Eulogy from Wade's Service

Greetings followers of Wade's Blog.  I have wanted to publish the Eulogy Wade's brother Will gave at Wade's service for some time now on Wade's Blog.  I decided that it made sense to publish it on February 6th, the one month anniversary of the celebration of Wade's life.  The service was a beautiful honor of Wade's life.  Thank you for reading and remembering with us.

Love,

Debra, Cate, Will and Ben

Eulogy for My Brother

Wade Robert Gillham (1967-2016)

Death should be ashamed.

I stand here today the saddest I have been in my life. A big brother whose little brother has died.

But I've also never been so grateful as I am now—because my little brother is no longer suffering.

My name is Will Gillham, slash Unkl Papi. Werd. I'm one of Wade's 3 older brothers, closest to him in age. Our number 2, Mason, died at age 12. Our oldest, Preston, is here with me today.

We're 2 left of 4 now.

On behalf of the Gillham and Hamilton families, thank you, each one of you, for being here today—even though you'd obviously be nowhere else.

We have gathered from all points to honor Wade Gillham—beloved brother, husband, father and friend—who, despite all our prayers, has blown from our skies like a cloud in a cloud-moving wind. In the end, all anyone could do was watch him fly away.

Our families are grateful as well to All Saints Presbyterian Church for hosting this gathering. Wade wanted us to meet here when it came time to memorialize him. He and Tim Frickenschmidt, senior pastor here, met at their kids' basketball games. Their acquaintance soon took root in a deep friendship that would prove very important to both of them in the final year of Wade's life.

Wade loved Tim first. And then he loved this high point of land where All Saints is, and this space where we sit.

Over the last months of his life, Wade watched all this being built, and it increasingly reminded him of the high-desert outpost of Marfa, TX, with its minimalist art and architecture, its exquisite land and skies, its palpable soul. Marfa held a particularly special place in Wade's heart—he traveled there numerous times, twice with me, and it was there he chose to go with his family on their final trip together. Those of you who have been there will appreciate the aesthetic and spiritual similarities between that place and this one, ...and why Wade selected this place for us to come together to remember him.

I first knew Wade as a four-year old.

When he got old enough, our early activities together included great fun like shooting at him with a BB gun while he sprinted across the backyard. Or sitting on him with his arms pinned beneath my knees while I thumped him many times over on his chest as he struggled to get away.

I'm lucky Wade didn't turn that table on me when he was older, cause he sure could have.

I got the good looks, but he got the size and strength.

Eventually our relationship assumed a more equitable footing, and we turned from BB'ing and chest-thumping to adventuring and making fun together—two qualities in Wade that over the course of my time with him would fill volumes of stories.

Many here today have their own volumes filled with Wade stories.

This adventuring spirit was inadvertently fostered early on in us by our somewhat conservative minister parents. To their enduring credit, our parents not only took us with them on their lecture travels around the country when we were kids, they didn't make us go to their lectures while we were there. While they were off speaking, we were left to our own devices.

Much awesomeness resulted.

Mom and Dad asked few questions; Wade and I told few lies.

In thinking about today, I remembered one time when we were kids, and we were staying at the Fontainebleau in Miami, where our parents were speaking in some church. Mom and Dad were gone all morning, and Wade and I were instructed to stay in the room. Which had a balcony many floors above the parking lot below. We spent our morning leisurely lobbing chewed-up mouthfulls of Oreo cookies onto the cars below. A direct trunk shot was so many points, contrast counted (black cookie on light-blue car for example), keeping score based on direct hits and called shots. One wet, well-aimed Oreo ball would splat across an entire hood and windshield.  

Another time, when we were a bit older and in Hawaii, we somehow procured a moped during our parents' lecture and luncheon, and we pioneered our way across the island to a nudist beach. Where we lingered for some time.

As we aged I like to think our adventures assumed a more mature character. We began partnering with Pres in our escapades, mostly on fly-fishing trips and biking.

Of all our adventures and fun together, I'm partial to the time Wade and Pres packed and shipped their bicycles to my apartment in New York City, where I was living at the time. We assembled them in my 1-room space and then hit the streets. Several times over we thrilled ourselves by racing amidst the traffic down Broadway through Times Square, using referee whistles for horns.

In the summer of 2015, Wade and I traveled to Marfa and Big Bend. We both knew he was very sick. It was early enough in his illness, though, that he was still able to ride in a car and get around. From Marfa all along the winding river road down into Terlingua, we stopped to push any large rocks we could find down the steep slopes into the Rio Grande.

Driving the dark two-lane into the park that night, we counted and inventoried the critters that got caught in our headlights. At one point we stopped, got out, and lay on our backs in the middle of the road and stared up at the starblasted sky arching above us from horizon to horizon.

This is the stuff best friends do.

