Bill was born and raised in the small town of Grafton North Dakota, which is only 50 miles south of the Canadian border. I always enjoyed the stories he told about life in this close knit community. Bill and his two sisters, Irene and Caroline, attended public schools in Grafton. Bill would tell our family amusing tales about the friendships formed during his school years that endured over many years.

When Bill was about eleven years old his father died of Tuberculosis. So much of Bill’s character was shaped from this very early age due in large part to this event and his becoming ‘the man of the house’. Friends of his have commented on Bill’s habit of always doing a thorough job of anything he took on. Bill’s mom had two sisters, who were school teachers, and they would come and stay with the family during the summer months. During these months the Bill, his mother, sisters and the aunts would work on improving the house, including the work needed to get indoor plumbing.

In the months since Bill left this earth on March 18, 2012, I have had many moments to reflect on our time together.  I share these thoughts with family and friends, believing that our marriage is a testimony to the hope that we can have in God’s Providence and in His Love for us.    
 

Marriage is the gift God has given for the right ordering of human love in abiding fidelity to the gift of life and openness to the gift of new life.

So says the late Father Richard John Neuhaus in a video entitled “The Road to Cana” which appears on the First Things website.   When you have received from God the blessing of a marriage with someone you love very deeply, and your loved one is no longer by your side, it is hard to put the whole thing into words.  Now in the Christmas season of 2012, my first without Bill, and thanks to Bill’s favorite Catholic writer, Father Neuhaus, I have found the words.  As Father Neuhaus explains it, when you decide to marry, “you enter into marriage.”  This means that very often, you are not really “prepared” in human terms, he says, and it is as God’s Project that the essential nature of marriage is discovered.  During those last months when we both knew that we did not have a lot of time, Bill and I spoke often of the way that God had brought us together.

That marriage is God’s Project explains how I, a 23 year- old native Californian whose Presbyterian faith had eroded away, decided to “enter into” marriage with a conservative Catholic from the Midwest who was 21 years my senior.  It has been said that Faith, Prayer and Action are the three elements of a practicing Christian life. Considering that I did not yet have a strong faith and I was not a praying person, what else, besides the Grace of God, could explain my “action” in deciding to marry Bill?

Our story begins with my going to work for Bill as his temporary secretary sometime in February of 1963. Bill was at the time a D.C. lawyer in private practice, specializing in government procurement.  I was in graduate school and in need of funds for a trip to Europe that summer with my girlfriends.

Before too long, Bill was arranging for long coffee breaks that stretched out to forty-five minute discussions about religion, literature, culture, politics and life   in general.  Often in these breaks, I would finally have to say, “Mr. McGraw, I think I had better get back to work, now.”  Then Bill would just say, “O.K.”

 When our son Tom, who was then a teenager, asked his Dad about our courtship,   Bill answered that he had fallen in love with me pretty much as I was walking through the front door of his office for the first time.  As I was to discover after we were married, Bill was almost as hopeless a romantic as I was, but fortunately, not quite.

          Soon Bill was asking me out to lunch, then lunch and dinner and in a few more weeks, sometime in April, I think, he asked me to marry him, saying, “I want to take care of you, Onalee.” Isn’t that just something a conservative, mid-western guy would say to the woman he loves? Bill had qualities that added up to great integrity, wisdom, and strength, but I was uncertain that we could make it, given our age and faith differences.   I had my heart set on going to Europe that summer as I had planned, and it was doubly hard for Bill because I had earned the funds to go by working for him.

This is where C. S. Lewis comes into the story.  One might say that this great British defender of the Christian faith had the greatest influence on my coming back to faith in Christ. Among the books that Bill gave me when I left for Europe four months after we had met was Lewis’s Mere Christianity. As I read and reflected on the arguments for the divinity of Christ given by Lewis, I began to abandon the existentialist worldview I had adopted in college.  While traveling across Europe with my friends, I would find myself reading Lewis, and the other books Bill had given me; G. K Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man and Jesus and His Times by the great French historian, Henri Daniel-Ropps.

