just as I’ll regret not knowing Bill better than I did.

He was a man of infinite jest, foremost in the recollections of Elizabeth and Jean and their brother Billy. He was unceasingly curious. He was loving – not only to his own, but to his legions of friends, and, as much as it was in his power, to that unlovable creature known as mankind. (He was still working on this last one, up to the end.)

Two years ago, Bill threw himself a 75^th-birthday bash. (In typical Cochran fashion, he picked up the tab.) He invited all the old Y ballplayers, every last one of whom he’d outstayed. Bill, with his family in attendance, reveled in the barbs, happy to listen to others do what he dearly loved to do himself: talk. He looked like the youngest man there.

Indeed, all of his children marveled at his youth, his exuberance – at his passion for living. Jean said she’d remember his sheer “visceral physicality.” Fellow ex-ballplayers echoed the sentiment, often trite but perfectly apropos to this 77-year-old: Too soon.  The pastor read a piece by George Bernard Shaw, that Bill had especially savored: 

“I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.  

“...Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations.” 

A man in love with life, Bill perhaps was seeking an answer to the puzzle: How ought we to die?

I’ll remember Bill Cochran as a man in a hurry. He was always half-running to his next destination, eager – make that ravenous – to find out just what more life could possibly have in store.

So long, sojourner.