Funeral Service for William Bradner

Saturday, April 25, 2009

St. David’s Episcopal Church, DeWitt NY

The Rev. James C. Bresnahan, Interim Rector

 

 

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

 

We gather today to thank God for the life of Bill Bradner.  We come as family, as congregants, as friends, as one-time co-workers, as neighbors - all here to remember him before God with gratitude, to pray and support those who grieve, and to be assured of a love that will not let us go. For that is the promise of today’s Gospel reading: Anyone who comes to me, I will never drive away.

 

On Sundays in this Easter season our worship here has been marked by shouts of “Alleluia.”  Praise God!  No less so today! For though we grieve, we grieve in the hope of the resurrection. Our trust is in God who raised Jesus from the dead and will raise us also to be with him.  Our grief neither drowns our hope in God, nor chokes our expression of gratitude for Bill’s life and what he meant to us in many ways.

 

Bill was in our choir. He was here Sundays to sing and Thursdays to rehearse.  On the evenings of rehearsals, when others had gone, he would often remain to learn organ and practice piano on the grand piano in the back corner. Every Sunday, as I line up to process for the opening hymn, I’ve stood near that piano. Never having heard the story about it, I thought of it as one more nice grand piano.

 

This week, I learned the story that goes with it. The story begins when Bill was five years old, living in the home he was born in, one of four children, growing up in Short Hills, New Jersey. It was then, when he was five, that his father died, forcing his mother to abandon her role as daytime mother to work in New York City to support the family.

 

Thank God for Mimi, his mother’s mother, Bill’s grandmother, who moved in and remained to help raise the family. Mimi was a pianist.  And she brought to Bill’s home a piano.  She wanted Bill to be a musician, like herself.  But not on the piano! Why not? She wanted someone to accompany her, not play instead of her.  So Bill unhappily was taught to play violin.

 

When Mimi died in 1985, Bill donated her grand piano to St. David’s. And that’s the story behind his coming or remaining here at night alone to play the piano he had grown up with, which he heard played throughout his childhood by the one who helped raise him and cared for him in those trying years of his life.  Now it was his turn to play that piano. As his fingers stroked the keys, what memories must have swirled about his mind about childhood pain and childhood love!

 

Thank God for Mimi!

 

Bill attended college during the Second World War.  He got no further than his freshman year before he was drafted into the army and engaged in deadly combat in France and Germany, twice wounded and hospitalized. While lying wounded in a hospital bed, the rest of his unit was sent off to fight the Battle of Bulge.  All of them, all of them, were killed.  Bill lived because of his wounds that were being treated.  He was shipped back, having lost all his buddies.

 

Here in the United States, he continued his convalescence in an army hospital before being released to to continue his college studies. 

 

He remained at Lehigh where he completed his bachelor’s, masters, and doctoral degrees.  Ruth jumped into his life during his doctoral studies.  At the end of their first date, he said to her, “Want to go flying tomorrow?”  And they did. They lived in a trailer camp at Lehigh.  Ruth worked.  Bill studied. Finally, he started to learn piano.

 

From Lehigh Bill went on with Ruth to Brown in Providence, then to New Jersey to work at Sloan-Kettering in New York, then here to work at Bristol Laboratories.  He loved it here, but always missed spring. There’s so little of it in Central New York. But winters were fine, because there was skiing.  

 

Children came along.  A joy!  You’ll hear from them soon.

 

What a blessing he was to our choir.  He was a true tenor - really enjoyed singing, helping the rest of us below with lesser faculties to lift our voices in song to God. It was so hard a year to two ago for him to give choir up, when a second illness struck, many years after cancer had first grabbed hold of him and remained clinging.

 

He was twice a warden of our parish, a true leader, a good leader. 

 

Bill could extremely frugal at times. I suspect from the anxiety of childhood loss.  But he did like a nice automobile. One among his family said in that regard, “He was a grown up boy!”

 

Bill never talked about his ills; never complained in the hospital as he was dying.

 

Like always, he was a calm presence – the kind of person you would want to meet in an emergency situation, comforting, offering security.

 

Now he is not with us.  But we remember his presence with thanksgiving.  We thank God for how his life intersected ours or accompanied ours for years, for decades, or for the lifetime of those younger.

 

We pray that the calm presence he exhibited might be ours as well in the days ahead, living in a holy hope and in the quiet confidence that nothing in life and nothing in death shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

 

And we pray for guidance and wisdom to live the remainder of our life well, to love others as God loves us, to be generous and do good, to be reconciled to others, and to strive for justice and peace.  Amen.