Sheri Wren Haymore
Author
Change. It pretty much comes with the territory of being human, doesn’t it? We all experience change. Sometimes change is invigorating, and at other times, it’s traumatic. How do we respond when our world crashes and all our plans lie shattered at our feet? To find a life-affirming answer, I sought out my friend Bill Pendleton and his wife, Jan Frye Pendleton (Billy and Janice, everyone called them when we were classmates at Mt. Airy Senior High School.)
Bill’s life was forever altered when he suffered a brain tumor his senior year in college. To give us a glimpse of his life before, I remember Bill as a nice guy in school, witty, athletic, maybe a bit of a prankster. He was a lifeguard at the Country Club, a passionate daily tennis player who helped start the school tennis team, a dabbler in the game of golf and sometime golf caddy, and he ran to keep in shape. We grew up in the ’60s—turbulent years indeed—and Bill said he had no idea what he wanted to do and felt ill-prepared for college. Having worked summer jobs at two local manufacturing plants—Renfro and Perry—he decided to build on that experience and major in Textile Engineering at NC State University with a minor in Mechanical Engineering.
Life was humming along for Bill until one morning in his senior year in college, he woke up with vertigo and nausea. Through a battery of often painful tests, an initial diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis was given, although at that time no definitive test existed. What he went through “changed my view of everything,” Bill told me. Eventually, he came under the care of renowned Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander. Again, at that time, options for testing were limited, and the only way Dr. Alexander could see inside Bill’s brain was through an X-ray, which revealed a pencil-point sized tumor. By the time Baptist Hospital obtained its first CT scanner, the scan showed the tumor had grown to lemon-size. In December, Bill entered the hospital for surgery and didn’t leave until early June. Of course, he had to postpone his last semester of college. “With a lot of help over the summer,” Bill said, he learned to walk again, to adjust to balance issues and limited vision, and he returned to college in the fall, graduating the next December.
How Bill met this sudden and shocking life change is a lesson for us all. He left the hospital a weakened shell, having lost fifty pounds down to one-hundred-twenty pounds. His family was told that patients with a glioma brain tumor aren’t expected to live beyond seven months. Bill said he never questioned—”Why did you do this, God?” He never bargained—”If you let me live, then…” What he said to his Creator was simply, “If I live. If I live, I’ll work for you the rest of my life.”
Let’s pause a moment and think about this. When life throws you a curve, does it do any good to rail against it, or try to bargain your way out of a desperate situation? What if, like Bill, we met the seismic shift with grace and humility? I see in Bill’s simple statement, “If I live,” a recognition that there was no going back to life as he had known it. “I’ll work for you.” Not a bargain, but a manifestation of his new perspective on life.
Continuing with Bill’s story, he returned to Mt. Airy after college to work in the Engineering Department of Perry Manufacturing for 10 years during which he got quite an education in human nature. “I saw and heard things I’d never seen or heard before,” Bill told me. “I learned to get along with people who were different from me.”
Fed up with a job situation he couldn’t change, Bill returned to NC State, entering the graduate program with an assistantship that allowed him to teach undergraduate courses while pursuing his own degree. Meanwhile, the state started a pilot program to provide vocational rehab to citizens with disabilities. Bill was approached with a job offer to be one of four Rehabilitation Engineers in this program. The job entailed assessing the needs in a home, designing and blueprinting architectural modifications to make the home accessible. He would get bids, supervise the work, and sign off on the contractor. Bill said that often a client would clam up when they saw a state guy at their door with a bag of tools. Because of his own disability, he could relate to their needs and advocate for them, and clients learned to trust him. The program was successful; when he retired thirty years later, the team of engineers had grown to twenty-one.
Remember Bill’s simple promise, “If I live, I will serve?” During his tenure at Perry Manufacturing, Bill decided to attend seminary and entered the five-year program offered by the Episcopalian Diocese. It was a tough course through which only five of thirty-five candidates made it to the end, and it involved commuting to Durham for classes while still working full-time in Mt. Airy. He was ordained as an Episcopalian Deacon by Bishop Michael Curry. He and Jan had to explain to me that, unlike the casual office of deacon or elder in other denominations, this is an official position of ministry. As Deacon, Bill serves as a bridge between the Priest and the Community, and only he or the Priest has the authority to read the Gospel during services. Over the course of his ministry, Bill was placed in three successive churches before finally coming home to Trinity Episcopal in Mt. Airy, where he serves as the only Deacon.
Let’s come back to Bill’s wife, Jan. The two met again in 1992, twenty years after graduating from high school. Both had been part of the Mayor’s Commission for Disability in Winston-Salem, and each was receiving an award that year: Jan for Friend of the Disabled, and Bill for Business Entrepreneur. Jan was in a good place in her life, enjoying her calling as a nurse, and about to get married. She could never have anticipated that drastic change was coming to her life as well. After only three months of marriage, her husband was injured in a terrible accident and died shortly after. The trauma from that tragedy continues to haunt her, but the good that came from it, she says, is her continued work and advocacy with an organ donor group.
Fast forward another twenty-five years to 2017. Bill had retired and returned to Mt. Airy to care for his ailing parents. Jan had moved back to be near her father following her mother’s death. They met again in, of all places, the dog food aisle of the grocery. Bill was buying food for his service dog, Toby; Jan was searching for food for a neighbor’s dog who was not being properly fed. And thus began a sweet relationship a long time coming.
In his marriage proposal to Jan, Bill said something like this: “life hasn’t turned out the way either of us wanted. Let’s make our final years what we want.”
The joy of companionship. Continued service to the community through their church. Ongoing physical challenges for Bill. Additional responsibilities for Jan as the primary handler of Bill’s newest service dog, Fabio. Life for the Pendletons, I believe, is what they’ve made of it.
As Bill told me, “I’ve still got a lot to do.” Jan put in, “A lot to give to people,” Bill continued, “I’m not finished. I’ll be finished when the Lord is finished with me.”
