“Are you looking for Father David?”
No, I am looking for my Uncle Bill.
This was the response I always gave to that question, although I never said it out loud.
My Uncle Bill was known as “Father David” in his religious order, the Dominicans. They were his religious “family,” and when he was ordained a Catholic priest over 56-years ago (photo gallery) he took a new name — Fr. David Willis Geib, O.P. That was his professional identity.
And the Dominicans were a second family to him. But we were Bill’s first family. His “real” family, as I saw it. His personal identity, before his religious one was grafted on top of it. Look at the below photo of Bill as a little boy — the blond kid without a shirt on the right —
That was his birth family.
But my Uncle Bill chose the Dominicans as his religious family in early adulthood and never looked back. Father David lived true to his order’s austere vows — ”chastity, poverty, obedience” — for his entire adult life.
I always know how long my Uncle Bill has been a priest because almost the first religious rite he presided over after his ordination in June 1967 was my baptism. Born in May 1967, I always had Bill as both a beloved uncle and the family priest:
Bill perform’s mass at my house in March 1973.
My lifespan was the total years Bill had been a priest. So when I was fifty-years old we flew up to Oakland, CA (to St. Albert the Great Priory, the Western Dominican Province headquarters) where we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Uncle Bill’s priesthood.
Photo from that weekend
Similarly, I flew to Tucson to be present at his 25th anniversary at the Newman Center at the University of Arizona when I was 25-years old. In short: I’m 25 — Bill is 25 years into the priesthood; I’m 50, and Bill is 50 years in. 1967 to 1992 to 2017.
The years how they have flown by!
I first started writing this eulogy for my Uncle Bill on October 31, 2020 — on Halloween — which was the 24th anniversary of the death of my mother. It was five days after the funeral mass of my stepmother. The Covid-19 pandemic was in full bloom at that time with some 220,000 dead in my country and 1,200,000 worldwide. And Bill had advanced Alzheimer’s disease combined with a long struggle with diabetes, and his days seem to be numbered. It seemed to be the season of decline and death.
My Uncle Bill’s ministry had centered on working at Newman Centers on college campuses. Over the decades he had served the Catholic college students at the University of Oregon, University of Arizona, UC Riverside, and Occidental College, among other schools. But his health declined and then reached a crisis point. This is what happened: In April of 2020 Uncle Bill was driving into Eugene, Oregon for a doctor’s appointment from the St. Benedict Lodge Dominican Retreat and Conference Center outside town. The problem was this: he could not find the doctor’s office, even though he had been there several times before. So my uncle drove home and called his doctor and told him he couldn’t find his office.
That set off a flurry of more serious medical examinations, including an Internet meeting via Zoom with neurologists at UC San Francisco. The diagnosis was quick and unambiguous: Bill had Alzheimer’s Disease, probably brought on by years of diabetes. Bill was 78-years old.
His superiors took away his permission to drive. That was the right call, although my uncle did not like it. (Surprisingly, the State of Oregon did not take away Bill’s driver’s license.) Then the Dominican Order also took away his power to say mass. Bill would forget parts of the Catholic Mass or lose his place in the liturgy, after having been saying mass for almost five and a half decades. This made him even madder. Bill would never drive a car on the road or lead a mass in public again. (He would say mass for his close family sub rosa.)
His decline from Alzheimer’s would be inexorable and end in death. Bill knew this. And he was more tearful than I had ever seen him when he called me not long after the diagnosis in mid-2020. And the knowledge that soon enough he would not know who he was. His body might still be alive but he would essentially be lost to himself. My Uncle Bill was terrified. He did not use those words, but I could tell. He would talk to me about past events over the phone, as if he were reviewing them to be sure he could still remember them.
Alas.
At the beginning of this essay I mocked the idea that the Dominicans were my Uncle Bill’s “family.” But they were as good as their word: they took care of him in his decline. He continued to live in McKenzie Bridge with Father Kieran and Brother Lupe, and they watched and cared closely for him. I knew it was not easy. My uncle received the benefits medical science could give, which seemed to be meager: medication could slow but not stop the progression of Alzheimer’s. My Uncle Bill might never have had money or much in terms of material goods, but he was always surrounded by his faith community and they never abandoned him. His religious life was a facsimile of socialism: he owned next to nothing, but his basic needs were always met. Bill was especially “rich” in human connection. In an United States where so many live isolated and lonely lives staring at screens, my Uncle Bill lived and died ensconced in the care and love of both his religious and biological families. Watch this video of Bill talking about his love for the outdoors and for his lifelong friends who hiked and camped with him:
Do you see what I mean? Bill was rarely alone in his life — he was always loved, and he knew it. He enjoyed in life a richness beyond money.
