William A. Safstrom

by Steve Elde

1950 — 2024

Bill Safstrom was born on March 27, 1950, to William and Harriet Safstrom in Seattle, Washington. He grew up at the First Covenant Church in Seattle, and attended Seattle Pacific College, graduating in 1973 with a BS in Biology. He later completed a master’s degree in educational leadership from Seattle Pacific in 1985. In 1982, Bill married Janet Pampeyan, whom he had met in a singles group at the Mercer Island Covenant Church. Together they raised three children. Bill served as a high school principal at Landgren Christian, Seattle Christian, and most recently at Bellevue Christian High School for 21 years. For 6 years, Bill worked as a supervisor of teacher interns in the education department at the University of Washington, a role he continued to serve in at Seattle Pacific for the past 20 years. For many years, he also volunteered with the Nicolás Fund for Education to create libraries and train teachers in the Ixil region of Guatemala. Bill is survived by his wife Janet, daughter Julianna (Peter), son Michael (Dani), grandson Bridger, and son Greg, as well as his siblings.

A week before Bill died, my wife Marilyn and I visited him and Janet and the kids in Woodinville, Washington. Bill had shown serious signs of cognitive decline due to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a rare, fatal brain disease. He was uncharacteristically slow and deliberate in his speech and his movement. As I talked with him, Bill told me that inside his own head there was, in his own perception, no impairment. But others had told him what they saw, and he believed them. Even with his speech slowed and his affect fallen, Bill’s humor was intact. I told him how precious he was to me, to all of us. I told him how much I cherished our friendship and that I loved him. His eyes twinkled and crinkled as they always did when he was about to deliver a punchline: “I…let…you…marry…my…sister.” And he did.

During his formative years, when Bill was a boy, whenever he got into trouble, especially when he got a talking to by his father, he would smile. “Wipe that smile off your face!” his father told him. Bill tried. But the smile remained. He couldn’t not smile. Throughout Bill’s life he never completely wiped that smile off his face. Nor could he hide the crinkle around his eyes. Oh, he could be and was often serious, very serious, particularly when it came to things he believed in deeply, or when you invited him into sacred places like your hopes and your fears and your disappointments. Bill was with you and for you. He came alongside you. He held you, encouraged you, stuck with you. He listened intently and asked good and sometimes hard questions. He spoke to you with love, always with the certainty that in the end you would come through it, that God’s mercy would prevail. Bill did not stand outside our lives looking in through a window. He entered them. When Bill was around you were never alone.

Bill was devoted to his family. There was a deep bond with his brother Don and his sisters Cheryl and Marilyn. They called each other C, B, D, and M. As in-laws, Tom and Janet and Jan and I all had front row seats to the Safstrom family’s love and laughter. You had to have a quick wit to keep up with them, to roll with the punches. Samuel Johnson once said, “A good jest breaks no bones.” He was describing the Safstrom family. Once you were invited into the repartee around the Safstrom table you were “in” for life.

Bill was fascinated with everything, and I mean literally everything. Before Google, there was Bill. He was a repository of obscure facts and anecdotes. He read voraciously and he remembered what he read. His mind was encyclopedic. He loved history. For Billy all history was contextual, a cautionary tale for our own time. Ideas often took him into uncharted territory, and he took you along for the ride.

Bill was not fearless, but he was courageous. He was always looking for another adventure, whether it was bringing books and teachers to children in remote villages in Guatemala, traversing a mountain trail in the Cascades or Olympics with his boys, harvesting wheat in his backyard garden and planting as many varieties of carrots and potatoes the garden could hold, or in his sixties and seventies still blocking shots and dribbling past his opponents on a soccer field.

Some of our best and most intimate moments with Bill and his family were around a campfire. There, Bill was at his best. He was a master at frying bacon and brewing coffee over an open fire. Around the campfire with Bill, stories, laughter, and food all came together. Bill always made a place for you around the fire. Marilyn and I and our kids sat around many campfires with Bill and Janet and their family.

At another campfire long ago on a cold, clear morning on a beach, friends still reeling from the tragic death of their most precious friend, still in the throes of inconsolable grief, saw someone making breakfast. “Come and eat,” he told them. There, around the warmth of that campfire, they found their risen Lord. Bill now sits with all the saints around that fire, with a smile on his face and that twinkle in his eyes.