A Few More Words from Betsy

Elizabeth Vardaman
and Students

Betsy speaks of Professor Vardaman's good health and abrupt death:

Jim lived to be 89 year of age. He did indeed "rage against the dying of the light" and knew himself fortunate to enjoy a long and mostly healthy life. Certainly he had every synapse firing in his brain until the week when all the clocks stopped. Just over four months ago. In this complex, fragmented world, he was a person we turned to for historical context, for wisdom and perspective, for affirmation that we were okay, even if we did not know everything, and for peeling the layers of issues back to their origins.

This might sound like Betsy's last word on the subject, but she still has four more pages, so I might cite some more.