As my Uncle Bill began to decline into a sort of living death, he continued to work as a priest while living with his coreligionists in a faith community . In the SARS-CoV2 virus outbreak of 2020 many elderly and sick lived isolated due to “social distancing” quarantine measures which protected them from infection but also helped to accelerate their deaths. They would sit in some facility for the elderly completely isolated during the pandemic. That was not the case with Bill who lived at the St. Benedict Lodge Dominican Retreat and Conference Center near McKenzie Bridge, Oregon until his disease progressed to a point where he needed more care than could be given him there. At that point Bill moved down to Oakland, CA to live with his fellow priests at the St. Albert’s Piory. Eventually, Bill moved to the “Watermark” facility in nearby Emeryville where he received 24-hour care in a “memory home.” I visited Bill in that place once in August of 2023. It was clean and orderly. But it was also inordinately grim. Halfway through a 90 minute visit my Uncle Bill looked up at me and asked, “Where am I?”
What was best about my Uncle Bill?
Was it his gentle nature which rendered Bill a loving, trustworthy soul to thousands of his devoted parishioners, fellow priests, and family and friends?
Definitely.
Was it his atypical work schedule which led him to be available to his nephews and nieces to go to afternoon matinee movie showings during the week, with soft-drink and bucket of popcorn in hand?
Of course.
Was it his love of the outdoors and the backpacking trips he would take to the California Sierra Nevadas, and so many other beautiful locales?
Yes.
Was it the fact that he was our family priest — that he baptized me and presided over my wedding — and baptized my daughters and gave them their first communions?
For sure.
Was it because whenever some local Catholic authority would get snotty with me, I would invoke the fact that my uncle was an ordained Dominican priest — and officious church bureaucrats would back down, doors would open.
I loved it.
Here is a colorful anecdote of my wonderful Uncle Bill: he agreed to come talk to my students when I worked as a middle school teacher in a private Jewish school in Los Angeles in the late 1990s. It was like “show and tell” of a Catholic priest, and my students asked my uncle questions nobody in our family ever had the guts to ask him —
“Do you like women?”
I do!
“Would you ever get married, if you could?”
Yes, I would.
Wow!
Most of these Jewish kids might never have the chance to talk with a Catholic priest again. It was a great teaching day. My uncle had driven down from Eagle Rock to my apartment the night before, and he was so exhausted by the kids that he fell right asleep on the floor of the teacher workroom afterwards — where I surreptitiously took this photo of him:
This is one of the best aspects of family — or any kind of emotional intimacy — that when you ask of them a favor, they bless you with an affirmative response which sanctifies and strengthens both sides in their love and commitment to each other:
“Uncle Bill, will you please come talk to my students at the Jewish school?” — me putting myself out there, and honoring him and his position as a Catholic priest with my request.
Of course I will. — Affirming both my students and me.
Another fun fact: my Uncle Bill was a real hiking and camping stud. In his prime he could hike from the top of the Grand Canyon down to the Havasupai Falls below and then back up to the top again in one day. For as long as his health was good, and even for some time after that, Bill was a serious outdoorsman. Maybe he was never happier than when he was active and out in nature? Backpacking and camping outdoors? But it had been many years since my Uncle Bill could do anything of the sort.
The ravages of time. And diabetes.
My Uncle Bill was almost 75-years old on April 29, 2016 when he came to my house to give my oldest daughter her first communion —
I had ice cream and chocolate sauce for the celebration afterwards. Despite his diabetes, Bill went over and ate a heaping dish of vanilla ice cream covered with chocolate sauce. I shook my head as he ate, but I held my tongue. Uncle Bill was a grown adult. I was not going to scold him like a child. But still.
There were other signs. In 2017 at the celebration of his fiftieth anniversary as a priest at Saint Albert’s Priory in Oakland, CA there were two other veteran priests to be fêted besides my uncle. My uncle was in better physical condition than they were, it seemed to me. But during mass Uncle Bill had trouble holding the chalice of altar wine without liquid spilling out on the ground from his trembling hand. These tremors, while not new, had grown worse.
