William Longhway Sargent

William Longhway Sargent, (“Billy”, “Sarge”), age 79, of Bend, Oregon, was involved in a fatal auto accident in the early evening of December 16, 2025.Billy grew up in Wabasha, Minnesota, on the banks of the Mississippi River. Summers were spent fishing, cruising the river, wandering sandbars. Winters had skating upriver, starting wood fires on the snowy ice to fight off the frostbite.Bill graduated from Waba-sha High School in 1964. He attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, until his enlistment in the US Army First Air Calvary. He served 2 tours of duty as a medical corpsman in Vietnam, returning home in 1970.Billy then worked to finish his undergraduate college. He received his BA degree from Metropolitan State College in Minneapolis, MN, in 1975. After which, he spent several years living and studying at the Findhorn Spiritual Com-munity in Findhorn, Scotland. Outside of his daily routine, he often plunged with his fellow community members in the extremely frigid Firth of Forth to achieve enhanced awareness and sensitivity. His visits to Iona, an island in the Scottish Inner Hebrides and its Abbey, which was established by an Irish monk in 563 AD and played a central role in bringing Christianity to the Scots and Anglo-Saxons, were the subject of many of his tales. These deeply felt experiences imbued all of his remaining life. His view was always upwards, towards the light.Bill relocated to San Francis-co, CA, in 1979 and earned his MA in education from Stan-ford University in 1982. Billy pursued a career of teaching high school classes in English composition and digital pho-tography in San Francisco, and later in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington. About this time, Bill estab-lished his spiritual home in the high desert of Lone Pine, CA, in the shadow of Mount Whitney, and cherished his sense of this place ever after.Bill met his future wife, Carol Barrett, while pursuing his PhD degree from the Union Institute.He was awarded his PhD in 1991. In 1992, Bill and Carol married in San Francisco. Their daughter, Sarah, was born in 1993, and the family shortly afterward moved to Battle Ground, WA, and later Longview, WA. After retiring from teaching, Billy moved to Bend, Oregon, where he lived until his death. Bill enjoyed meeting new people and con-necting with his community while driving Uber.One of Billy’s primary plea-sures was sunbathing, which he found invigorating and meditative.Unfortunately, Billy’s sun worship had a downside. Bill was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma just months before his seventieth birthday. He was projected to have a year to live.Miraculously, he found an experimental drug in a clin-ical trial that sent him into remission, and he remained in remission for almost ten years. Defying medical advice, as he commonly did, he continued to indulge in sunbathing whenev-er he had the chance.He was preceded in death by his father, William Burnell Sargent, his mother, Clara Al-ice Longhway Sargent, and his brother, James Louis Sargent. He is survived by his daughter, Sarah Caryl Sargent, his ex-wife, Carol Barrett, his brother, John (Ruth) Sargent, and his brother, Michael Sargent.Bill’s generous and magnan-imous nature endeared him to all he met throughout his life.