“THE LONG GOODBYE, PART FOUR: FINAL TEARS”

For Mark King Schwartz, 1960-2020

They call dementia “The Long Goodbye” because it is an agonizing and protracted death of the souls who love the victim.

For many years now, I have grieved a man who was still alive, trapped in an earthly vessel which, at its best, was never able to accommodate his indomitable spirit. 

 But now he is unshackled, free to be my friend again: buying a round of Cuba Libras at the “Lunch Counter” at that big “Bucky’s” strip joint in the sky, commandeering the DJ Booth at The Veranda and singing a medley of Sinatra tunes, and driving the “Great Red Shark,” his candy-apple red 1973 Olds ’88 convertible, the engine of which I burnt out on the way to Houston in the summer of 1980.

He might even finally be able to dribble a basketball.

He is free now and so am I.

I would like to be able to say that his illness made me a better man: to appreciate the things I have, to love more deeply, and to cherish the new friends I have to replace the ones I’ve lost.

But it did not. It stunted me and made me bitter. I felt vaguely guilty about my undeserved good health, my law practice, my beautiful new granddaughter.

And I was angry. Angry at God. Angry at myself for letting our friendship diminish in the years before his illness. Angry at him for not being there when I needed him.

But when I heard the news he had died, I felt an exceedingly undramatic sense of relief, like his beloved Longhorns beating Kansas in football, a desired but wholly expected result.

I am through crying now.

 

The last time he suffered a setback and we feared the worst, I hustled to Austin and sat silently with him for a couple of hours, not knowing it would be the last time I would be in his physical presence.

Later that day, I got the rare pleasure of sitting with two of his children, children who I had thought I would know as well as my own. But by historical accident and fateful cockup, I did not. Had it not been for that day, I would still feel that.

It was that day they learned I had written the three prior segments about his illness in my blog. I was able to hear his eldest daughter, an aspiring stand-up comic who inherited her father’s great voice and comedic timing, read my words.

It was the first time I had ever heard anyone read my words aloud and it frightened me, fearful I would offend them by not doing their father justice. I feared I might lose the next twenty-five years of their lives.

As she read, she would falter and her eyes would well up with tears, but then she would find her voice again and even laugh through her tears.

I will always remember every minute of the day I was married, the day my son was born, and the day I walked my daughter down the aisle.

But I will also remember the day I listened to little Kitty Schwartz read my words about her father for the first time, reading them like she wrote them, as if by anointed process, her father’s voice all I could hear.

You don’t get many days when you can look up and say, Ok, Big Guy, You can take me now, because this is about as good as it gets.

 

This blog has always been about transition and spiritual growth, how a dinosaur ex-fraternity boy from deep East Texas found spirituality and enlightenment in an unlikely place: a yoga mat.

Ironically, he too had found solace and peace on a yoga mat. In the early stages of his illness, he would take classes at a studio in Tarrytown. With a wandering spirit and soul, he could live without traditional norms. I can completely see how yoga would provide a centering place for him, where he could find comfort in its repetition and traditions.

His mother is a yogi of emeritus status and I believe his practice was also a way to seek her out and hold her close in a mind that had begun to haunt him from within.

His mother was also a brilliant professor of German at UT and has forever scared the living shit out of me, but we all sat at her dinner table one wonderful afternoon and talked yoga. For the first time in her presence, I felt a heretofore unimaginable sense of metaphysical equality. Together the two of us even attempted a tandem tree pose.

While I do regret we never got to take a yoga class together, I do imagine him on his mat in those early stages of his illness, going through the poses by rote, struggling to maintain safety and stability in his life against the tide of uncertainty he must have felt on a daily basis.

So, in the end, somehow our friendship persevered across time and space, on yoga mats two hundred miles apart, whether we knew or not.

 

 

In the early 1980s, there remained at the SAE house in Austin the surviving tradition of inviting the members of the senior pledge class, at the final chapter meeting of the year, to stand and provide their reflections on four years of life at the fraternity. The Eminent Archon would call your name and bark, “tears” and you would stand on your chair and share those memories nearest and dearest to you.

We called it: Final Tears.

It is not lost on me the irony that I would have to be “invited” to share my innermost feelings or that I would do so only in an insular environment, but please remember I am the product of an certain era -even as I try not to be a prisoner of it.

It is perhaps even more ironic that “tears” was actually not an invitation at all, but rather a command, held over from our pledgeship, where an active member would scream, “tears” and the pledge would immediately jump up on a chair and await instructions, such as a demand to recite John Walter Wayland’s “The True Gentlemen” (worth a read) or the entire Greek alphabet while holding a burning match.

If you made a mistake, you started over again, without blowing out the match.

Tears.

The depth and genuineness of the revelations might surprise the uninitiated. Hulking ex-jocks crying like babies expressing their undying love for their pledge brothers. Cynical future lawyers choking up when recognizing that this would be the last meal they would share together. Good ol’ boys from deep East Texas describing unlikely but enduring friendships with the sons of Yankee civil rights lawyers.

The stories had only thing in common: Tears.

So, it is somehow appropriate, as I sit here in quarantine suffering my fifth day of frank symptoms from Covid-19, that I would receive the news that my best friend, Mark King Schwartz, had died.

So, these are my final tears for him.

 

© Thomas C. Barron 2020