This obituary appeared in The Montana Standard and The Bozeman Chronicle. Doc Losee was a legend in our valley. He will be sorely missed and always remembered with a smile. The writer is anonymous.
I’M A GONER
It is difficult to write about Doc Losee. There is so much to say it would take pages. We were thinking that if he would be able to put this in his words it might go something like this….
I walked off the face of the Earth today.
I closed my eyes… then, darkness – nothing… the big void. Like before you were born.
I was prepared for this; to let nature take its course, and now this big wonderful life is over.
I was born October 29, 1919 and grew up in a small village along the Hudson River in New York State called Upper Red Hook, on my Grandad Teator’s Apple Farm. Grandad Teator was an enthusiastic amateur naturalist and thru his tutoring I learned the complex laws of nature, and cultivated a deep reverence for all living things. Dominie French, the local Dutch Reform minister taught me that it is a privilege to live, and for that privilege, you should live your life in service of others. So when I was 12 years old, I decided that I wanted to be a Doctor like my Grandad Edwin K. Losee, and Great-Grandad John A. Losee. I attended College at Dartmouth N.H., the worst 4 years of my life, where I majored in Chemistry and had to memorize thousands of chemical formulas and can’t remember a damn one of them, oh yeah H2SO4 is Sulphuric Acid. I graduated from Dartmouth Cum Laude, and got accepted to Yale Medical School. I spent the rest of my life un-learning everything they taught me. The last year at Yale, I was conscripted into the Army and graduated with my MD and as a Captain at the tail end of WWII. Those were troubling times but I came out with a wife, Olive, and a surplus Jeep that I had to paint blue. Becky was born in Kentucky and with her in the back of the jeep, Olive and I headed out west. We discovered Ennis and the Madison Valley in 1949. Son Jonathan was born in 1950. The rest is history.
I sure loved living! And I sure will miss it. You come and go and do not know.
I’ll miss the folks in Montana. My patients… I’ll miss the long intense times I spent with each and every one of them watching, listening, examining, touching, thinking so hard about their medical problems. I’ll miss the closeness I felt to a patient and the mutual respect we had for each other. I’ll miss love.
I’ll miss the Valley, the river, the Madison range in alpenglow late in the evening, the nighttime howl of the coyotes, wildflowers on the Gravelly Range, the black and white contrast of a herd of angus against a wind-blown snow-packed benchland, the rising of a full moon, the sound of my plaster-covered wing-tips in the dark hallways as I made my late-night patient rounds.
I’ll miss my stuff; my wool shirts and hats, I’ll miss my toys, my trains, my dear friends and professional colleagues, my kids Becky and Jonathan, their spouses Kit and Cathy and grandkids Joshua, Amber and Deirdre and great-grandkids Evelyn, Sylvie, Rowan and Grayson.
I miss Olive. She was my soul mate. It has been a lonely 9 years since she passed away.
I have no regrets.
I was impeccably honest and lived by the Golden Rule. I did unto others what I would have had them do to me. And it served me well.
I’m so damn glad I chose to live the way I did, I am so glad I doctored, with intense devotion to my profession, I am so glad I loved strongly and passionately and with humor. I am so damn happy, you’ll have to bring me down with a string.
Doc Losee passed away at the Madison Valley Manor May 14, 2017. He worked for and was a devoted supporter of the Shriner’s Hospitals for Children in Bozeman, Butte and Montreal and would appreciate that any donations in his name be sent to that organization: www.donate2sch.org, and an RE Losee MD Memorial account has been set up at the First Madison Valley Bank.
A memorial service will be held in Ennis at the Pole Barn Rodeo Grounds June 17, 2017 11:00 AM. He worked for and was a devoted supporter of the Shriner’s Hospitals for Children and would appreciate that any donations in his name be sent to that organization: www.donate2sch.org.