By Elinor Smith
Elinor Smith: The houses along Daly Avenue in Missoula are cute — with painted shutters and manicured lawns. They’re a quick jump away from the University of Montana. And in front one of those houses – that’s where Bernie Burnham died on his front lawn.
Jane Shigley: …just walked outside to change a sprinkler, and he died.
Roxane Weikel: the diagnosis was an aneurysm, and so his was basically a blood vessel ruptured.
Jane: For the survivors, I think that’s probably the worst way to go. It’s maybe not so bad for the person who’s passing away, but for the survivors to have absolutely no notice is really hard.
Elinor: This story may start with Bernie’s death, but it’s not really about him. It’s about his wife, Beulah Burnham – Bea to all her friends. She’d been visiting her daughter across the street when Bernie died. She walked back home and…
Jane: The police were at the front door waiting for her.
Elinor: This moment, when Bea’s husband of 34 years just dropped right there in front of their house, stopped her in her tracks. It opened up this giant hole of grief and the people closest to her weren’t sure if she’d be able to crawl out.
I knew that Bernie wasn’t the only one for Bea because I’d read her obituary. That outline of her life said she’d outlived four husbands – FOUR HUSBANDS.
Bea was 97 when she died in 2022. I was in my early 20s then. In fact, when I read her obituary, I was just about the age Bea was when she met Bernie.
And not to air my dirty laundry, but I’ve never been the best at making a relationship last. I can’t imagine marrying one man, let alone four of them.
I wanted to know why she kept starting again. Was she in love with love? Or with being married? And who was she in addition to being someone’s wife four times over? I found out so much that wasn’t in that obit after having long, lovely conversations with Bea’s daughters, Roxane Weikel and Jane Shigley.
Bea was a bank teller in Glasgow, Montana, when she met Bernie. He was working as a meteorologist for the weather service above the bank. Roxane has been the keeper of the letters her parents sent back and forth during the early days of their romance.
Roxane: They met in the middle of May. They apparently got engaged because my dad wrote to her. ‘I’ve only known you three weeks and we’ve been engaged for two of them’ or something like that.
Elinor: They got married in 1945. Here’s Jane.
Jane: She said, I’m not gonna obey. I mean, in 1945 when she got married, she told the Baptist minister in Glasgow, Montana, don’t put obey in the vows. I’m not gonna say love, honor and obey. I’ll say love and honor.
Elinor: But on the other hand…
Jane: She was fairly traditional and she made dad’s lunch and packed his lunch in a lunchbox every day. If dad had to go to work at seven in the morning, she got up a little bit before he got up and she got dressed and washed her face and put her makeup on just in order to make him breakfast and hand him his lunchbox.
Elinor: Bea and Bernie had three daughters together and adopted a son. Although she fit into this era – being a wife with kids in the ‘50s and ‘60s – she was also a kind of force at home. Bea asserted herself. She talked about women’s rights, about class, about race, about how to treat other people as equals. And at the same time, she taught her kids how to be practical – how to run a home.
Jane: She had this idea that each kid needed to learn each chore. Well, it was great. I mean, I actually learned stuff that you wouldn’t learn otherwise, like how to use a measuring cup, and then the summer after sixth grade, I don’t know what it was we did, it was your year to do the ironing, I think.
Elinor: Her family moved around until they eventually settled in Missoula in 1959. They bought that house on Daly Avenue – where Bernie died on the lawn. Bea lived there for almost 60 years. Jane and Roxane have fond memories of the place — stealing all the olives from the hors d’oeuvres tray before Bea could serve Thanksgiving dinner and watching TV as a family off a big boxy set that took up the king’s share of the living-room wall. Bernie had been retired for about a year when he died. By then, the kids were all out of the house. So there was Bea – left alone with years of unfinished plans and all the reminders of their life together.
Roxane: I mean, he was just part of her life and so, you know, I’d stop over and she’d be talking about Bernie and, you know, it was just so evident that they were a couple still. And so she just constantly would say, you know, well, Bernie likes mashed potatoes. Bernie would always go out on the boat and he would do this, and it was just, it was a constant reminder and brought sadness to me, but yet I think that’s extremely common. You don’t switch from today, he’s my husband, and then start using the past tense immediately.
Elinor: But it turns out, Bea was the kind of woman who could pull it together. Roxane remembers it happened because of a thermocouple that went out in the hot water heater.
Roxane: And she went into Ace and got the directions and crawled under the cabin, and you could see she was just furious. Step one. Okay. I gotta come out and get a screwdriver. Where are the screwdrivers? But she was just: Damnit. I’m gonna…
Elinor in the tape: why do you think she was so dedicated to fixing it?
Roxane: I think she just plain wanted to get on with it. It’s just, you know, I don’t know what else to do. It’s just me. I’ve gotta learn to do this stuff.
