Posted by Lynne Frances Miller Homeyer on April 16, 2011:

My father died of renal failure brought on by complications of pneumonia sometime in the early morning of 1 April 2011, in his sleep, with all three of his daughters under the same roof. It was a "good death," certainly; he had become sick less than 2 weeks previously, we had come with four of his five grandchildren, arranged for hospice care, and brought him home. Sign me up for that kind of ending. It matched his life, in that his dying was quick, courageous, and guided by both love and the principle of not making a big deal out of anything. "Whatcha gonna do, G.I.?" he said many times to visitors and callers over the few days of his illness. Robert Lee Miller, Jr., grew up as an Army brat in the Phillipines, Costa Rica, Panama and the U.S. as the son of Robert Lee Miller, West Point Class of 1924, an officer in the Coastal Artillery. He graduated from high school at the New Mexico Military Institute during WW2, when his mother moved the family - he had two younger sisters - to Santa Fe. He enlisted at 18 and served on the American Front, a phrase that always made him laugh. He was accepted to the United States Military Academy in 1946, graduated in June 1950 somewhere in the middle of the class, and was commissioned into the Field Artillery. He married Cornelia van den Toorn in June 1951 and was posted to Germany where they had two daughters, me (1953) and my sister Cornelia (1955). Back in the states he joined the Signal Corps and earned his Master's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Arizona in Tuscon in 1960, then serving in Korea for 13 months. He was next posted to Ft. Huachuca, AZ, to the U.S. Army Electronic Proving Ground where his third daughter, Morgan, was born in 1962. He was posted to the Pentagon, then volunteered for duty in Viet Nam where, as a Lieutenant Colonel, he commanded the 53rd Signal Battalion headquartered in Bien Hoa, serving during the Tet offensive and receiving the Legion of Merit. He was next posted to the NATO Standardization Group in Ottawa, Ontario, and then to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama where, promoted to Colonel, he served with the Ballistic Missile Defense Systems Command. He retired on partial disability in 1975 (heart problems) and became a public accountant and investment manager. His wife, my mother, died at age 58 in 1988 of breast cancer, a blow he never fully recovered from. He lived a life of service in his career and in his retirement. There are many people who can claim him as a friend, but what impresses me is the wide circle of people who he visited, helped bring them out to restaurants and church and on errands when they were no longer able to drive, walked with them, just visited. He knew he was fortunate to be living independently and still driving at 84, and counted his blessings, and shared those blessings. I am so grateful that God never asked him to face his greatest fear, which was of being incapacitated by a stroke and becoming a wheelchair-bound shadow of himself. He was joking with us to the last, and he leaves ingrained in us his dedication to service, love, and courage. Which, of course, is enough.

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