Dave Williams

This is a portrait of a remarkable man and a happy marriage. Tolstoy famously wrote that all happy families were the same but that's clearly nonsense. The lucky land of the happy is peopled by unusual types who are typically more interested in others' happiness than in their own, and they are interested each in their own way. Perhaps that's the meaning we can get from Tolstoy's statement: that happy people don't even bother to analyze their own state of mind, because they're not that interested in it. Is that why there is so little good, down-to-earth, believable writing about happy marriages? The happy leave few reports. Leslie would surely never have written this if she had not suddenly, without warning, lost her beloved husband, Dave.

I knew Dave from my years living in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, in the 1970s. I moved to San Francisco in 1981 and when Dave visited us later in the decade Debi and I set him up for a date with Leslie Holmes, one of our best friends. If I ever doubt that I have done a good thing in my life, I only have to recall that piece of serendipity. Leslie's daughter, Orli, has written about her stepfather on her remarkable science blog here. This is what Leslie said at his funeral in Leeds.

Some of you don’t know me. I am Leslie and I am Dave’s wife. First of all I want to thank all of you for coming here today to mark the passing of our wonderful Dave. When I was thinking about who should be giving this ceremony today, and you know, the person who would do it best is Dave. I’ve asked Lynn Alderson, who knows how to do these things, to guide us through this morning, but I want to try to begin. I may or may not make it through, and you should know that either way I am going to cry. But Dave would be the first say to all of us that there is nothing wrong with tears. Tears and joy are two sides of the same coin, and if we can’t have the tears we can’t get to the joy. And as difficult as this week has been, there has also been much joy, and much gratitude. All week, and looking out at his friends now, at his community, I feel the vast love and respect people had for Dave, and what a difference he made to people’s lives. It is hard to feel too tragic when there is so very much love. Myself, I am filled with gratitude that for 15 wonderful years, I had the great good fortune of loving and being loved by Dave.

When I was trying to write this I quickly became overwhelmed by how much there is to say about Dave and the richness of his life. I am going to leave a lot out and I am sorry for that but we could easily talk all day about what he cared about, what he loved, what he involved himself in. I found this definition of the word polymath on the BBC website: A polymath is not a state of being, but a state of becoming. Being a polymath is not what one knows now, but what one desires to know; not a matter of intelligence, but a matter of intellectual and creative ambition, and curiosity. And that was Dave. He woke up in the morning curious, and he went to bed at night interested.

He was not a religious man, and but would have called himself a spiritual man – he related very deeply to the spiritual wisdom in his favourite book, The Snow Leopard. Mostly, he had huge compassion, and a profound love and fascination for the miracle of life. Every living thing, people, plants, bugs (he could often be observed rescuing bugs), were deserving of his attention and his reverence. For me I believe Dave was a Bodhisattva, someone who was put on this earth to end the suffering of others. Not suffering in the sense of woe is me, but the kind of suffering that arises when the circumstances of life cause us to lose sight of how miraculous life is, and how great we are. Dave just loved people and to him there was greatness in everyone. He was always fascinated by what people were doing and he wanted to know, how can I help? Someone once asked a group of us what we were committed to in life. Most of us said things like world peace. But Dave said, I just want people to be great. And that was Dave. He truly wanted to know what made you great and he would do everything in his power to support you in being great. It was as natural to him as breathing. It was just what he did. I think that’s why people loved him so much, because he just loved people. In our wedding vows, we promised to love each other without condition. And to my great good fortune, he loved me without condition, every day. But I think he took that on for everybody. He had this capacity for connecting with the best part of you and even more important, somehow helping you to connect with the best part of yourself. I know that I am a far far better person for having had him.

Dave’s passion for people came through in everything he did. Most of you know about his part in creating the TechNorth Centre just down the road, helping local kids get a start in life doing something he loved himself, computer technology. He was so very proud of that Centre and I can’t tell you how many times someone would stop us in the street and eagerly talk about their days there and say “you changed my life”. It was the same with Learning Tree where Dave was a consultant for many years. You’ll be hearing more about that later, but being here at home with him while he wrote the courses I know he poured his heart and soul into them. He wanted people who came to his courses to have a life-changing experience. They might be coming to learn about management but he also wanted them to learn something about themselves as people, and about how they in turn could encourage the greatness in other people. So many times his attendees would write, “you changed my life”.

