Richard James Hamilton sojourned on this earth for more than 94 years. A half year ago, Rick’s back began to pain him so much he was unable to get out of bed. The back was healing, but after the long stretch in bed, his leg muscles had atrophied to the extent that he was no longer able to stand up by himself. We bought him a laptop to help keep him engaged with the world and, especially, so he could work on his investment projects. In most matters his mind remained sharp until the end, though he struggled with passwords, and unsteady hands.
The last day he was at the retirement home, his vital signs began to slide. Caretakers recommended that the family move him to a hospital. He was drifting in and out of consciousness at the time, and his last words before leaving were, “Am I alright?” I think Rick was perplexed by his diminishing capacities–a natural reaction from one whose mind and body had been vibrant for so many years. Even Jesus on the cross cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Let us also note, though, that Jesus’ cry was lifted from Psalm 22, which resolves in this way: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you.”
Jesus was alright and, yes, so is Rick. Both are raised from the dead. Rick is now much improved. Imagine a glorified Rick. On our earth he was already a man larger than life.
If you ever sat in a room with Rick, more than likely, you sat with him around a table of good food and home-made wine. In that setting you would have experienced Rick’s unhurried speech, compounded with pregnant pauses. His tempo was challenging for most listeners. Often someone, innocently or mischievously, would interpret a pause as an invitation to change the subject. The new topic was usually allowed to run its course, at which point Rick would resume his own monologue as if their had been no interruption. Sometimes this side-tracking would recur two or three times before Rick would finally reached his conclusion. Rick was not easily discouraged.
In keeping with his speech, Rick’s movements were plodding, or maybe it was the other way around. In any case, this characteristic contrasted sharply with the busyness of his life. Most people assess their lives from time-to-time and say, “Okay, I’m tired; my plate is full; no mas!” Not Rick. He retired from a business only to start one of his own. He served on boards: Phil-Mont Christian Academy, Covenant College, Bethany Christian Services. He built a (doubtful) sailboat; the Helen Louise. Then he bought a real one and insisted that Helen Louise sail with him, mostly in the Gulf of…we’ll call it “Mexico”, since Rick considered himself a Democrat. He was part of a book club. The stranger the book the more he liked it. (A Canticle for Leibowitz, comes to mind.) He played tennis and squash. He coached tennis. He learned to love soccer, probably because son, David, played, and he wanted to share that passion with him. He promoted children. “Children are a heritage from the Lord, Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them,” he would often quote. He loved to sing the Psalms, even if his notes were not always noteworthy. But his vocal limitations did not damper his enthusiasm. Singing Psalms around the Sunday table was a long-standing tradition of the Hamilton household.
Rick was uncomfortable with idleness. Even in retirement, he wrangled his way into activities. He became an elections official in the Thompson area. He initiated an investment club among other retirees–a club that currently has 25 members and a waiting list. He volunteered to spend time with others of his retirement community who had been placed in hospice care.
Rick liked sporty cars. He drove a Karmann Ghia for a time. He folded himself into that thing, knees up around his ears. A few years back he decided to take a driving vacation in Europe. Apparently, by driving a new car around for a week or so, it becomes “used,” greatly reducing its assessed tariff. Rick could talk like a socialist, but if Uncle Sam was going to write tax laws with loopholes, he wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage. So Rick worked out a detailed vacation. Then, not wanting to travel only with Mary, he shopped for fellow travelers, settling on me and Michelle. Thus, the four of us embarked on the adventure of driving a cherry-red Mercedes through Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland.
I will not share the details of Rick’s planning other than to say it was both brilliant and terrifying. Well, all right, then, I will share one of our more harrowing adventures. We were staying in a mountain villa outside of Florence. We had assumed from the beginning that we would rely on GPS, even though none of us had much experience with it at the time. When we picked up the car we learned that Mercedes planned to load the software once the car arrived in the U.S. Whoops. Not to worry, the fine people at Mercedes loaned us a portable unit. Whoops. Even though Frieda spoke top quality English, all written instructions were in German.
Getting back to our story, outside of Florence, our plan for the day was to drive to a nearby town where we would catch a bus into the city. We (okay, I, since I was driving) misinterpreted a GPS instruction and drove to a wrong parking lot. We could see our bus depot on a nearby hill. So we pointed (okay, I pointed) the car in the direction of the hill, determined to ignore the schweinehund GPS for the time being. We hadn’t traveled far when we turned a corner and found ourselves at the top of a steep hill. The descent was narrow, with high stone walls crowding in on either side. This raised some questions. “Do you think this is actually a road?” “Does it really get narrower at the bottom, or is that just perspective?” “What do you think?” “Go for it, said Rick. “Okay; it’s your car,” said I.
We rolled slowly down the hill, the three passengers wide-eyed, peering from their respective windows, fingers in. No, it was not perspective—the walls inched nearer as we descended. As we neared the bottom there was a scraping sound on the passenger side. “Move left, move left!” The little road–at this point we no longer believed it–the walking path was so steep that at the bottom a handrail had been attached to one of the walls. The car and the handrail shared a space for a moment, handrail prevailing. Finally we broke into the sunlight—3” to spare on the left, a negative 1/4” on the right. Everyone breathed out. We pulled over to inspect the damage: a 4’ gash. Rick was pretty calm. “That’s what insurance is for,” he said. Later he confessed, “I had visions of us being wedged between those walls, unable to open the doors. We would have had to crawl out the hatch in the back of the car.” I think we could have done that. Thankfully, we were able to spend the day in Florence instead.
