As a member of The Robert Burns Club of Milwaukee for several years and its current president it would be no surprise to anyone that I should turn to the poetry of Robert Burns on a sad occasion.   On a recent sad occasion, the death of my father on October 2, 2000, I found a Burns poem which eloquently and accurately expressed the spirit of my father.   My father was a physician and an army veteran.  He was a first generation Scottish American whose ancestors came from Beith, Ayrshire in 1913.  His passing brought many a tear to family and friends.  They considered him a kind and intelligent man who in his retirement raised beautiful roses in Florida where roses are hard to grow.   He died at home clutching one of his roses while I and my daughter held his other hand and my sister cradled his head in her arms.

Robert Burns's poem Epitaph On My Own Friend and My Father's Friend, WM. Muir in Tarbolton Mill was what I read at my Father's wake.  Since my Father's name is also William, it is deeply meaningful.  Like William Muir my father was an honest man, a friend of man and of truth.  He was a friend of age as he nurtured with kind words and gifts of roses, many people in the retirement community where he lived.  He was a friend of youth, like the poem says, because one of his best correspondents who looked up to him was a grandson just entering college.  And like the last two lines of Burns's poem which express uncertainty of an afterlife, my father was agnostic but hopeful in his beliefs.  He certainly made the best of this world.  And whether you believe in Heaven or the Celtic Summerland or any kind of afterlife, I am certain you will find my father there offering Robert Burns one of his roses.