In one of his later blog posts, Wade referred to his best friend as "a diamond, hard and beautiful and highly precious."

Read on and you realize he wasn't referring to me. Or to Chip or Trey or Brett or PJ or any other of his great friends here today. The subject of his sentence was his beautiful wife Debra, whom Wade went on to call "selfless in caring for those around her."

Epic warrior in Wade's epic battle. Indispensible to all of us and our collective strength to carry on, and to do what had to be done.

The person I call Tiny Boss. ...The Force is strong in this one.

The words needed to describe what Debra and Wade endured together over the past two-and-a-half years are unsuited for a holy place such as this.

Debra Gillham, I admire you more than anyone else I have known. Thank you again and again and again for how you cared for my brother during his illness, and never once failed to shine a light in the obsidian darkness for your blessed children and all the rest of us to follow.

It is of no little import to the Gillham family that Wade shares the same deathday with Princess Leia.

Who else would Wader run off with?

Debra's clearly got the Force, and we've all seen her use it. But before the Force was strong in her, it was strong in Wade.

He and I saw the original STAR WARS together in 1977—before it was Episode IV—and like any kid in '77 Kid Wade obsessively collected the 6-inch action figures. They didn't stay in their boxes either. We were always playing with them, and we each secretly knew that the other one knew that Boba Fett was the chillest of them all.

The last movie Wade saw was ROGUE 1, and by this time his collection focus had turned from the figures onto a single clear, insulated, 16-oz plastic STAR WARS cup.

Which he drank from exclusively.

I'm sure a number of you who stopped by over the past few months know the cup, but I doubt very few of you here outside the family know that Wade composed a song and dance for the cup.

I don't dare try to bust Wade's moves here today—but the words to his cup-ditty go like this:

"STAR WARS cup (2x)

You may want my STAR WARS cup

Can you have my STAR WARS cup? Huh-uh, huh-uh"

The lines suffer without the moves.

More even than his STAR WARS cup, and possibly even more than he loved Debra, Wade loved his three beautiful children: Cate, William, and Benjamin.

And his dogchild Beau. Callout to Bubba-Dog Hound, who couldn't be with us today. He stayed at home.

Wade demonstrated an astounding loyalty and sensibility as a parent, and a devotion to his children that bordered on the unreal. It remains amazing to me how Wade could be sick as hell, and he would still go to his boys' games or his daughter's performances.

Those of you who know Cate, Will, and Ben know how they feel about their father. To those who don't know them, there's this: How many 17, 14, and 9 year-olds like to hang with their dad, see movies and walk around the block with him, and listen to his music?

I can point to 3 who did.

I so wish the reason Unkl Papi is up here talking was not because your beloved dad has died. ...I'm sorry for all of us here today, ...but most of all I'm sorry for you three.

Hear me: Because you are branded with your father's heart, in time you will see that he not only prepared you for life... but for life without him.

In his honor, in his memory, hold to his examples as father and friend, and you will do right in the world.

A party always had life when Wade was there. But of course the Wader was so much more than fun and laughs. His spirit encouraged transparency and honesty; friendship with Wade involved commerce between souls.

He wrote to all of you here in one of his posts: "I try to live in the light and the yellow joy of each new minute, but sometimes I fail and I have to sob and cry and hold onto my wife and dear friends for support. I thank them now and forever."

It's been said that you have the friends you deserve. Again on behalf of Wade's family, from the deepest bluest water of our hearts, thank you for demonstrating such true friendship throughout Wade's long, hard journey into peace.

Wade loved you all. He would want us all to stay committed to each other, to maintain our bonds of friendship, and to be ready to help any in our number again when the need arises.

For the rest of our days, Wade will be missing. While our lives in concert with his are rich with many joys and laughs, for my part I'm most grateful for the last two-and-a-half years with him.

Faced with a slow, painful, and wicked death, ...sick beyond description, the end of his life as tragic as any I've witnessed. Wade could have died a bitter, poisonous, and ruined man.

But he didn't.

Instead, he nourished and turned a light onto the beautiful in life: faith and family, love and kindness, friendship and grace.

Wade's beauty grew brighter as his light dimmed, which caused beauty to thrive all around him.

Many of you here today have witnessed this beauty. It was manifested in many ways over his last months. Just this week I rediscovered a particularly remarkable and shining example attached to an email Wade sent me last May. It was a poem he'd written, and he sent it to me because he didn't want to lose it. "It might come in handy some day," he wrote. And so it has. He titled it...

Radiance

I see me

scattering

dipping

rising

floating between earth and blue sky

waves of me

over new blossoms, yellow, white, green

passing familiar paddings of bent grass

shining on water's still movement

pieces of me

reflect and

pass through

both

to redisappear

on another blue sky day

Wade: Until that blue sky day my brother.