The following thoughts I wrote were delivered by my beloved wife, Heidi:
I have a few words that I would like to say in remembrance of my father. It's hard for me to resist a captive audience, but if anyone can avoid the unpleasantness of a dissertation, it's me, so I'll be mercifully brief.
Someone once said that the greatest gift a man could give his children was to love their mother with all his heart. My father was steadfastly committed to my mother, and she to him, no matter what. This is just one of the ways that they have inspired me.
My father was no stranger to tragedy, but his life was far from tragic. Furthermore, I can see no tragedy in his passing. His death was a dignified ending to a life that I regard as a triumph. His humility more than anything often overshadowed his imperfections.
He was generous with praise, and he often told me he was proud of me and my siblings. This always made me beam, though I tried not to show it. He was as validating and supportive a father as one could ever hope to have. He sent me loving notes in my lunch from time to time, and he was affectionate in ways both subtle and overt; he gave hugs and kisses unsparingly, but he conveyed warmth to us with simple glances, wry smiles, or simply by delighting in what we had to say.
He was a selfless provider for his family. Getting the guy to spend money on himself... well, it would have been easier to coax a newt into using a litter box. While he never lavished us with "things," he spent lots of time and money providing us with experiences and opportunities. He spent a lot of his hard earned resources on us, but he was most generous with his time. One year for my birthday I was given a subscription to a series of children's theater productions. Every couple of months my father and mother would trade off taking me to a play. That year he missed the Superbowl in favor of taking his little boy to see a production of "Mr. Popper's Penguins." He would play catch in the back yard with my brother, dissect lab specimens with me on the kitchen table, and cheer my sister on at her soccer and field hockey games. The only time he took for himself was his research, and even then I can't tell you how many hours of our respective childhoods were spent tromping through fern carpeted woodlands chasing after juvenile specimens of Notophthalmus viridiscens. I confess I wasn't always enthusiastic about spending such quality time with the mosquitoes, poison ivy and wet socks.
As my father grew older and his health started to fail him, he poured his heart and soul into being a grandparent. Traveling was VERY hard on him, but he cheerfully made the pilgrimage to visit his children's children several times a year while he was able. It took two days for my parents to make the eight hour trip to Virginia, and my father had to recuperate for several days after arriving from these journeys. Indeed, he never actually recovered from his final journey last Christmas, and he completed his book of days shortly thereafter. I strongly suspect that if it were up to him, THAT is the very course he would have chosen for himself.
More than anything my father taught me to marvel at nature; to see beauty in the infrastructure of a leaf, to consider that microcosmos contained in a drop of pond water or to appreciate the myriad cycles of an ecosystem. Anyone can appreciate the conspicuous plumage of birds or the sublime elegance of an orchid. But if you ever walked in the woods with Bill Healy, he would show you sprouts and larvae and parasites and bits of slime that might even move before your eyes if you were patient enough in watching them. Without him, however, you would have seen only rocks, stumps, trees and twigs.
It is because of my father that I appreciate the field of biology, and have a pretty good understanding of it even though I never actually took a biology class in college. Moreover, my father gave me a sense of wonder at the complexities of the forms, structures, and processes of life. I've come to share his enthusiasm for the modern scientific study of life, which began in 1859 with a book that concluded with the following words:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
My father appreciated the grandeur that Darwin wrote about, and in passing that appreciation on to me, he's taught me the most important lesson I've learned in all the books I've ever read in all the classes I've ever taken.
William R. Healy was, and always will be, my hero.
