Ubi Sunt? 2021 June blog by Charles Peek
Yeah, I’ve seen the grim reaper wander/my neighborhood in a Chanel suit with a diamond-/studded scythe because we all want to be overdressed/for the afterlife.
“Everyone Is Acting as If We’re Not Temporary, and I Am Falling Apart in the Privacy of My Own Home,” Dialogues with Rising Tides, Kelli Russell Agodon
We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love. (Madame De Stael)
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
Emily Dickinson
Twice a year, New Years and Memorial Day, I reflect on some of those who have died in between, from friends and family and acquaintances to celebrities and “names.” “The first was he to bear arms and a name,” writes James Joyce of his eponymous character Finnegan, so my little “In Memoriams” or mini-necrologies are mostly just lists of names and a little comment, sometimes appreciative, sometimes snide, about why I’ve taken note of the name and the person who bore it.
As I age, however, and especially as I wrote the Memorial Day blog this year, I found myself taking the “losing” in the phrase “losing friends” more seriously. I was less inclined to ask for whom the bell tolls because its tolling seems to surround me more each year.
When you reach the age of 78 (and closer to 79), one thing becomes rather clear—the death of friends, once spaced out over periods of time, come much more rapidly.
I began losing friends, as many do, in high school—illness or recklessness takes its toll on the young, too, and Vietnam took Mike Confer and Mike Klingner. We have quite a list, now, when we gather for reunions. I’m fortunate my Steve Schneider is still thriving, but many of our early friends are gone, including Bobby Reynolds and John Morris and Tom Cox. Few of our K-12 teachers are still living.
My time at NU began in 1960, taking an MA in Philosophy in 1964-66, and the gang with whom I studied seemed to take their time, decently dying over a period of many years—despite those who pushed the timing a bit themselves. So far as I know, none of my teachers, all of whom were at our wedding, are still living. I recall Dick Wood saying once that philosophy was a preparation for dying, but I heard that when the prospect seemed much more remote.
Dr. Bouwsma, as one might have expected, died rather before the students who were most often seen in his seminars. Then Dewey Jensen, Jamil Namour, Jack Murphy, Jerry Jones, John Marshall, Betty Carpenter, Perry Weddle, Dick Wood. Of the old gang that used to come to parties in my parents’ basement rec room, only Ron Hustwit, Larry Kimmel, and Kay Michelfeld are still living. There was time to mourn each as they died. The bell tolled somberly, to be sure, but less ubiquitously. RIP Cedric Evans, Bob Hurlbutt, Charlie Patterson, Bruce Waters.
But then the old gang from my years of study in the English Department (1966-1971) seem to have gotten on a faster track. Mike Whaley, again as might have been expected, earlier on, Dudley Bailey some time ago, and Paul’s wife Betty, as, too, Chuck Mignon and James McShane, Fred Link and Charlie Stubblefield, Mordecai Marcus and Berniece Slote, Lou Leiter and Les Whipp, Gene Hardy and Ross Garner, Bob Knoll and Norton Kinghorn, Lou Crompton and John Robinson, Karl Shapiro and Wilber Gaffney. You expect this of your intellectual parents just as you do the parents who raised you.
Over the years, you lose track of many. Where are Mickey Bird, Karl Briner, Kater Chamblee, Fred Fetrow, Bob Griffen, Howie Halperin, Judy Little, Art Munson, Charlie Reynolds, Mike Richter, Gordon Slethaug, the Spenglers, Phil Weller, Afshar Yahzdi? Phil got one of the highest scores ever on the GRE in philosophy, the year I got one of the lowest. He was fascinated by the philosophy of accounting. I should have paid better attention in the seminar on the history of philosophy I took along-side Afshar with Bob Dewey.
Are they here? Abroad? Still among us? Gone with the snows of yesteryear?
Some, Like Fred and Gordon, reappeared in our lives and then disappeared again, Gordon appearing in all places first in Canada and then again in China when I was on my first Fulbright. Arnold Johnson and Phil Strong were in Flagstaff when I taught there, but I believe both are gone now. The others? Ubi Sunt? I don’t know, and for Afshar it might be a bit of trouble to get news out of Afghanistan these days.
Such is life. We are glad still to be close to John Hall, but we lost Brent Bohlke long ago. And then began the dying of “our gang”: Clyde Burkholder and Lynn Nelson and Emily Uzendowski and Mike Cartwright and Pete Clark and Bill Kloefkorn and Ruth Lampe and Edie Cunningham and Olive Cunningham and just recently Glenn Reed.
At this moment, only Denis Calandra, Dave Lampe, Jerry Parsons*, Gail Reed, Lillian Cunningham, Don Cunningham, Dennis and Jeannie Calandra, Tom Hoban, and Ted Kooser are left from the students I knew best then or have come to know better now. There were dozens and dozens of us on the steps of Andrews Hall for the annual photo. Paul Olson, Lee Lemon, and Bob Haller are, I think, the last of the living from the faculty we all knew.
English Department Nebraska University Andrews Hall 1968? “The second best department in the United States,” said Walter Jackson Bates
Our small set, pretty much some of the names above, was I suspect not nearly as unique as we felt then—maybe pretty much like any set of friends that go through graduate work together. On the other hand, that was before graduate programs in our field, as Louis Menand recently told Ezra Klein, turned into training fields for future professions spent proving English Departments were necessary rather than places where students came to explore their own curiosities and creativities. It was before ideological training overcame humane letters, with both the good and bad results that this change brought about. Maybe, then, we were not so different at the time, but seem unique now that we are among the last who could turn to English Departments for what we found there about ourselves and our world.
But I still cherish the close, intersecting circles of friendships that met together, sometimes in the library or the seminar or the coffee room or over an occasional lunch in the union. We still exchange an annual holiday card with Mike and Diane Liberman whom we knew only a little but thought highly of, and we’ve been doing so for years.
I could go on with those I’d grown close to or in respect for in places where my work took me, Anne Berthoff from the CCCC conferences, David Porter and Merrill Skaggs I knew from Cather work, and the Faulkner folks: Evans and Betty Harrington, Jim Hinkle, Jim Campbell, Bill Shaver, and Noel Polk—each, one less clip clop on the bridge in Kooser’s poem, with only the shadow under the bridge to hear the missing sound and take the message to the sea (“A Shadow,” Red Stilts).
The world is a poorer place without those I mourn, though it may not know it; but I’m the poorer for their absence and am keenly aware of it. And aware that this will only accelerate until I am among their number. That is a clarity that dispels the comforting muddle of most of life’s experience and expectation.
Still, my thinking this month has little to do with how friendships form or how humane studies lost the battle for academic favor. Rather it is simply the reflection that it is a good year, now, when the celebrity deaths outnumber those of friends. The death of the famous diminishes the world far less than the death of those near diminishes me.
*To celebrate his 80th birthday, Jerry Parsons made a tandem jump from an airplane—we are not sure if he was the first of our gang to make the jump but we are sure he was the first to do it at 80!
Next blog: probably not until Fall—hoping as Nancy’s treatments succeed and come to an end and COVID-19 remains at bay we will be “out” more and writing less—just or a while.
Kearney, Nebraska
June 23, 2021
capeek 