On Belonging - A eulogy for my godfather, William C. Rands III

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Bill died on Father’s Day, which is fitting for a man who was a father figure to so many, and looking back on our life together with the kind of clarity that only comes when someone is gone, I see the long contours of his love as if for the first time. It’s funny how death does that. The cold force of absence reveals love in ways we may not have always perceived when the person was alive.??

Bill loved his family with constancy. Speaking personally, he shaped me in ways I have barely begun to understand. Undercurrents, feelings deep in the mind, he shaped everything: how I see family and friends, the purposes of my studies, my views on subjects as diverse as politics to science, to the duties of citizenship and family.

It was deeply rooted in place, his love. In this place. In the Great Lakes and its freighters, beaches, and lighthouses. And I will always see those things through him. We all will. It was on the Lakes that water came to align with family.

How did he do it? Simple, really: he showed up. A constant presence. Year after year. From when I was a baby to serving as the best man in my wedding in South Africa, to our last call just a few weeks ago, he was a constant. He was for everyone a voice of caring, reason, and reflection.

Over the last few days, I’ve had the privilege of sitting in his library, which if you haven’t seen it, is a remarkable thing, a remarkable feat of construction and books, you know Bill carries books with him everywhere but if you haven’t seen it you actually have no concept of how many books he had in his possession. And so to go through his papers and books, Barbara and Bill showed me a life mission statement he wrote in 2016, which is really not that long ago.

?“I believe in an old piece of Native American wisdom,” he wrote, “which I learned from people that work with children. In order to grow up to be, then maintain ourselves as, a strong, honest, productive, happy person, we all need four things.”

1.???“A sense of belonging

2.???A sense of independence

3.???A sense of mastery

4.???A sense of generosity.”

He lived these words his whole life. He inhabited them, and he tried to impart them to his children, grandchildren, and probably to the dog Cinnamon, and to all the people he loved through his actions.

Belonging. A dear friend of mine once said that your achievements don’t actually matter at the end of the day – what matters is how you make the people around you feel right now. With his constant love and presence, with the world he built, from the Prismatic Club to the hydroplanes to all the organizations he helped build and lead, all the foundations, he fostered a sense of belonging by showing up.?

A sense of independence. Finding your way in that space between belonging and independence is a key part of growing up. Billy, Barb, Stash, and I all learned that under him. It is easier, I realize, to be a godfather than a father. Throughout my life, he could step in with deep and pure affection, and then hand me back to my folks for the diapers, and the homework and the attitude. But that distance also meant he could offer words of counsel to help me see my own father, in particular, from the perspective of someone who loved us both. He helped me see myself as both whole and separate, and that granted a sense of belonging and independence.

A sense of self-mastery. Now in Bill’s case, the list of self-masteries is long. My father tells me, and he knew him since they were 11, that as a young man, Bill made a conscious choice to stop being shy, and he did it by learning. Over and over throughout his life, he would turn knowledge into value into action, as a financial analyst, in the accumulation of wisdom to be a better husband and father, in the collection of puns, in everything.?

He reminds me of Angelica Schuyler’s lines in Hamilton, when she goes to a ball in New York City looking for a suitable prospective partner. “I’m looking for a mind at work,” she says, “I’m looking for a mind at work.” And that must have been what it felt like when Happy met Bill those many years ago. Two minds, two of the funniest souls, encountering each other again in their twenties after knowing each other in childhood, two adopted children who could have been anywhere, but who found themselves in that unique moment, who found themselves here. They built a lifetime together, the greatest of achievements, on a foundation of humor and love.

You can his see self-mastery in the dozens of books he’d bookmarked in his library. Last night, I pulled a book randomly from the shelf, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, where he’d marked a poem by Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us, Great and Small”, and I read it again, listening for his voice.

?Then, above his desk, I saw a framed cartoon of a choo-choo train. It reads:

“The Little Engine that Reads Descartes…”

?Then below it says:

“I think Therefore I can, I think therefore I can, I think therefore I can.” That was Bill.

Last night I opened so many books of his. In one he had bookmarked just one story. I had to take a look. It goes like this.

“Mahatma Gandhi was known for walking hundreds of miles barefoot. Over time, he developed incredibly thick calluses on his feet, stronger than the soles of many boots. He also ate lightly and fasted often, which left him frail and gave him chronically bad breath. And do you know what that made him??

A super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.”

The book is called The Pun Also Rises.

He laughed so hard at his own jokes he sometimes cried.

He carried books of physics with him wherever he went. Equations. Images of triangles.

He wrote in a prismatic speech that he gave in 2019, On Truth, which I think he worked very hard on, that he would have become a physicist but he felt that he wasn’t fast enough at math, so he majored in psychology, a field of expertise that helped him tremendously as a reader of humans.

His self-mastery of his own mind, I think, is part of what led to his independence of spirit.

He had no fear of being himself. Any fear that he ever had, he overcame it years ago, long before most of us met him or knew who he was, with the possible exception of Happy and my father. And that comfort with himself made him comfortable with others, you all have seen it, over and over. He was the best man at my wedding. He was also the best man at father’s wedding in 1974 and then at mine, 31 years later in 2005, and his combination of self-mastery and independence led him to give the best speech I could have ever asked for:

He told my wife she looked beautiful.

Then he called me an ugly cuss.

Then he said congratulations. And that was it.?It was amazing.

Belonging. Independence. Self-mastery; and finally a generosity of spirit.

There is a phrase in psychology, Eriksonian generativity, named after the psychologist Erik Erikson’s theory of the human lifecycle in its latter stages. You have found belonging and independence. You have worked towards some self-mastery, and hopefully achieved it. Then the only thing left to do is to give back.

There are people across this room – and it’s a big room – and across time – that have benefited from Bill’s generosity of spirit. He was that way for as long as I knew him. For as long as all of us knew him. A man constantly giving back.

A man walking out by the water, his gaze rising as he stares out at Lake Huron. A man full of happiness at seeing his family and friends, a glimmer in his eye, an irrepressible soul. A mind at work, full of plans and ideas, always dreaming, always present to the ones around him, full of intention.

Fair seas and following tides, lovely man. I see that the Navy is here today, and that is fitting. You taught your children and grandchildren to make our way out into the world. You taught all of us that. Thank you for your deep and constant love.