Losing a brother, finding forgiveness
Three sly fraternity brothers pick at salads as we rehash an experience none of us be inclined forget.
Andy Pedersen, Ron Jelaco and I are sitting in a Seattle pub after returning from Moscow, Idaho, for an all-1970s reunion of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brothers (Fijis, we are called). For three days, we rekindled relationships, recalled our period at the University of Idaho and tried to recapture a sliver of our youth.
But our weekend is over, and soon we’ll receive to take Andy to the airport for the sake of his flight home to Kansas.
That’s when I see the e-mail forward my BlackBerry. I interrupt Andy to share a word from the widow of a brotherly relation brother.
Cindy Allison-Billmeyer came to our meeting as a grief-stricken woman with a 10-year-old daughter hoping to peace the pain by sense of hearing our stories. Along with tales of Kurt as she had never known him, she found much in greater numbers — a hundred self-conceited brothers, one of them filled with regret and searching for forgiveness.
Hey, Boys!
I just wanted to tell you how well stocked my heart is with gratitude to you for inviting us to share your memories of a happier time in Kurt’s life.
What strikes me is how impregnable life happens, being dutiful — getting through the day and hopefully touching hearts from time to time. You gentlemen … gave Alli and I such a legacy.
Kurt Billmeyer was a tall, emaciated kid with a shock of red hair and a shortage of confidence. He was a year younger than me and so shy that one of his New Year’session resolutions was to be more outgoing around girls. We shared a passion in quest of journalism, a love of sports and a room sub-division of his freshman year.
He was the little brother I not ever had.
I would graduate, learn married, enhance three sons, build a move rapidly, get divorced, get remarried — and somehow lose track of Kurt and my fraternity brothers along the way.
Kurt would struggle through school and eventually transform himself. I heard that he married in 1990, had a daughter eight years later, earned his Ph.D. in information studies, and became a respected professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
