“Blessed every day.”

 As I write this, the funeral of my cousin Bill Ellis is about to begin. 

The funeral will be held in the gymnasium of Harlan County High School, and when you have a funeral in a gymnasium, that says something about the number of people you expect.

My cousin Bill was from Harlan, Kentucky. Harlan is not a town with large churches or large places to “put on a show” in order to raise money. But it does have the gymnasium of the Harlan County High School. 

Bill’s death has hit me hard, and I think it’s because it happened so suddenly. 

Last Friday, December 30th, the family believes that Bill went out to burn some brush in a burn barrel, and the wind kicked up very suddenly. In trying to put the fire out, he suffered either smoke inhalation or a heart attack and died. The fire department was there for several hours until the fire was gone. 

He leaves behind a wife — his second wife, whom he married after the death of his first wife — a daughter, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and a host of relatives and a county full of friends. 

Bill was 18 when I was born, and by the time I was four, he already had a baby daughter. That was my cousin Kellie, and when my family would visit from Florida, she was my playmate. Bill and his wife would later have a son, Jeff. 

I remember a younger Bill with a slightly sarcastic sense of humor. During a visit to Florida, he once jokingly asked me if someone had hit me over the head with an ugly stick. But I also remember on one visit to Harlan seeing him play in a baseball game—I think a neighborhood league or something like that—and his team lost. He shook hands with the opposing team afterwards, saying, “Good game.” I thought, “Why is he doing that? They lost!” 

What I didn’t know was that I was witnessing an example of good sportsmanship. 

Bill, for many years, was known as “the voice of the Bears” (the Harlan County High School teams),  broadcasting football and basketball games on radio station WTUK. Sometimes his wife Tami would call the games with him, and he’d often play the trick of turning off her mike (joking that he could always turn the volume down on her radio.)

I last saw Bill in 2019, when I made a trip to scatter a portion of my mother’s ashes at her father’s grave. He and his wife had dinner with Susie, his sister; and me. He showed me a bookmark where he had pasted my father’s obituary. He hoped it wouldn’t upset me. I appreciated that Bill remembered my dad in that way. (Bill was the son of my father’s sister.) It was obvious by then that he was fighting health problems but he did not complain. He was like my father in that way; he would not complain about how bad he felt. 

In reading his obituary, I learned that Bill had been an elder in the Rosspoint Church of Christ. Being an elder is not an easy task. I have no doubt he handled it with grace. 

The obituary writer pointed out what I hope people will remember about Bill when they think of him:  When anyone asked him, “How are you?” his answer was, “Blessed every day.” 

Maybe that was why he had the attitude he had about his health struggles, and other tragedies he faced in life. Carol, his first wife, died of ovarian cancer.  A few years later, his son Jeff died suddenly. In the best tradition of “life must go on”, Bill, just a few days after his son’s death, called a ballgame on the radio, and afterwards, the winning team presented the game ball to Bill. He thanked them and encouraged them to keep on walking with God, no matter what, and reminded them that if they did so, they would be “blessed every day” no matter what the circumstances were. 

I went up for his mother’s funeral in 2004, and I remember him sobbing as he stood in front of her casket. Just because Bill knew he was “blessed every day” didn’t mean that he couldn’t be heartbroken at the death of a beloved mother. 

I have a hard time understanding how God could allow certain things to happen. I don’t understand why He doesn’t intervene. I’m guessing that Bill’s widow and the rest of his family will lie awake at night asking,  “why?”. Man has asked that question since the time of Job, and pat and easy answers just do not cut it. 

Perhaps, though, the answer is not, “why did this happen?”

Perhaps Bill Ellis was placed on this earth to remind us that, no matter what, God had blessed him every day . . . and that no matter what, if we trust God, we, too, can be “blessed every day.”

In loving memory,

William Wayne Ellis, January 23, 1945 - December 30, 2022.

Rest in peace, Bill.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.