Upon two deaths: an appreciation

7/29/2019 Upon two deaths: an appreciation

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/upon-two-deaths-an-appreciation 1/6

Upon two deaths: an appreciation

Markham Shaw Pyle

Bapton Books



1

HIweek began with the news of two deaths, news I received one after the other, in discrete tidings of misery

and sorrow. One of my best and oldest friends died, no older than am I now; the mother of another of my

(and his) best and oldest friends died at the end of a long illness, at what it is lightly, unthinkingly, called “a

good age” – as if there were ever a good time to lose someone.

TI do in fact, as it happens, believe in “The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins: The Resurrection of the

body, And the Life everlasting,” and I do in fact, as it happens, “acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins. And

I look for the Resurrection of the dead, And the life of the world to come”:Credo in … Sanctorum Communionem,Remissionem peccatorum, Carnis Resurrectionem, Et vitam æternam; Confiteor unum Baptisma in remissionem

peccatorum, Et exspecto Resurrectionem mortuorum, Et vitam venturi sæculi: that is not in question. But no more in

question is the wisdom of a Dean of St. Paul’s, who wrote a little poetry on the side, one John Donne:

No man is anIland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of theContinent, a part of themaine; if aClod beewashed away by theSea,Europe is the lesse, as well as if aPromontorie were, as well as if aMannor of thyfriendsor ofthine owne were; any mansdeath diminishesme, because I am involved inMankinde; And therefore neversend to know for whom thebell tolls; It tolls forthee.

I grew up – insofar as I ever have grown up – at St. Christopher’s, when the Reverend Charles Fuller Hood was rector;

and Father Hood knew well what I am struggling to convey, that for the soul translated from the Church Militant here

below to the ranks of the Church Triumphant and At Rest, death has no sting, for he or she who dies and joins the

company of all faithful people departed, has, as he always put it, “made his (or her) Easter.” The bones sing – shall these

bones live? – and Easter may come at any moment: all time being– as my publishing partner insists, in his Eliotian way –

eternally present, midwinter Spring its own season, indeed, midwinter Eastertide its own season, coming upon us like a

thief in the night.

The faithful departed, then, are at rest. When A. P. Hill was killed in action, R. E. Lee, mourning the loss, said, “he is

at rest; it is we, the living, who suffer.” My business is with the living, on this Friday, the day before a Saturday of back-to-

back funerals, one a Methodist, the other a Roman Catholic, service, and me wending my Anglicanvia mediabetweenthem.

____________________________________

Y friend Wade – D. Wade Loep – played the Big Ol’ Boy, the Good Ol’ Boy, to the hilt, and halfway up

the haft of the handle. People who saw, or heard, him only in passing – and Wade had a voice that could

waken sleeping hogs in the next county, when he chose – would have expected him to have attended Texas

A&M rather than Centenary. Like his father before him, he was a nurseryman, with green thumbs and soil on his hands,

M



2

even as an executive of nursery companies. The inattentive would have presumed he went by “Bubba” or “Hoss,” and he

was built for that role, with a beaming grin and hands like hams.

Nor would it have surprised those who knew him but slightly or not at all, in passing, that he was hilarious when we

were badgered into receiving our high school senior rings: there are a lot of people in a lot of Texas schools for whomthat’s likely to be their only major life accomplishment. Nor would it have surprised such persons, the casually

inattentive, to have heard that he was in a car wreck on his way to a summer outdoor concert when we were … I don’t

recall, somewhere between the ages of 19 and 21, in our undergraduate years (his at Centenary, mine at W&L).

Wade was a good deal more than the casually inattentive would ever have managed to guess.

Take the incident of the rings. (I don’t wear even my university signet ring.) Wade might have looked – to the casually

inattentive – like a Good Ol’ Boy for whom getting through high school was the high point of his life, but he wasn’t, and

our high school wasn’t precisely that sort of place. We were all badgered into getting the damned things, but Wade’s

reaction was not what the casually inattentive would have expected. He and I were in my parent’s front parlor, grinningsourly at the farce, when we both had the same idea, and chanted practically in unison,

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

As I said, there were depths in Wade unexpected by the casually inattentive.

Or take that car wreck on the way to the outdoor concert in July, in the early 1980s. Wade was driving. I was a

passenger. Two folks in a stolen car, both of them drunk enough to make their subsequent taking to their heels in fear of

La Migraa futile gesture, ran a red light and T-boned Wade’s car at an intersection. On the passenger – my – side,

naturally.

