Robert Timberlake NDNR memorial

[published in ndnr November, 2008]

left to right, rear row: Jim Lee (lobbyists), Charlie Cropley, Louise Edwards.

middle row: Nancy Rao, Ruth Adele,

front: Rena Bloom, Sophie Schor

We attend AANP conventions to be with our people.  All other activities are just  requisite necessities to fill the time.  Seeing friends, colleagues, and meeting young doctors brings me a deep joy.  To be in touching distance of these people creates a deep and sustained pleasure that touches my being and sustains me throughout the year. 

The longer we engage in the daily work of this profession, the more it shapes us.  We share similar routines, hone similar skills, taste similar herbs, and share similar frustrations and dreams.  The power of nature, in drawing us along a common path,  makes us its individual agents of healing and over time brings out certain common aspects in who we are.  The longer we practice the more easily we recognize the resultant commonality in each other. The same current of life that drew us to this profession in the first place and that continues to draw us along year after year, draws us closer.  What we have in common becomes more apparent with each passing year.

It was with great trepidation that we packed for this year’s convention knowing that Robert Timberlake would not be in attendance.  Bob died earlier this year of pancreatic cancer at his home in Fort Collins, in the center of a circle of loving friends and family.

We often speak of cure when we talk of naturopathic medicine.  Transformation would be a better word to describe our medicine’s impact on Robert Timberlake. If there is some force of nature that gently shapes us individual doctors, then that same force carved  Bob and made him what he was.

‘He was a thankful client of a New Hampshire-based naturopathic physician.’ John Weeks wrote earlier this year in his Integrator Blog.

 ‘Thankful for what?’ I ask Jim Sensenig, founding president of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians as we share lunch at the Vital Nutrients booth at this year’s convention tradeshow. 

‘He was in a wheel chair, crippled with Reiter’s Syndrome, a burnt out corporate headhunter in New England, back when the area’s electronics industry had taken off.’  Jim tells me the story.  When his rheumatologist told him that he was doing pretty well, Bob flipped out; he rebelled.  Reduced to living in a wheel chair in constant pain despite no shortage of painkillers and steroids was not what Bob considered to be ‘doing well.’  He found Barry Taylor, ND.  He found naturopathy and he found both his cure and his calling. 

Always an appreciative guy, Robert Timberlake committed himself to furthering the profession that had given him back his life.  He never became a doctor.  Yet he did more for our profession than anyone else I can name.

He became the penultimate volunteer for the AANP at a point in its history when survival was questionable.  He single handedly grew our membership like the ex-headhunter he was, cold-calling non-members and selling them an organization that at the time offered only promises.  He organized a couple of doctors in New Hampshire, brought them to the state house and passed a law.  Before we knew it Robert was the AANP’s national lobbyist, surviving on a meager stipend and passing naturopathic regulations all over the country.

Robert Timberlake was directly responsible for the passage of naturopathic licensing laws in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Utah, Idaho and Puerto Rico also passed laws during that period, with significant support from Bob.  He instigated legislative efforts in New York, California and other states that I’ve forgotten.  One must wonder where our profession might be today if the AANP had maintained their relationship with Timberlake just a few years longer.

Bob and the AANP had already parted ways when we made our first run at the Colorado Legislature. We were young and innocent in the ways of politics.  With a bit more political savvy things might have gone differently for us.  Even without the AANP’s backing, Bob was always with us.

Bob came to Colorado in August of 1993 to testify at a legislative hearing. It wasn’t until this summer that we learned the story about the wheel chair.  Not knowing any of his past medical history, we took him for a hike and picnic way up on St. Mary’s Glacier.  We played in the snow. 

Robert’s commitment to legislation continued even after he went into business with Rick Liva.  He allowed us to talk their fledgling company into continual, constant and, it seems, perpetual financial contributions to our legislative work.  Contributions they couldn’t afford and could only justify as the right thing to do.  We leveraged their donations and encouraged other companies to match them.  Bob was always ready to be the first to step forward and open his checkbook. 

After Robert moved to Colorado to live with his future wife Sylvia, he became a regular attendee at our legislative hearings. He would lay it out in no uncertain terms that with every legislative defeat we had no choice but to go back for another round. Early this year, in response to the announced date of an upcoming hearing, Robert apologized that he wouldn’t be able to come.  His excuse wasn’t that he was busy dying.  Rather he had already bought plane tickets because he was going to Germany for treatment.  ‘Nevertheless’ he wrote in an email, ‘I will be there at the hearing in spirit.’

We all have our own stories of how we were drawn to this profession and perhaps  Robert’s story is not so different from your own.  But while we have been slowly shaped by the daily practice of medicine, Bob was blasted by it.  He was forged in the legislative arenas driven by his desire to move this profession forward.  Not in small incremental steps, but in the fire of conflict.  He became in a few short years the kind of person that it will take us years to grow into.

We talk often of naturopathy as bringing cure to illness.  In Bob’s case it was more than cure, naturopathy transformed him.  As Rick Kirschner, former AANP president, wrote, “Bob was an incredibly sweet-natured and generous spirited man with a great love of life, a great big laugh, a great smile, a great desire to do good, a great willingness to go the extra mile and a great stubborn streak that allowed him to go where someone needed to go when others would or could not.  In a word, he was great.”

These sentiments were echoed by one person after another at a memorial earlier this summer.  At the clubhouse at Bob’s ‘golf course,’ one friend after another, all dressed in Bob’s silk Hawaiian shirts bequeathed by Sylvia from Bob’s closet, got up and in so many words said, “Robert Timberlake was the best friend in the world.”

He developed a spiritual side along the way.  A deep belief in love and goodness that saw him through his last months with a nobility of spirit and thought that we all should be envious of.

No death is good in my calculation and yet listening to the stories of Robert’s last days and hours and even minutes that his dear Sylvia told me over the course of the convention, Robert made finishing out his life into a thing of beauty.  Even in his last hours as he was slipping away, he paused on his journey to tell Sylvia and, through her, all of us,  “What they say, it’s all true.”

 

He followed the current of his life to its end with grace and honor, following a banner of deep and everlasting love.

We all should be so lucky.