I was also corresponding with Bill, and in many European cities I would go to the American Express office and have a letter from Bill waiting for me. One of my happiest memories is sitting on the Spanish Steps in Rome reading a letter from Bill.  I think what was happening  was we were growing closer together as soul mates and the external differences between us were becoming incidental. When I returned to Washington D.C. and to Bill in the fall, I was as serious as he was about “entering in” to marriage. For both of us, I think, it was the kind of “entering in” that Father Neuhaus spoke about in his Road to Cana presentation. We were both taking a chance, but in another way we were not, because we knew that we were soul mates.

 On a historic note, we were making plans for our December 28, 1963   wedding  at St. Matthew’s Cathedral when,  on November 22,   the great tragedy of President John Kennedy’s assassination  took place. As it happened, this was the same sorrowful day on which C. S. Lewis departed into eternity.   In a few days, President Kennedy’s funeral would take place at St Matthew’s.  Bill and I were in the crowd outside the Cathedral but we could not see anything except the hat of French Premier Charles de Gaul, who was about 6 foot-seven.  It was right that we should pay our respects, as the apartment where I lived on 18th street was only blocks away.

 All of the years in between seem to blend together in a jumble of memories. Bill was the spiritual head of our family, and in our marriage he was my rock,   I leaned on him and was protected by him more than I ever realized until he was no longer by my side. He was a man of deep integrity and great spiritual vitality, and yet he was also so very lovable in the daily life we had together.  As I related to our family and friends gathered for Bill’s wake, throughout our married life we were very close and devoted to one another, almost like two farmers, walking side by side behind a plough.  Now this is not to say we didn’t sometimes trip over a rock, to use the analogy of the two farmers, but I think that is where the real mystery of faithful love comes into play. No matter how frustrated or upset you may be, that mysterious force just pulls you back together again. Then, in the last two years of our life together, we became like sweethearts, cherishing every moment we had because we knew we didn’t have much time.

           Bill, as I had known before I married him, was a man who saw life as something  that needed to be lived for God, family and country, and  never once in our 48 years of marriage did he ever act as if life was supposed to revolve around him.  With confidence, I can say that God gave us, especially  in the last two years of the life we shared,  the gift of love woven mysteriously together  as described by C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves:  agape — the supernatural divine love of God that is the source of all true love;  philia — the love that two people share in mutual understanding, laughter and  companionship;  Eros — the  deep passion of the heart that sustains a man and a woman in a mysterious and romantic way; and Storge — affectionate and funny moments of  spontaneous joy.   

 Until the very moment on that Sunday in Lent when he left this earth, Bill was still strong in mind, heart and soul. Father Steve, our son who became a priest in 2001,   gave the last rites to his Dad on Saturday, the day before he died.  As part of the rite of this last sacrament, the priest will ask the dying person if they believe in Christ and when Father Steve asked his Dad this question, Bill answered “I do,” with a clear and audible voice that had not risen above a whisper for three days,

I was able to kiss my husband goodbye and hear him say, “I love you”, in a   barely audible whisper just moments before he passed into eternity.   Around his bedside, friends and family were singing Faith of our Fathers and Amazing Grace. Then our   granddaughter Melanie cried out, “We had better hurry up and ask the Blessed Mother to take granddad home.” So we sang Immaculate Mary and when we came to the phrase, You reign now in splendor with Jesus our King, Bill just seemed to slip away.  I didn’t see it, but our daughter Laura saw her Dad smile.

Christ tells us in the Gospel that in marriage men and women “are no longer two but one flesh”.  Bill is not with me here, and it has been lonely of course. As one of my friends remarked, when you love someone that much, it seems like “half of you is gone.”  And yet, as many of my friends have said to me when I tell them how much I miss him,   Bill is closer to me than ever, because he is with God.