The British have named January 24 the most depressing day of the year, but I say they may have gotten it off by just a week. This year, from my point of view, nothing can beat out January 31 for a sad day.

That’s the day we lost both Molly Ivins and Bill Meade.

Molly you probably know about. Tributes to her writing and her scathing liberal wit have been everywhere in the press lately. She deliciously made fun of the rich, the powerful, and the Texas legislature. My favorite is a description she once gave of one of the legislators of whom she said, ”If you put his brains in a bumblebee, it would fly backwards.” And of another one that “if that man’s IQ slips any further, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” 

Bill Meade, however, you might not have known. He was a family man, a father of three, and a husband. An ordinary guy, except somehow not so ordinary. He loved music and poetry. He read Thich Nhat Hanh and Reader’s Digest, both. He believed in helping people. He worked hard for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised. After retirement, he worked as a volunteer for literacy and in the hospital. He had four young grandsons and a chihuahua named Joey who adored him. Bill was the kind of dad who talked to his grown children every day and never let an opportunity to say “I love you” go unsaid.

By the time I met him, when my daughter started dating his son, he was already involved in a serious fight with depression. You could see in his eyes that the battle was taking its toll on him, and yet what was also there in his face was so much love and tenderness that you sometimes felt you should look away. He was someone who seemed to understand everybody. It was as though he saw to the core of you and recognized all the goodness you were striving for, even if you missed half the time, or even three-quarters. Bill was devoid of pretense, as if he knew he didn’t have time to bother with all that. I think he was in a race with a huge and unmanageable sadness, and the effect of that was a kindness that shone from him, even as it was mixed with melancholy.

He reminded me of a saying I’ve always found comfort in, written by the Buddhist thinker Jack Kornfield: “Life is so hard, how can we be anything but kind?”

This sounds corny, I know, but tonight it’s just a little bit tempting to think of the afterlife being a little bit of a better place, with Bill and Molly both there at once, shining their special light. In the meantime, she left us with a charge a few years ago, and I think Bill would echo it:

“Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.”

And be kind.