My dad passed away a few weeks ago. It was a long time coming - like 25 years of slow, steady decline - but it was especially tough during the past 3 months when he lost freedom of movement and awareness of his surroundings. He stopped eating and drinking and, after one final guilt trip protestation, was put on a morphine drip and euthanized by the hospital hospice unit. His two wives, 5 children and some of his grandchildren were able to visit with him in his final days. On 10/8 he died which is the inverse of the date of his birth which was 8/10 and was a fitting symmetrical end time for a man obsessed with proportion.
My two sisters, mother and one of my brothers worked up a wonderful obituary for the man which mom posted on her blog and spread around the internet for all to see. Dad's second wife was missing in action for most of the post mortem planning including the mortuary visits, funeral planning and gravesite acquisition. Dad hadn't planned any of this stuff at all and his wife, my step-mother, wasn't communicating with me or any of my siblings so... we did what we could with the constraints of a brain damaged, drug addled nincompoop. Not a problem. We were well prepared for this eventuality and had, in fact, discussed with father the great unwinding that would occur with his rotund muse when he kicked the bucket. He just laughed and swept the air with his open hand in the motion of wiping away an irritating fly and claimed we were "over exaggerating" the issue as usual.
At this point I should probably restate an oft-cited disclaimer for the KOTCB blog by mentioning that these whimsical ruminations have a target audience of 3 people with a secondary spillover group of about 30 people who should probably read it but might not. If you've stumbled upon this post and aren't sure if you're one of those 33 then you're not and while I'm happy for you to continue reading please don't complain or get angry at anything that causes your psyoped brain discomfort because I'm not writing for you.
There was a lot of back-and-forth over the location of the funeral service, the interment of the body and the reception for people who wanted to gather and remember a person who had been an active member of the community for 60+ years. In his final years he had joined this non-denominational Methodist church about a mile from his home and he was adamant about holding his funeral there (even though it was too small a space) and in her opening remarks at the service the preacher claimed dad had said in earnest that "joining this church was the best decision I have ever made" which elicited a roaring guffaw from yours truly in astonished awe at the man's ability to lie with a tone of absolute sincerity while simultaneously telling a profound truth. As she droned on about how much she loved Charley and their many conversations about mortality, spirituality, forgiveness and whatnot I couldn't help but frame the scene in my mind's eye with poor old dad being tortured by this woman and having to sling endless bullshit to placate her desire to find "peace and forgiveness" for all concerned.
We, his children, planned the funeral service to be short and efficient without any hymns, readings or prayers to slow down the process of laying him to rest. There was an attempt to gunk up the program with some Alcoholics Anonymous approved prayers from the Big Book but we nixed them and the Saint Francis prayer which we deemed too Catholic and ill-suited for dad's temperament or, come to think of it, his approach to life or sobriety. The preacher did yammer on about the 23rd psalm and I don't know what else because I was contemplating his lifetime of "decisions" and praying to God above that I could hold myself together during the eulogy I was presently about to deliver.
A Eulogy for Charles Tompkins Matheson
One of Dad's favorite books was J. P. Donleavy's The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners. In the chapter on Extinctions and Mortalities, Donleavy has this to say about how the dead are remembered:
“Posterity is that conception where less of you is now than you hope there'll be later, when you like to think now there'll be a lot when more than likely there will be even less than nothing at all. But do what you can for the sake of it because there will always be plenty of lowdown, shabby people blackening your name.”
Dad lived a long and eventful life. I came along when he was twenty, so I knew the people and places of his youth, lived through the exuberant middle years beside him, and watched the later ones from the respectful distance of adulthood. Those years held great accomplishment, real excess, hard-won sobriety, and stoic courage through illness and loss. His obituary lists the achievements lovingly, and I won't recite them here. I also won't pretend he was a saint. He would have hated that.
Instead I want to talk about something harder to pin down, something that could easily be lost once he's laid to rest. If I name it now, maybe some of you will carry it into your own lives. He would want that.
When Dad moved his city wife and children to live year-round at our country house in The Plains, his friends in town worried, because Middleburg had a reputation as a lawless, debauched playground for the sporting set. They'd ask him, “Is it really as bad as they say?” And he'd answer, “Oh no. It's much worse.”
Horse and cattle country back then felt like antebellum Virginia except with cars, phones, and television. At least, that's how it was in our house. When VCRs arrived in the mid-seventies, Dad bought one to watch his favorite movie, the 1963 Tom Jones starring Albert Finney. It played on a loop on our television for about ten years.
Heathfield was not the usual hunt-country farmette with a few sporting prints on the wall and an iron jockey in the drive. We had a stable full of horses and carriages, and a real man named Edward Stewart, who groomed for fox hunting three days a week in the fall and winter and for four-in-hand driving in the spring and summer. The house was a hive of guests, friends, and visitors moving between the pool, the pond, the tennis court, the stables, the gardens, and the patios.
