In the spring of 2023, a doctor in Kansas City received the kind of news he had spent thirty years delivering to other people.
The diagnosis was a leiomyosarcoma — a cancer of the soft tissue, rare and aggressive, treatable only by surgery, carrying a high probability of death within five years even if the operation went well. There would be no benefit from chemotherapy or radiation. The road was narrow, the odds were clear, and the man sitting in that examination room understood both with clinical precision. He had been a pulmonologist and critical care physician for decades. He had led palliative care teams. He had sat beside hundreds of people receiving exactly this kind of verdict and had learned, over years of listening, that every person meets death differently — that the work of dying, like the work of living, is irreducibly personal.
Now it was his turn.
“I planned on dying soon,” butch Murphy says, without drama, without self-pity, without the faintest hint of performance. “Avoiding the usual old age disabling conditions. My perspective was geared to continuing my happy life knowing it was limited, plus planning for my demise with my partner and family.”
He is 81 years old. He has survived the cancer. And in April of 2026, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
He is still, by nearly every measure, living his happy life.
butch Murphy was born in Camden, New Jersey, and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, before he was two years old. He doesn’t capitalize his first name — a quiet, deliberate act of humility that medicine instilled in him one day at a time, and that sculpting, when he came to it, only deepened. Corva, his wife of 58 years, removed the M.D. from their checks the day he left the practice. They understood each other.
His early years were defined less by any single influence than by a relentless accumulation of experience. From age ten onward, butch worked — paper routes, oil fields, representing the state of Oklahoma at the World’s Fair, serving as an orderly on a psychiatric ward and in a rehabilitation institute in southern Germany, working as a surgical obstetric technician. Most significantly, for a summer, he was a diener at a hospital morgue in Tulsa, assisting with autopsies, moving among the dead with the matter-of-fact composure of someone who had decided, early, that death was not something to look away from.
It was there, over a body on an autopsy table, that he first saw Corva.
She was a nursing student. Her pod had come to observe. Their eyes met across the room. She was scheduled to report for her Army physical the next day — she had been accepted and was set to ship out, possibly to Vietnam. The recruiter came to collect her. She told him she had met someone and fallen in love. He said he understood. She and butch got engaged. Fifty-eight years later, butch shakes his head at the arithmetic of it. “I don’t know how she’s stuck it out,” he says. “Amazingly, she has.”
I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
He went to Oklahoma State University for his undergraduate education in premedical sciences, then to the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine — never, by his own account, considered a star student. He completed his residency and fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center. Along the way, the Army drafted him during his residency, and he served as a family physician at Fort Knox, near Louisville, Kentucky.
He describes the arc of his early life with characteristic economy: doors opened, and he walked through them. A surgeon he knew in high school suggested medicine. The door opened. He went. “I don’t believe I considered it with a lot of thought,” he says. “Something to do. It sounded like a good idea and so I pursued it.” This is not false modesty — it is something closer to an accurate account of how a certain kind of intelligent, capable, unsentimental person moves through the world. Not by grand design, but by attention and willingness.
What those doors led to, over the course of his career, was a practice that placed him at the most difficult intersection in medicine. Pulmonology. Critical care. Palliative care. For the last three years of his practice, palliative care consumed half his working life. He led a team with a rule he imposed himself: listen ninety percent of the time, talk ten percent. Because every person’s relationship with death is shaped by their entire life — by what they believed, what they feared, what they had left undone — and the only way to serve them was to understand that first.
He tells the stories quietly. The patient who couldn’t complete the dying process because, raised Catholic, he hadn’t been to confession in years — and how the team’s social worker found a priest, and the man died comfortably two days later. (“I was the team leader,” butch notes, “and a well-known atheist. Yet I was consulted on all these ethical questions. Ha.”) The Buddhist patient whose wife said firmly, no, he doesn’t need a minister. The patient waiting, his whole life, for something better to arrive around the corner.
“These lessons helped formulate my approach to my own death,” butch says.
In 2011, butch Murphy opened a studio in rural mid-Missouri, about thirty-five miles from Columbia, and began teaching himself to weld steel.
He had seen equine sculptures outside a bank in Columbia — the work of an artist named Doug Owen, who had been making horses from car and farm equipment parts since art school. butch looked at them carefully, inside and out, and told Corva: I’m going to try that. He consulted his mentor, Bonnie Baxter — a lifelong expatriate in Quebec and retired art professor in Montreal — who told him simply to do it. Her spouse, a metal sculptor, taught him what equipment he needed.
He made seven sculptures in Owen’s style and sent images to Owen, who responded that they were good — but that butch needed to find and follow his own pathway. “The best advice ever,” butch says. What emerged, over years of work, was an evolution toward modernism and cubism, influenced by Braque and Picasso, designed deliberately to create what he calls “spectator confusion” — work that invites participation rather than offering easy answers.