And in May 2019 at the celebration of our birthdays in May, Bill struggled to make any sense whatsoever of his brand-new Apple iPhone. Bluetooth smartphone settings? Browsing the web on the Safari browser? Email on the small screen? GPS mapping services? Text messaging? YouTube? It was beyond him. Bill never did make the leap into the hand-held mobile computing era. Here we are during that celebration:
In retrospect, all the signs were there. None of us should have been particularly surprised then when he finally failed to locate the doctor’s office in early 2020. The writing was on the wall. Bill’s decline was gradual and lengthy. It would go in only one direction towards the end.
By mid-2021 we had all been vaccinated against the SARS-CoV-2 virus and were finally given permission for a long overdue visit. So my brother, sister, and father all flew up to Oregon in May 2021 to celebrate Bill’s 80th birthday over a long four-day weekend. My aunt, uncle, and cousin were there, too.
I knew this would be the occasion to say “goodbye.” Bill had declined precipitously by then. His skin had the unhealthy waxy pallor of the dying, and he was stooped over and had difficulty speaking loudly. Was it the diabetes or the Alzheimer’s which would be his end? Unknown. Was it both? Combined with just getting plain old?
Bill cried numerous times that weekend, and suddenly and unexpectedly he would moan in pain and fear, shocking and scaring me a bit — Death was at the door. Bill’s mind was there, then it was not. He seemed OK, then he didn’t. He could remember specifics from decades ago, but then he couldn’t remember what happened yesterday. (The same sort of brain misfiring happened with my stepmother at the end when the malignant breast cancer tumors arrived to her brain.) Bill would stare at photos from his past as if it were a quiz — do I still remember that person, and my relation to them? Do I know who I am? Am I still me? The bottom line: the brain was (usually) malfunctioning, while the rest of his body was (mostly) fine. We told Bill that both his blood and religious families were fully with him. We reminded him he was “surrounded by our love.” Most of his family were there and he was the center of our attention and affection. Courage and acceptance, Uncle Bill. Faith! It is no easy thing to look Death in the face, to accept it and die well, with grace and dignity.
But people have been dying for a long time, and perhaps it is as natural to die as it is to be born; we get old and our bodies wear out. Sometimes it happens sooner, sometimes later. But “everyone dies, their bodies rot, and every face becomes a skull,” as Sister Alethia reminds us. My time would come, too. Yours also, dear reader. To believe otherwise is childish. Our time on earth is precarious and limited: ripeness is all.
I was filled with sadness during that last 2021 weekend with Bill in Oregon, but also strengthened and confirmed by the familial unity. Bill would get worse, not better, over time. It would be only downhill. This was it.
When you see Bill in the below photo, he looks relatively good.
But then when you talk at some length with him, you understand better what is happening. Bill was forgetting who he was. He was slipping away, and he knew it.
When it finally came time to depart, I started crying. Bill did, too. “You see? You understand?” he beseeched me. We embraced. I told him, through my tears, how much I loved him. I explained that I appreciated everything he had done for me my whole life. My Uncle Bill had been a loving presence year in and year out. He had been the family priest and presided over every important ritual. If I had died before him, he would have buried me. Looking into his eyes, I thanked him for it all. When I had gotten on the plane to go see my Uncle Bill, I was determined to say these words to him before I left. I had the same experience with my mom and stepmom. (I regret I never had this opportunity with my friend, Chris Prewitt.) My Uncle Bill was shrunken and stooped over by that time, wasting away, and was much shorter than me. So I bent down and kissed him one last time on the top of his head, covered by sparse and snowy-white hair. Then I left. It was Sunday May 16, 2021.
Bill’s birthday was May 15, 1941. The eightieth anniversary of his birth was May 15, 2021. His deathday was March 10, 2025. He was 83 when he died.
The unending relentless march of time — “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old time is still a-flying; / And this same flower that smiles today / Tomorrow will be dying.” The blooming flower which was Willis Francis Geib was dying and had been so for some time. This is true of all of us, but for Bill more immediately.
The received wisdom was that my Uncle Bill would be more ready than most to depart this “vale of tears” and meet up with His Maker. Bill was a priest, after all, and priests are supposedly happy to be reunited with God. Faith would be his armor against Death, and the terror of it – or at least that was how I thought. But Bill’s brain was addled by Alzheimer’s. He seemed stuck. Bill was losing himself. He was afraid. He kept repeating himself. Bill was super emotional. Out of the blue he would whimper in emotional pain. It was hard to watch.
