Dear Acharya McKeever,
I wish I had a chance to say goodbye to you! I was so busy living these past few months while you were busy dying, and I didn’t know that. I’m sorry. So here is my written goodbye for now.
You were my first buddhist teacher and being your student and then your friend completely changed the trajectory of my life. When I was 22 years old, living at Marpa House, and struggling greatly with both my physical and mental health (which healed mysteriously through sitting multiple dathuns with you), you adamantly encouraged me to take part in my first dathun. I couldn’t afford it, so you helped me set up a fundraiser and were the very first one to generously donate. You were so incredibly generous and kind towards me, immediately my mind began to open.
I feel so grateful that I was your student towards the end of your teaching career; those final dathuns you lead, you shined like the brightest star in the sky and they were truly extra-ordinary. You were humble and gentle, human, ordinary AND outrageous, inscrutable, and quite remarkable… the truth is the magic of the Lineage spoke and moved through Bill.
You not only taught the dharma in these retreats, you WERE it. We all got to have a direct experience of the beginning-less and endless Devotion for your guru and all beings that radiated from you.
I have no doubt that you paid off your bill, Bill, and then some! The Vidyadhara would be so very proud. You taught me to cheer up, laugh at myself a great deal, to be more gentle, and perhaps above all - that it’s good to be who I am, just as I am. I don’t think anybody has benefitted my life more than you have.
I loved learning in your Shing Kahm that the refuge name that CTR gave you was a very unusual Sanskrit/Tibetan hybrid name “Shiwa Reishi.” I never knew that your name was both Sanskrit and Tibetan. I have always thought the refuge name you gave me which is also both Sanskrit and Tibetan had been a mistake. Now I know it wasn’t.
Bill’s mantra was “never give up, always give in” and at the end you did just that. Thank you, dear friend. May your path always be supported by (and haunted by) all the bodhisattvas of the lineage and may all your suffering completely dissolve as you are embraced by Great Love. Goodbye for now. Ki Ki, So So!