It's always a shock to hear about a death, even when you know from the tone of the first word of the voicemail what you are going to hear.

I believe I owe you a word about my friend:

He was a most unlikely friend for me to make.

I'm a leftist--he was a retired Marine colonel who served in both Korea and Vietnam, picking up a Bronze Star along the way, and an honorary member of the Daughters of Confederate Veterans. (I misdoubt that he picked up a few of the non-honorary daughters along the way.)

He was a well-read man with a wide-ranging and questioning mind, and I found his company much more congenial than most any of my doctrinaire, ideologically-bound left-wing buddies. In an emergency (and what of this life isn't an emergency?), I would have picked him for my team first. He had a deep understanding of how contingency impinges on life, not so much from the experience of war (although that played a part) as from his wife, who survives him, developing a degenerative disease that has kept her bedridden for over twenty years.

I cannot imagine what that must be like, but I never heard him express any bitterness toward his situation, only dissatisfaction at what he saw as his failures to do the best that he could with what was, obviously, an impossible situation.

Only the truly great spirits among us ever experience such dissatisfaction.

It's a goddam shame that he's gone, at least for those of us who knew him, and for those of you who did not have the privilege. But he is now at rest, and I hope at peace--my tears at his passing are selfish tears, and they will dry quickly.

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

William Butler Yeats: the words he wrote for his own tombstone

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