This memorial website was created in memory of our loved one, Robert Butler, 61, born on August 6, 1953 and died on January 14, 2015. We will remember him forever.
INS conference dinner at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm. Bob knew how to have fun!
We had just gotten our marriage license from the Pono Market in Kauai. He was the love of my life, and I miss him every day. Happy times.
As a pre-doctoral intern under Bob’s tutelage at OHSU I was quite frankly terrified of him. He’d return my apparently pathetic report attempts covered in red ink with such comments as, “Karla, you might want to think about reviewing your High School grammar book.” I first caught a glimpse into another side of Bob when, after a few days of high pressure sales I was the only intern to buckle and “volunteer” to watch Molly-Bob for the weekend. I was amazed to find my hard-nosed, tie-sporting supervisor living in a place filled with music, color, and several pieces of his own artwork. I was amazed to find a note on the counter stating, “by the way, Molly is in heat, here’s 5 bucks for your trouble.” As hoped, my sacrifice yielded a just perceptible softening in our subsequent supervision sessions…but he still scared me. When after a brief educational interruption for motherhood I decided to pursue post-doctoral training in neuropsychology, I came to know Bob in an entirely different manner. Not only as an incredibly supportive mentor, but as a much-valued friend. Like an out-of-town relative who you only see once in a while, Bob would greet me warmly each year at INS and dive right into gathering every last detail about my life since we last met until he deemed us sufficiently all caught up. (The difference from the relative being, Bob always made me feel like he was genuinely interested.) From there would ensue several days of pure fun that left my stomach aching not as much from the requisite conference over-indulgences but the hours of pure belly laughs only Bob could inspire. He was hilarious, brilliant, cranky (I was still just a wee bit scared of him), sensitive, and thoughtful. And for the last 10+ years his thoughts were clearly never far from Sarah. Bob apparently didn’t wholly succeed in curing me of my love for superfluous adjectives and run-on sentences but he taught me so much more- about being a clinician before a neuropsychologist and about life, balance, priorities and friendship. There is a tall, warm, toothy-grinned, ripped-sweatshirt-wearing hole in my heart.
