By M. Stephenie Crowley
I was fortunate to meet an extremely special family through their friendship with my new husband, John. He had first met Bill and Marguerite Sears and their sons in South Africa where they were ‘pioneers’ for the Bahá’í faith. I met them when Bill retired to Tucson.
Bill had been in television and radio for years (the play-by-play announcer for the Philadelphia Eagles; In The Park, the CBS award-winning children’s program; the Ed Sullivan show, etc.).
Along the way he had embraced the Bahá’í faith. Because of his works for, and devotion to, the faith, its leader at the time (Shogi Effendi) appointed Bill a "Hand of the Cause of God" - a prestigious office bestowed upon only a handful of Bahá’ís worldwide.
Bill was elderly when I met him; a more charming and sweetly funny man would be hard to find anywhere. Within a few years, though, he had succumbed to age and diabetes. We attended the funeral.
Now for the eerie part. It was raining in Tucson, but when we arrived at the chapel, the downpour stopped long enough for everyone to get inside ... then started up until the service was over ... stopped long enough for everyone to get into their cars (the cortege was almost two miles long), then began again ... and kept up until we reached the cemetery, where it stopped once more.
During the gravesite service, I noticed someone staring straight upward. I looked up, then looked again, then started nudging other people to look too. Directly over Bill’s grave circled a flock of large black birds ... round and round, again and again until practically everyone was staring at them. Exactly at the end of the service, they suddenly broke off in mid-wheel and streaked directly eastward in a straight line, disappearing rapidly into the cloudy sky. Someone thought to take a picture of them before they completely vanished.
Now, the number nineteen has a special significance in the Bahá’í faith, just as three does in Christianity (the Trinity) and 18 (the word for "18" is "chai", or "life") in Judaism.
When we saw Marguerite some weeks later, with a sense of wonderment she showed us the photo. Nineteen black birds were frozen forever in mid-flight over Bill’s final resting place.