For a long time I have harbored suspicions that Rick had a dozen angels assigned to him, shielding him from all things hazardous. Think of Sweet Pea from the Popeye cartoons. There are many illustrations of this but the following is a family favorite. I believe this event took place shortly after 9/11 because the airlines had become particularly annoying in their examinations of passengers and their luggage. Rick needed to get to Grand Rapids, Michigan in a hurry but he couldn’t find his passport. Undeterred, he grabbed a church directory and, so armed, ran out of the house. Could have any of the rest of us pulled this off? I know I wouldn’t have tried it. But even strangers had a hard time saying “No” to Rick.
I proposed to Michelle, Rick’s oldest child, in January of 1977, becoming the first candidate for entering the Hamilton clan through marriage. Michelle agreed to marry me but, some weeks later, informed me she wouldn’t be able to until her father had given permission. This came as a mild shock to me; a set-back. I had thought I was already over that hurdle. But, kids, if you’re going to marry, you’re going to have to adjust your thinking on many things (I began to realize then). When Spring break arrived we left Lookout Mountain to meet the Hamiltons of Smithtown and find out whether I would pass the marriage exam. Michelle had no apprehensions. I, belonging to that tribe of more anxious humans, had sent a long letter in advance, hoping my written words would be more convincing than my imagined verbal fumbling. In the end the feared exam felt more like a social visit. No pronouncement was made, but we shared a congratulatory toast that, I think, sealed the deal. Rick learned then that his first son-in-law-to-be was a tee-totaler, so he had to adjust his thinking a little bit, too.
Rick’s business was mostly about retirement plans and investments, and he really enjoyed the complex math involved. He was a successful investor, and he was generous with his earnings, both with his extended family and with various charities. He set up a charitable trust, like the boat, named for his wife, and then, characteristically, drafted the trustees out of the clan.
The series of talks I had with Rick over the last months of his life were mostly an exercise in teasing financial information out of him. He had a terrific memory, especially for financial matters. If I had a question, and I had many, he nearly always knew the answer. But what he couldn’t do, seemingly, was organize his knowledge and say: “Here’s what you need to know.” His mind didn’t work like that. He was always onto the next project; being tidy about his business was not that interesting to him.
Rick was interested in theology, though. He served for decades as a Presbyterian Elder. He gave exams to seminary students from Westminster. When I first met him he seemed like a garden-variety Calvinist Presbyterian. But there was something of the maverick in him that kept his theology dynamic, creating tensions between himself and those more wedded to rigid systematics. In his later years he seemed to move in the direction of Roman Catholicism, settling into an Episcopal church, partly due to a growing interest in the mystical, and partly out of longing for a universal, undivided Church. I didn’t always agree with his thinking, but his commitment to testing his beliefs against the plumb-line of scripture helped him to continue maturing throughout his life.
Thinking about Rick, it has occurred to me that it’s not possible to know him without knowing his wife, Helen. Rick couldn’t have been Rick without her. Rick was a dreamer and a visionary, which is not to suggest that he was inactive in his own dreams and visions. To the contrary, he was actively engaged in them. But Rick could get out in front of himself–and this was something that never seemed to bother him. So Helen had to reel him from time-to-time. The complaining wife is a cliché, but when Helen complained, she was the good tennis umpire who knows when the ball has hit out.
She was also a dedicated supporter.Rick’s dreams and visions were good, but he often couldn’t carry them out on his own. As an example, Rick wanted to support young pregnant women who were unwilling to abort their children. These girls came, one after another, for years, to live in the Hamilton home. Well, Rick had to work every day. Who do you suppose did the heavy lifting on that particular project? That service would have been impossible without Helen.
Of course, marriage is not always easy. Rick was an enthusiast for Bible reading. Every year he would send out a letter to his children and grandchildren, recommending that they read through the New Testament. He would include a daily reading guide to underscore his conviction. He did this because he believed in the importance of biblical truth, but he was especially thinking of husbands and wives. “It’s hard to stay mad at someone once you have spent time reading the Word together.”
In the last few months of Rick’s life, I visited him once or twice a week. Invariably, I would find Helen already there, sitting with him. She wanted to be there. As for Rick—he needed her there, even if she was doing no more than minding a crossword puzzle. She was there with him for 73 years: the quiet indispensable partner. They were like Lennon and McCartney—the sum being greater than the parts. Rick wouldn’t have understood this allusion, or appreciated it, but most of us get the point.
Rick was a pursuer of relationships. C.S.Lewis, in his book, The Great Divorce, imagined hell as a gloomy place where the people are self-oriented, and easily irritated by the shortcomings of others. They “solve” their irritations by regularly uprooting and moving further away from everyone else. Lewis, in this way, put the spotlight on the harmful human strategy of “managing” difficult relationships through avoidance.
Rick was abnormal in this respect. Rick hated to be alone. He didn’t want to eat breakfast by himself. He was always on the lookout for new relationships, even as he seemed to never tire of the old ones. He was deliberate and creative in finding ways to spend time with others. His pursuit was a kind of flattery that made him difficult to resist. Rick was not a perfect man; his idiosyncrasies could drive people crazy. But his longing for relationships was a special gift that served to encourage person after person throughout his life.
A few times already the thought has hit me: Rick isn’t here to be a part of my life anymore. Many people are feeling his absence these days. We miss him but we have not lost him. This is the Christian belief. Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. In a few days we will celebrate Easter and Christ’s resurrection. More wonderfully, Jesus was the first of many, among whom we count Rick. So we do not despair at Rick’s departure; we look forward to seeing him soon.
I have a feeling there will be nothing like a New York Stock Exchange in heaven, but I have another feeling that says Rick will be delighted with heaven anyway. He will quickly busy himself with wide-ranging activities, mostly for the sake of making new friends. And he will find his old friends so he can eat breakfast.
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