Bishop Terry Dies after Courageous Fight with Heart Disease
Episcopal News Service. March 18, 1999 [99-027]
Mary Koch, Editor of the Inland Episcopalian
(ENS) The Rt. Rev. Frank Jeffrey Terry, bishop of the Diocese of Spokane since 1990, died Friday, February 26, of complications following heart transplant surgery.
The 59-year-old bishop received a new heart January 7 at Sacred Heart Hospital, Spokane, after more than two years on the national organ transplant waiting list.
Retired Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning officiated at the memorial celebration March 6 at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, in Spokane. About 1,200 mourners packed the cathedral, including 12 Episcopal bishops and leaders of several other denominations.
Terry was active in various ecumenical efforts and participated in a pilgrimage of Episcopal and Roman Catholic bishops who visited both the archbishop of Canterbury and Pope John Paul II in 1994.
Terry was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, an enlargement and weakening of the heart, in 1992. He was placed on the national waiting list for a heart transplant in December 1996. By September 1998 his deteriorating condition forced his hospitalization, but he continued working from his hospital room.
Ecclesiastical authority for the diocese was transferred to the Standing Committee January 29, with approval of Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, when it became apparent Terry was having difficulty recovering.
He survived at least one crisis with his lungs, and his medical team was reporting some improvement. Two days before his death, a perforated colon was discovered. Two subsequent operations failed to stem the bishop's deteriorating condition.
"His good new heart had just had too much and it stopped, " Carolyn Terry, the bishop's wife, wrote to friends and supporters, who had been receiving daily updates from her on the Internet.
Throughout the tense weeks following transplant surgery, the bishop, his wife and daughters Katy and Ellen, were supported by an international outpouring of prayers, many of them in response to Carolyn Terry's Internet reports.
"You have lifted us all through this on a sea of prayer," she wrote after her husband's death. "Last night, a friend mentioned my 'buoyancy,' and it was really this sea of prayer, and Jeff was carried on it too."
Shortly after he was placed on the transplant waiting list, Terry reflected on the resulting demonstrations of support and prayer.
"I have had a rediscovery of the power of prayer," he said in an interview with the diocesan newspaper, the Inland Episcopalian. "When tons of people are praying for you, it is very humbling, very impressive. You learn how many people love you. It provides a venue that brings that to the surface."
Terry was born in Laramie, Wyoming, and raised in southern California.
After earning a bachelor's degree in business, he graduated from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. He met his wife while a student in Berkeley. He was ordained in 1964.
The Terrys lived and worked in the Philippines for seven years. After returning to the United States, he served churches in Great Falls, Montana, and Richland, Ephrata and Grand Coulee, Washington.
He held an honorary doctorate from CDSP and was an active member and advocate for the Joint Council of the Philippine Covenant.