I tell you this because Heathfield was an extension of Dad, his vision made physical. The wife and children, the dogs (there were many), the horses, pigs, and cattle, the paintings on the walls, the flower beds and walking paths, the whips, hats, horns, and clothes: he willed all of it into existence. As the young people say today, he was locked in, with infinite aura and unlimited rizz. He showed us what life could be when you set aside fashionable thinking, nagging scolds, and self-righteous hypocrites in favor of something freer and better. And we loved it.
On my wall at home hangs one of Dad's allegorical landscapes. A dismounted fox hunter stands on the Virginia Piedmont looking out over a ship at sea, and far in the distance a small Icarus falls, aflame, from the sun. That's the fate of everyone who flies too high. But I'm here to testify that nothing can burn down what he made: a freedom of thought and action that will live on in his children, and their children, forever.
So strap on your wings and flap them as hard as you can. Fly high. That's what he would want. Don't worry about falling, because it's inevitable. Enjoy the ride, and smile at the lowdown, shabby people below.
It goes without saying that this was not the first draft of the eulogy and as lively and pointed as you, dear reader, might find it to be I can assure you that these words were distilled over years of contemplation for, as I will presently explain, this day was a long time coming and I had plenty of time to think about my remarks. In fact, up to the night before his funeral I had prepared a different kind of remembrance which would take the folks trapped in their pews on a long journey through dad's life composed of four distinct chapters of approximately 20 years each:
- Youth and Formative Adolescence - Stories about his childhood spent at Ferry Point on the Potomac river with his parents and brothers and sisters, Florida and Gloucester Mass., Episcopal High School and University of Virginia.
- Marriage and Exuberant Excess - Grand wedding, 3 children, Washington DC, hard-charging friends, the move to Middleburg, 2 more children, Fox Hunting and Coaching
- Sobriety and Stoic Courage - Drink becomes a problem, commitment to AA and sobriety, Fox Hunting, Coaching, Court Tennis, anything related to horses, hounds and country life, marriages of children and the birth of grandchildren, painting, teaching in Venice, financial crisis, cancer.
Sickness and Slow DeclineStruggles and Transformation - Radiation treatment (torture) and Broken Arm, Anodyne, Sale of Heathfield, Divorce from Mom, increased Artistic output, difficult business decisions, death of his parents, marriage to his mistress, lawsuits, relationships with his grandchildren, health complications, more medication and death
It was going to be a free-association stemwinder that called out every false friend and opportunist who rode high on the road coach with the jolly whip on sunny days but watched him come a cropper from the sidelines without assistance. And worse than their failure to toss a lifeline to this distressed man they instead threw him insults, both direct and behind his back, to justify their miserly greed, bitter envy and unwarranted pride. This all transpired a generation ago and though many of these millionaires are long dead themselves, and some were quite close to dad, I thought it would be fun to skewer them for a 45-minute slow roast in the chapel. It gave him cancer and he was a changed man thereafter for the last quarter century of his life for which they deserved some overdue retribution. However, on the advice of my wife and daughter and with the assistance of Grok I reduced dad's 4 stages of life into a single sentence and forgave the guilty just like the preacher woman asked me to in her sermon.
Almost 50 years ago I was hanging out with dad watching the evening news program and they broadcast an excerpt from the experimental film MALJ (THE MALLET) by Yugoslavian director Aleksandar Ilić where a discolored dark chick is separated from his golden brothers and sisters by babushkas working the conveyor belt at an industrialized farm. The film shows the discolored chick's repeated attempts to join the others only to be grabbed, pushed and banished by the ruthless hands of the proletariat. The tone of this film is somber and its finale of the useless, deformed chicks dumped from the conveyor belt into a chamber where a mallet smashes them into pulp to be used as fertilizer or dog food or God knows what is clearly a modern fable signifying something important and bad. But the old man saw things differently and he was wiping away tears of laughter at the sight of this dark chick trying, in vain, to join the flock only to be ostracized by the cruel hand of some low IQ woman following instructions from HR.
That story about me watching dad watch that short film on TV back in 1977 was my original eulogy because it explained what motivated him, what he was trying to accomplish and why. Modernity had no use for him and fitting in, try as he might, was never, ever going to happen because he had the mind, countenance and ambition of an 18th-century aristocrat. When he was soaring in the blue sky it was a glorious time to be alive and with him because he showed us what life could be like when you spread your wings and jump from the carousel of convention. The slow 25-year descent was excruciating to witness as his reputation and fortune were consumed in flames of pride, resentment and guilt but even this fall is a testament to how high he flew. On the whole his was a life of great achievement, lasting legacy and significant moral lessons some of which are yet to be discovered.
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