Dave had very deep roots in Leeds. We loved being in San Francisco, where I am from, and we talked many times about living there permanently. But somehow, it seems fitting that he lived his life here, because he loved it. His passion for people extended to our community, the Methleys – he lived here for more than ten years before I arrived, and it’s hard to imagine the Methleys without him. We spent many hours in this very building in community meetings with our friends and neighbours. And Dave loved the north of England. Every visitor to our house received the grand tour of the Dales. He knew everything about the geology of the region, about the weather, about the landscape. The north deeply satisfied Dave’s sense of place – another great passion of his. Wherever we went, he was constantly looking to see, what makes this place special? Why does this landscape fill me with awe, why is that bench sitting just there so right, why is this room welcoming and comfortable, why is this coffee shop a wonderful place to meet friends? One of his first gifts to me was the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander which is all about what makes a place “right” in the sense of what makes it fit naturally into the ebb and flow of life, what makes it elegant and satisfying.

Which brings me to Apple Computer. You cannot talk about Dave without mentioning Apple. When Dave and I were introduced by our dear friend Dave Belden who some of you may know from the old days in Leeds, and his wife Debi, the only thing Dave Belden had to say about me was that I used to work for Apple Computer. I was already in with a chance. Apple computers embodied, for Dave, everything he valued. They are impeccably designed, easy to operate for the humans that use them, beautifully packaged, and most of all, useful. His computer was an extension of his brain, repository of his endless ideas, projects ongoing and planned, for his writing, for his music and most recently for his photographs.

Some of his photographs are being displayed on the monitor over here and if you can’t see them I hope you will have a chance to look. He never went anywhere without a camera, and his eye was always attuned to the images he saw everywhere. He would come home from a trip and the first thing he’d do was load his latest set of pictures into the computer and show me his favourites. He would see the most amazing things, finding an image where I would never have thought to look. He was entranced by Henri Cartier Bresson’s Decisive Moment – again the notion of the inherent rightness of a moment or a place. That was what he wanted to capture.

I also have to mention Tom and Jerry. Dave achieved one of his life’s ambitions a couple years ago when he finally possessed a complete, and chronological, set of Tom and Jerry cartoons on DVD. Tom and Jerry, like everything else, appealed to his sense of rightness of the art of it, but it also appealed to his sense of the absurd. He would scream with laughter over a cartoon he had seen a hundred times, because the drawing was so exquisite, the timing so perfect, the story so hilarious. Dave was a big clown, full of laughter and lightheartedness. There was some talk of burying him in his much loved Tom and Jerry pyjamas, but I must tell you that is not what he is wearing. Because Dave was also a very dignified man.

But most of all Dave was a loving man. A loving brother to Jano and John, a loving son to John and Elin, and a loving father. Being Tom’s father was a tremendous privilege to him. He adored Tom, never once spoke of him with anything other than complete love, complete pride, complete acceptance. Tom meant everything to him, and Tom, he was so very very proud of you and the man you have become. Tom has been speaking of the many places Dave took him during his childhood and I can vividly imagine Dave’s joy in showing Tom the places he loved, and sharing his great love for this planet we live on. When Dave and I married in 1992, Dave became my daughter Orli’s stepfather and without a moment’s hesitation he opened his heart to her and she became his. It was one of our great joys in life that Tom and Orli immediately adopted each other as brother and sister. It was just another sign of how right we were, how right we all were. He had great joy in knowing how happy our children are with their partners Jill and Geoff. He wanted you to be as happy as he was.

As for me, I can only feel today that I have been the luckiest woman in the world. Dave loved me and I loved him. And the best, the most special thing, is that we knew it every day. I do not exaggerate when I say that every day I knew how lucky I was. And that every day he knew it too. We often looked into each other’s eyes and said, this is so good. This is so very very good. We trusted each other completely. We loved each other gently and passionately, and when we argued which was rarely, we always made up right away. There is nothing left unsaid between us, and that gives me tremendous peace today.

Dave loved us all with a whole and open heart. Of Dave’s many projects, nothing gave him greater pleasure than to make other people happy. Every single person in this room knows that first hand. And God knows he made me happy. So I just want to say, Dave: Project complete. Job well done.