We were less than a block from the hospital. I’d hit my head on the rear-view mirror and windshield (I still have the

scars), and was bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig. Wade, who was uninjured, was at once frantic and reassuring, almost

tender:You’re going to be all right, the ambulance is already almost here....I just looked up at him and said, “I’m not

dying, you idiot. I’mbleeding all over my favorite shirt.Hand me a damned towel.”

It was a measure of Wade’s innate grace, decency, and goodness that even that did not cause him to cease being my

friend (always a tricky position, and not much sought after): that’s one point. Another is his concern for an injured

friend. The last point that this incident reveals, though, is this. It was July. We were on our way to an outdoor concert. We

were 19 or 20, say. It was Texas. Wadelookedlike your basic Good Ol’ Boy. Were we headed out to see, oh, ZZ Top, or

George Jones, or some rock group, or – I was after all along for the ride – a jazz band, a swing band, or Asleep at the

Wheel?

We were not. We had been on our way to the Houston Symphony’s outdoor Fourth of July concert.

I was a violinist: people weren’t shocked by that. (Dismissive, yes, but not shocked. It was felt to be The Sort of Thing

MSP Would Do.) Wade, though, was a violist, and a damned good one, who – for all his Good Ol’ Boy appearance in the

eyes of the casually inattentive – could and did argue with me about Bruch and Bartók. Admittedly, there may have been



3

an element of his having taken up the viola because “a squinchy little ol’ fiddle looked awful small in them big ol’ hands,”

but the fact remains that there were greater depths in Wade, and Wade had wider horizons, than the casually inattentive

would ever have guessed.

The fact is, Wade defined staunchness in friendship. He was the sort of friend whom you could see after decadesaway, and take right back up with without a break, as if the conversation had paused only long enough to get a drink.

Façades and fancy brickwork are all well and good, but you can’t have them without solid foundations and bearing walls;

the flowers make a show, but it’s the trellis that shows them forth. That was Wade, through and through, to the end –

and still is, and always will be.

The English poet Larkin once wrote, “Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.” That’s about

half right, and we’ll come back to that. What I do know is this. Wade is just as close to us as he ever was, if the communion

of saints means anything; he is at rest and has made his Easter; we are the ones bereft, and it is seemly,dulce et decorum,

and indeed very meet, right, and our bounden duty, to mournourloss even as we acknowledgehisgain; and, finally, Iknow that he is as present now with us, in his influence and his love and friendship and what these things made of us, as

he ever was. Only a mite quieter, until we join him and hear that great booming laugh again.

For now, my business is with the living.

____________________________________

ARIE Zalesak also died at the beginning of this week, the mother of one of my oldest and dearest friends;

Wade’s funeral is at 10:oo AM this Saturday, and Marie’s at noon. (Our mutual friends Andy Teas and

Gary Finkelman have rightly noted that Wade would approve: a two-for-one happy hour at the celestial

bar.) My mother, who died in August of 2011; Wade’s mom (who is, thank God, yet with us); Andy’s mother (also still

blessedly with us); Marie Zalesak … whether they liked it or not, and they gave every sign of being at least resigned to it,

they were all saddled impartially with maternal duty and watchfulness for all of us without distinction. Which surely took

saintly patience. We were forever banging in and out of their houses as if they were our own – and no doubt eating them

out of house and home into the bargain – and generally carrying on. (My own dear mother used my friends to get rid of

leftovers, although, Mumsie being Mumsie, her idea of leftovers was filet mignon and lobster Newberg. As seniors in

high school, we were permitted to eat lunch off-campus, and I’ll never forget the future Reverend Richard Zalesak seated

at my mother’s table, shyly, with Wade and Andy and me, obligingly eating whatever Mumsie was serving and then

conscientiously eating the lunch Marie had packed for him, although he couldn’tquite finish the banana.)

M

To take one sub-grouping of the (surely, looking back, incredibly annoying) young barbarians whom all these good

women found themselves mothering and feeding, Andy became a lobbyist, I went to law school, Wade went into the

nursery and fertilizer “bidness” – and Marie’s son Richard became a priest in the Episcopal Church. Even Marie (a devout

Catholic all her life long, I may add) smiled a little at the realization that between lobbying, lawyering, and compost, it

was her son alone who wasn’t in the business of selling one or another sort of manure.