Elinor: And after that, things were different for Bea. She crawled out of that deep dark hole. She fixed her own car. She redecorated the whole house. She went to church and functions and joined clubs.
Roxane: And I don’t know if she was making the choice to be happy as much as just going to get on with my life, I’m gonna figure this out.
Elinor: She was in a progressive dinner group.
Roxane: She was also a founding member of the Missoula Mall Walkers, and she was so proud of that.
Elinor: And when another woman from her church got sick and didn’t have anyone to take care of her, Bea stepped up.
Jane: One time I asked her, are you doing this because of God? Are you doing this because it makes me feel good to help other people? Or you know, what is it? What’s motivating you, mom? Why are you spending so much of your time taking care of this lady that you knew from church? And mom’s answer was never: ‘Oh gee, I feel closer to God when I do it. Or: Jesus wants us to be nice to people.’ It was: Well, she didn’t have anybody else
Elinor: And eventually, when she was ready, Bea dated. Or really: She married.
Roxane: I took my mom to a children’s theater production of Annie with my daughter, who was probably five or six or seven at the time, and she said to me, see that man down there? His name is George Stokes. His wife just died. He’s really, really a great man. It’s too early for him to start dating, but I intend to date him when he’s ready, and then she gets up and goes down and talks to him.
Elinor: George was her second husband. After chatting at the theater, they moved on to square dancing and then marriage. George died in 1988. She knew Bob from a support group for people who had lost their spouses. He died five years later. And Dick, her fourth husband, was a family friend. This is Bea’s friend for almost 50 years, Dorothy Guth.
Dorothy Guth: I don’t think she liked being alone. I think she liked being part of a couple and she didn’t marry dumb people. She married very educated men and very polite and they were very gallant, all of ‘em.
Elinor: When Dorothy’s husband passed away some years ago, Bea stayed behind after everyone dropped off their casseroles to give her some advice.
Dorothy: When people call and say, ‘Dorothy, would you like to come for dinner?’ You need to go to dinner. And I said, I don’t want to. And she said, Nope. She said, this is the good Lord’s way of getting you out of the house and getting you to work through the grief. She said, if they call and say, ‘Do you wanna go to a concert or a basketball game?’ You never say no. You say, OK, what time? And they’ll come and pick you up. She said, they’re not ever gonna ask you to drive. I mean, it was really, she just walked me through this grief.
Elinor: And so life went on. After Bea lost Bernie, George and Bob, she met Dick when they were in their eighties, after they went on a trip and she got the pictures back…
Roxane: and looked at them and she says to me, ‘I’m scared. I have no recollection of being here and any of these pictures.’ And it would’ve been, you know, two weeks earlier. So, we talked to her doctor and made an appointment with a neurologist, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So she’s running the test, but she doesn’t have the results back yet. Yeah. So Dick calls me and he says, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ And I said, um, uh, I don’t know. What do you have in mind? And he says, ‘Well, we’re gonna get married.’ So, and I, I said, uh, uh, uh, uh, but…
Elinor: But Bea was diagnosed with dementia. The progress was slow. And she was herself for years afterward, moving into a senior living community with Dick until he passed away. When that happened, she told Dorothy…
Dorothy: OK, I’m not doing this again. She said, I’m tired of burying them.
Elinor: I found out from Bea’s people that for Bea’s whole life, with husbands and without them, she’d make a choice, and that was the end of that. She had her own way of doing things and she didn’t care what other people thought of it. She’d wear the same sweater every Christmas. She’d shave her legs two swipes at a time. So it was never really done, just always in progress. Eventually, though, her mind left her to the point where she couldn’t hold a conversation anymore.
Dorothy: When I’d go pick her up, when her memory was so bad, I always felt so bad because we had had so much fun together and we had enjoyed each other so much, and we laughed so much. And to see this beautiful person sitting next to me, I, it was like carrying an empty vessel because I just miss, I really miss the conversation so much. I mean, and it just slowly slipped away. Yeah. But she always could play cards.
Elinor: When I first read about Bea’s life, I didn’t think we had much in common. I made assumptions about her that I shouldn’t have — that she only got married because she didn’t know how to live without a man. That she let her husbands call the shots and followed suit. I, like most people would, tried to put this woman of a certain age inside a box that made sense to me.
I can’t tell you how wrong I was about her.
I first started reporting this story in 2022. Since then, I’ve been through my first serious breakup, I graduated from college and I started a career. The more I live, the more I realize just how much I admire Bea Burnham and what I learned about her beyond that obituary. I think of her now when I make difficult decisions — what would Bea do? And, so far, she hasn’t led me astray. Because she was someone who clearly chose for herself – even in death.
Jane: She would get crazy ideas and she would be driven, like she got the idea that she wanted to be buried in a fur coat.
Elinor in the tape: Did she end up getting buried in the fur coat?
Jane: You bet she did.
Elinor in the tape: That’s a good idea.