It was the fear: it had overtaken him, seized him. When I talked by phone with “Father David,” not long after his diagnosis in August 2020, the oscillating emotions of fear and sadness filled the empty spaces between the words he spoke. Bill’s voice (his soul?) quivered with fright and anguish now that the end was clearly discernible. What had been hidden and fuzzy in the future, now it was visible and on the horizon. It reminded me of a grim day in a Hoag Hospital room in September of 1995 when I watched my mom come to discern clearly her end. What had been vague and abstract — some future illness and death — had taken on specific and concrete form — a medical prognosis rendered. The shock was bracing; life was different now. Tomorrow would not be like yesterday. It never would.
And tomorrow?
Fear for the future. Fear of the end.
For Bill. For me.
Even you, esteemed reader?
For we are food for worms, sooner or later. Our flesh will become excrementitious. We will be fertilizing daffodils.
It is easier to recognize this fact in theory than to face it in reality. Bill struggled. That his brain was failing made it worse. Bill was unable to marshal his spiritual resources, it seemed to me. This could not be more ironic and tragic for a priest who should be ready to be reunited with God in heaven. My Uncle Bill was stuck in fear. Father David was terrified. His decline was unstoppable. It was also lengthy. For those last few years Bill was unhappy and uncomfortable as Alzheimer’s did him in. This was such a contrast to how he lived previously his whole life. It was heartbreaking. Bill’s older brother and mother had both died quickly of massive heart attacks. Those exits, to my way of thinking, were vastly preferable to the slo-mo macerating misery which is Alzheimer’s Disease. But God gave Bill a different path.
So would Bill die with the grace, dignity, and acceptance worthy of a Dominican preacher?
I didn’t know.
True, Bill Geib did live the vast majority of his life with grace and dignity. But the disease was destroying his brain, and by his death… I just don’t know. Bill did the best he could, I console myself. I try to put a positive spin on it. But Alzheimer’s Disease had long since taken the Uncle Bill (and Father David) that I had long known. The dynamic was ugly, ugly. It shook me. Here is a photo of Bill a few days before he had a small heart attack on April 29th, 2024. Do you see what I mean? It unnerved me. That was not my uncle. It was the shell of him.
My Uncle Bill would die almost a year later. That was only too long, considering how sick he was. As with my mother and stepmother, death by that point would be a relief: those who have also watched loved ones decline and die will understand. The list of my loved ones who had gotten old and died would only grow longer with time, God help us all. My name would also be added to the list, sooner or later. So it goes.
In her novel “The Yearling” author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings talked intimately about “Old Death” who personified was never far away from the animals or humans living a hard life of scarcity in the remote Florida woods. Or Emily Dickinson talking of “the King” entering the room at that penultimate moment. Our last minute is done, and Death takes us. It is a fearsome image. It is coming for us all, but for Bill sooner. We use literature and religion to cushion the blow. But those are coping mechanisms to make palatable the unpalatable.
Yes, you see, dear reader: Bill’s decline and death scared me. So I am repeating myself, as I try to wrap my mind around it all. Because this is how I process grief: I write about it.
So what else could I do? What could I offer my Uncle Bill? Time, money, grace, compassion, love… this encomium — I would give Bill what I could. As would everyone else in his blood-line Geib family, and in his chosen-faith Dominican family. The Wilkinson family was with Bill the day of his death. He could not speak but he held their hands firmly in recognition. They put my father (Bill’s brother) on the phone and he said, “I’m with you, Bill. I’m with you the whole way.” My uncle knew his family loved him. Bill was not alone at the end.
Would it be enough? Did this ease the process of dying?
I hope so. I’d like to think so. But I don’t know.
We all die alone, in the end.
And we leave precious memories in our wake for those who loved us, which taste like dust in their mouths. We leave them. Forever.
Forever?
Won’t we be reunited in heaven?
It is unclear.
Death be not proud, sayeth the Christian poet in triumph. We die supposedly to be born to eternal life. But is this so? Will God be there with us? Was He be at Bill’s side, at the end?
Maybe, maybe.
I don’t know.
Farewell, Uncle Bill —
You will be missed.
Thy will be done.
PHOTO FROM FUNERAL