Amazingly, Marie managed to smile a lot even when confronted with her son’s friends, a group that would have



4

drawn censure in a Wayside Drive honky-tonk: which sets the bar pretty high for maternal grace, if you ask me. (Richard

was theGood Boy.) There was always a twinkle in her sternness, and a sternness in her twinkle: which explains why

Richard turned out so well.

There are any number of stereotypes that are applied in praise of wives-and-mothers: the proverbs attributed toSolomon,Míshlê Shlomoh,are not shy about it: “a crown to her husband; … her price is far above rubies, Strength and

honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come. She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is

the law of kindness. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children

arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.” The Romans also had their formulæ:Lanam fecit;

“She spoke with grace, she counseled well, she tended the house and worked wool; may the earth sit lightly upon her.”

And of course, for a Schoener who married a Zalesak, Texans inevitably have their own irresistible presumptions, of

motherliness and kolaches. Well, sometimes stereotypes become stereotypes because they are true enough; but there was a

right smart more to Marie than that, more than the steel and the lace together.Her son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren may indeed rightly rise up and call her blessed, as may the unofficial

sons who burdened her life and larder when we were all young. And certainly she leaves a legacy in Richard and Meredith

and the grandchildren. But this blessed legacy was not the result only of the Old Testament and Classical virtues.

Marie was a woman whom there was no fooling, and in whom there was no folly. Her charity encompassed all, but

her principles never bent. She was deeply imbued with Catholic spirituality and devotion, and very much at home in this

rumpled, shopworn world of ours, all at once. She had a vein of wit and humor that only rarely flashed and glittered, and

those lucky enough to know her were privileged to see that coruscation from time to time, far above mere rubies or gold.

One didn’t trifle with her; but one was alwayssure of her. When I was a lawyer, I began far too many speeches with,

“May it please the Court; ladies and gentlemen of the jury....” Well, in the most comforting of the Comfortable Words, we

are assured that, “If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the

propitiation for our sins”; and if there is anyone who was least in need of pleading and advocacy when she came to be

judged, it was Marie.

If you seek her monument, look at her family and that wider family whose lives she touched and brightened. For my

business is with the living, and it is right that we are sensible of, and mourn, so great a loss.

____________________________________

T is time now that we, the living, rejoicing in our friends’ having made their Easters, and mourning at the same time

our loss, however temporary – for we are all progressing to that same eternity at the same rate of speed, sixty

minutes per hour – return to Larkin’s half-right meditation at the Arundel tomb.

Larkin’s church-going, as his poem of that title demonstrates, was that of the agnostic who’d as soon not be an

agnostic, a searcher without hope, as well as that of an antiquarian who found perhaps too much comfort – too much to

maintain his search – in mild antiquarianism. Well, I like a bit of Larkin at times, but I defer to my publishing partner,

Gervase Wemyss, on Larkin, and I think he’s quite right to put his own gloss upon Larkin’s lines, a gloss that renders



5

them to my mind wholly true: it is an instinctwhollytrue that what survives of us is love.

The love that, living, our friends bore us – quite often, as in my case, wholly undeserving and undeserved – does not

end. I do, but one needn’t, believe in the communion of saints to believe that truth: we are shaped by them and their love

towards us, and by whatever poor recompense we have returned to them of that. That is why we mourn for our ownlosses even as we rejoice in their several deliverances. Their influence no more dies than do their souls. Generations from

now, people unrelated to us and to them, but shaped at a distance by their legacy in our lives, will carry that legacy

forward, a torch ever burning and ever passed forwards. I am an historian nowadays; and if there is one truth I wish to

convey, it is that history is simply mass biography. Classes, races, nations, economic interests, all the false gods of the

Objective Forces of History, are just that, false gods, idols with feet of clay: it is lives that matter, and each life, like the

splash of a stone in a pond, ripples ever outwards.

What survives of us is that, the influence of interior lives as of public acts, the gravity of humankind, acting at the

furthest distance undiminished, attenuating but never lost. What survives of us is, in fact, love: charity, and faith, andhope. It is our duty to respond accordingly, as they, shaping us, taught us to respond, with love.

Death is not final; done right – the communion of saints, the company of all faithful people livingand at rest – it is

merely long-distance in place of face-to-face … for a time. Loss is transient. Love goes on forever.

Let us love one another, as we were and are loved. Let us live that we may love; let us love, that we may live. Light the

torch; pass it on; hold it high.

FINI

Upon two deaths: an appreciation

Documents

Transcript of Upon two deaths: an appreciation