Friend Laurie Decker Pitcher recalls the memorial service and life of yacht designer Michael William "Bill" Langan, who died on Dec. 31, 2010, after a battle with leukemia. He was 55.

It is sunset and the watch is over. The flags are lowered in a ceremony called Colours. The puff of smoke from the cannon disappears over Narragansett Bay as the sun goes down on the day. 

The people on the deck of the yacht club shiver in freezing January air as they say good-bye to their friend. Those who are closest to him huddle together for warmth and comfort. Bill’s watch is over. Eight bells ring.

“Hip hip HOORAY!” they yell. “Rest in peace, Billy,” someone says.

The church was a sea of black that day with an occasional burst of color from a Pashmina shawl. The large church in the tiny town could not hold everyone who came to pay their respects.

The wife and children entered the sanctuary with fresh and old tears on their faces. The lines of grief on Candace’s face could not take away from her natural beauty although the struggle of the past few years was visible in her once sparkling, once laughing deep blue eyes.

For such a long time, everyday words like breakfast, lunch and dance class were replaced with words like blast crisis, leukemic cells and transplant. Everyday requests to pick up the dry cleaning or a quart of milk were replaced with requests for strength and healing. Prayers for remission. A call for stem cell donors. A hope for a miracle.

It’s the story of a death and a story of an amazing life, but more than all of that, it’s a love story. A tribute to the meaning of wedding vows taken 30 years earlier. They never gave up on life or on each other.

They fought together and put normal life on hold so they could fight the battle against leukemia with all of their strength. They lost the battle but they won the war. The war that kept them together, still in love, still side by side, until that final day in December when Bill went to rest in another’s comforting embrace in Heaven.

The courage and hope and strength extended from Bill’s hospital room to friends all across the globe. Upbeat e-mails from him filled with medical terms and descriptions made me laugh and cry.

“New start tomorrow,” he would say.

I saved every one as a reminder of his amazing ability to see past the leukemia into the outside world, even if he was stuck in a Boston hospital room.

“Don’t make me come up there and wave paper at those Red Sox fans nurses,” I wrote to him one day. “I’ll be wearing my pink Yankees hat if I have to come up there.”

“It won’t be pretty,” he wrote back, thanking me for putting a smile on his face that day.

In honor of Bill, I signed up to become a bone marrow donor. They haven’t called me yet but I hope they do. The group is called Be the Match and I told Bill it was not at all like match.com but if he came across any eligible doctors to remember me.

Bill died on the last day of 2010. A sailor who will remain on the horizon of our lives forever. Eight bells. The watch is over. Sail on, Bill.