He has now produced more than sixty equine abstractions. He has exhibited across Missouri, Kansas, South Carolina, and Oklahoma. Works are held in private collections across multiple states. In 2021, one of his sculptures standing outside the Kemper Museum of Modern Art in Kansas City was stolen — all of it recovered except the tail.
He and Corva built something beyond the art itself. The Art Soirée Series, which they have hosted since 2016, gathers residents and guests shoulder-to-shoulder to watch artists present and discuss their work. He founded the Oval Table, an artist salon, in 2017. He has moderated the 7 Oaks Gallery curator group since 2021. He chairs a committee at their Unitarian Universalist church. He manages rural property. He swims. He does Pilates.
He is, his wife believes, over-obligated.
Now I seemed to have the opportunity to choose what pathway I would take to complete my tenure. The reality was I did not really have a choice on which one would drive this bus.
The cancer diagnosis in 2023 had, paradoxically, offered a kind of clarity. Leiomyosarcoma follows a known script. If it recurs, the symptoms are predictable, the trajectory is defined. That predictability — grim as it is — gave butch something he could work with. He made his plans. He had the conversations with Corva and his children. He calibrated his cost-benefit thinking the way a physician would: what interventions would be worth it, and at what threshold he would stop. “I won’t request measures that buy a little time,” he says. “And if I need to rush the process, if misery is in the future, then I’ll do it in a fashion that allows my family and friends comfort as well.”
Parkinson’s disease operates differently. Its course is not predictable. Will it be neuromuscular? Cognitive? Behavioral? Will there be swallowing difficulties? When? “The end result is the same,” butch says. “But that unpredictability makes it harder for me to deal with — being a chronic, disabling condition.” His greatest fears, named plainly, are cognitive decline and loss of self-control. Loss of control over the manner of his dying.
“So far so good,” he says.
Those four words, from this man, carry the weight of everything he knows.
butch Murphy follows Epicurus — the Greek philosopher who taught that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure: not hedonism, but the quiet, sustainable pleasures of friendship, meaningful work, and freedom from unnecessary suffering. “I have found,” butch says, “that the intention to identify meaning is an individually, life-long, ever-changing, derived adventure that can’t be translated for others.”
He is an atheist who chairs a committee at a Unitarian church. A physician who spent his career listening to people die and emerged without bitterness. A man who walked through every door that opened without agonizing over the choice — and then, at the moment he finally chose something deliberately, chose to make horses out of steel in rural Missouri.
His one regret is familiar and hard-won: he married at 22, had children at 25, while still in training, still becoming. “I wasn’t prepared or trained to do all the things I thought I could do confidently,” he says. “In too big of a hurry.” If he could say one thing to his 40-year-old self, it would be this: family first, everything else secondary.
He doesn’t offer this as wisdom for others. He is careful about that. “Far be it for me to offer advice,” he says. “Beyond: get to know yourself. Be introspective. Don’t focus on regrets. Find your potential strengths and develop them. Don’t brag. Be humble.”
His greatest current sense of loss — and this, from a man who has faced cancer and Parkinson’s and the deaths of patients beyond counting — is American democracy. “I vacillate between apathy, anger, depression and grief,” he says. “The experience has taught me the need to sustain what is good and not become complacent.
Old people know what it’s like to be young. But young people have not a clue what it’s like to be old.
On the question of how he hopes to be remembered, butch Murphy is brief. “Someone concerned for our fellow inhabitants,” he says, “be it ants or other beings like humans.”
Not a great physician. Not a celebrated sculptor. Not a community builder or an Epicurean or an atheist or a triathlete. Someone who paid attention to the other living things around him and cared about their welfare.
He is still sculpting. Still swimming. Still moderating the artist group and chairing the committee and producing the quarterly soirée. Still disagreeing comfortably with Corva, which he considers a sign of a healthy marriage. Still doing Pilates at 81, with two serious diagnoses and a clear-eyed understanding of what is coming.
“So far so good.”
When pressed on the significance of everything he has shared, butch is characteristically brief. “Don’t make a big deal of it,” he says. “I’m just another guy with a girl, expressing myself before my tenure ends.”
Everett “butch” Murphy is a retired pulmonologist, critical care and palliative care physician and a working metal sculptor based in Kansas City, Missouri. His equine abstractions in carbon steel have been exhibited across the United States and are held in private collections in multiple states. He and his wife, Corva, host The Art Soirée Series, a quarterly arts gathering in Kansas City. His work can be viewed at butchsmetalimages.com.
