Bob
Somebody was in the helicopter doing the actual work that night. Forty years later he is still training the people who do it now.
There is a difference between the person who builds a program and the person who is in the aircraft at the worst hour of the night. Bob was in the aircraft.
He helped start the air ambulance program, and when they came for me in August of 1985 he was there with his team, and he took care of me in the air.
He never stopped
Bob went into nurse anesthesia afterward and built a career in it. He teaches now, at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, training the nurse anesthetists coming up behind him.
That is the part I keep turning over. He did the work, and then he spent the rest of his life making more people who could do the work. I do not know how a person says thank you for that at the right scale.
He is alive, and I want to say so plainly
There is a scholarship with his name on it, and people sometimes read that the way you would read a plaque. He is not gone. He is teaching. Giving here is not a memorial to anything. It is backing something a man is still doing on a Tuesday morning.
Where this one gives
The scholarship pays for students training as doctorally prepared nurse anesthetists at Saint Mary’s, which is the job Bob was doing over me in 1985.