George Hesley

On Monday afternoon, April 1st, 2019, having been under the competent care of Hospice for over a year, and with that peace of God which passeth all understanding, the aged George Hesley passed from temporal to eternal life in the company of his beloved wife of sixty-five years, Beatrice Joy.  He was preceded in death by two daughters, Dixie McCain and Victoria Bonomini, and is survived by children, both natural and adoptive, Robyn, Matthew, Cassondra, Felecia and Michael, by grandchildren and by great-grandchildren. Born at home on January 27, 1923 in an era of national scarcity, during the Great Depression, and the youngest of four children, circumstances were such that George "Junior," though a promising, gifted, unusually poetic student, was impelled to abbreviate his education at the local public school, recently a single-room schoolhouse, to help work the family farm in Stanwood.  That farm, with its surrounding woods, swamps and fields, was his personal turf, his own promised land. WWII marched in after the Great Depression.  Junior, grown in years, enlisted, laced his boots and left the farm to become an Army soldier, ultimately an officer, but not before first developing one of his trademark skills as a machinist by taking a job in Ypsilanti, a then national center for building bomber aircraft.   Later he expressed some regret that he wasn't sent overseas to fight under one of his heroes, General George S. Patton, with whom he felt a great affinity, but was also reassured to know that his country, by stationing him stateside to train troops, considered his role both important and worthwhile.  This was further proved, most recently, when, with notable effort on friend Kathy Bremmer's part, and accompanied by Kathy's son and fellow Army officer, Brian Anderson, George, with veterans of WWII and others, was able to take the Honor Flight to Washington, D.C. The "baby boom" followed the War and George was part of both.  "I'm going to marry you some day," he boldly, it turns out rightly declared to a young, attractive, certainly intrigued waitress, recently graduated from high school, Beatrice Albright, serving coffee at a Big Rapids cafe.  His earlier, troubled marriage, which resulted in a loving daughter, had failed, but this one would not he resolved to himself. Marry they did, in a happy, understated ceremony at the bride's home in 1953.  Afterward, in due time, children arrived in succession.  The marriage, though not altogether hopeless, was darkened by George's excessive drinking, a habit he had acquired in early youth, which had become a practically debilitating alcoholism.  From childhood he was taught the proper verities, kindness, generosity, love and suchlike, and was also raised unchurched.  Still, he had an overriding, preternatural spiritual sensibility, combined with a poetic instinct, which led him to wholeheartedly seek God and redemption.  Seek he did, for nine months, as he often told it, at the end of which he was not only assuredly but also gloriously found. He was, in other words, born again, in his thirty third year, alone with God on the farm of his youth, and the experience so radically changed him that, from that point forward, he was essentially a new man, no longer held in thrall to alcohol and other counterfeits, and so given to sharing and describing the experience that he became, for many years, a minister of the Gospel, as much by default, it seems, as by calling. We, his family and others, respectfully put him, a prolific poet, Christian mystic and soldier, now to rest, his mortal coil and physical shell, that is, to the inaudible sound of what his grandson called a twenty-one gun salute and in anticipation of what the Bible refers to as the final trumpet, at the sound of which the dead in Christ shall be raised incorruptible.     A memorial service will be held Saturday, April 6 at 2:00 pm at the Cedar Springs Christian Church, 340 W. Pine St. on the property of CTA. Arrangements by Bliss-Witters & Pike Funeral Home, Cedar Springs.