Heart of the Moment

In my life there have been two major influences that have opened love's door for me. The first and dearest, the one that fills me with passion and completeness with each breath she takes is my wife. The other has been the couple of Marc Edwards and Dennis Haddock - forever thought of as Marc and Den. To me, Marc and Den were the definition of love. They are both gone now. That is to say, they are both together again.

I want to tell the tale of how Marc and Den met. I apologize in advance for how clumsily I do it. The true sweetness of it could only be achieved by listening to Marc tell their story. Each time I heard it, the breath would go out of Marc's voice, his eyes would darken passionately with the memory of it, and you could tell just a few sentences in that he was no longer talking so much as reliving the moment. At the time of their meeting it was the eighties and Marc worked at the West Bank Club in Chicago as Catering Manager. Dennis showed up to the Club one day to interview for a job. For Marc it was love at first sight as something inside him melted away, and he could barely speak. So paralyzed was he by this first meeting with Dennis, that he had to run and get his assistant asking her to do the interview because he just couldn't think straight around Dennis.

That random stroke of lightening ignited something that would not stop burning. After some time, Marc and Den moved to Colorado Springs where we would join their lives. Jean-Marie met them long before meeting me. Marc was a partner in the very successful Food Designers catering company and Dennis was working at the Antlers Hotel when my wife was well on her way to being one of the best wedding and special events florists in town. As happens with Marc and Den, their friendship with Jean-Marie quickly deepened. So when I started dating my future wife, Marc and Den had us over to dinner to size me up. That part I did not know. What I did know was that the food would likely be exotic and spectacular because of Marc's line of work. I remember that night sitting in their lovely candlelit dining room sharing wine and conversation with a meal of pot roast and steamed broccoli. Perfect. I had a wonderful time, and only found out much later that the initial impression I rated was a lukewarm, "He's ok, but we just don't see it, J-M."  Luckily for me, Marc and Den gave second chances.

Over the years, Jean-Marie and I shared many meals, parties, and vacations with Marc and Den. When Marc and Den were planning to simplify their lives and were plotting their exit strategy from Colorado Springs, Jean-Marie and I joined them on trips to Charleston and Savannah to help them decide where they wanted to live. Though they ended up in my beloved Charleston, the Savannah trip held the most memories for me. Images from the trip bring easy smiles:  Dennis poking fun at me when we were at a bar and the barman kept "checking" me out, Dennis and I napping in the backseat of the car from the airport to the hotel (time often found Dennis and I napping), Marc hungover in the back of the convertible parked in the Southern Summer sun as the rest of us visited a garden shop (Den parked in the sun on purpose because he was miffed that Marc drank so much the night before). The sweetest memory of that trip came late one night at the hotel. Jean-Marie left the room to get ice and ran into Marc and Dennis kissing in the hall. Marc and Den were so embarrassed at getting caught!  She wasn't, and I wouldn't have been. I loved how Jean-Marie giggled when she told me what happened. Marc and Den were married and been together a lot of years at that point, and to still show that passion and youthful innocence about their love was simply beautiful.

Marc and Den were so adaptable as a couple. Charleston and semi-retirement did not go as planned when Marc did not realize the money out of his business that he had expected. Still they spent their first year in a beach house as promised, then hit the ground running. They found jobs and fell in love with the city. Dennis went about tending gardens, first at a church, then at a garden center, and finally the lush grounds of the stately College of Charleston. Marc worked briefly in a flower shop before moving back into work where he could make a difference. This started with Camp Happy Days where he was Director of Development for a cancer camp for children. From there he moved onto Senior Director of Development at the Charleston Animal Society (how he prevented Den from adopting all of animals himself I will never know). It was while there that Den was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Marc's world was turned on its head. It was so painful to see what Den's illness did to Marc. It was also an honor to witness how Marc's love allowed Marc to push through all his own anguish and pain to tenderly guide Den through the maze of treatments and provide Den the gentle daily care he required.

After Dennis died, Marc's friends and family rallied around him, but he was inconsolable. There was a light in him that passed along with Den. Eventually Marc re-entered the land of the living even if ghost-like. As best he could, he returned to the friends he loved as counselor, advocate, and port because that is who he was. He moved from the Charleston Animal Society to Low Country AIDS Services, where he could more directly help that neglected community. He would talk often to our children and our grandson. Jean-Marie would call him regularly and they would talk about hurts and joys, and sometimes nothing at all just hear each other's voice. I would hop on the phone with him (though I am horrible on the phone), and we would joke and we would laugh. I wish I could hear that laugh again. We would also see him as often we could.

The last time we were with him was over Thanksgiving just this past year. One day we were in the kitchen cooking, drinking, and listening to a CD of Marc at his first cabaret recital. There we were with the beautiful voice of Marc singing the standards in the background of our conversation and something hit me. I turned to Marc and said to him that I did not know how he could have performed without breaking down, because what we were listening to was simply a love letter to Dennis. Marc just shrugged, eyes wet with held back tears.

Not long after that visit, Marc's broken heart caught up to him. He completed the greatest love story I am likely to know when he rejoined Dennis. Both Marc and Den did many fine and noble things in their lives. They were leaders in the community, they were strong shoulders in weak times, they were an example for us all. More than anything else that I learned from them or shared with them, how they so openly defined love with both passion and innocence is what I will cherish the most, and will forever pay forward.
 

What is the Opposite of Hate?

There is almost nothing that we do not learn from, even a joke. We remember stories, tales, and humor for no seeming reason until one day Deja Vu will strike and what was once just some useless bit taking up gray matter becomes prophetic.
Long ago when I was a young man, I was trailering a sailboat back home to Orangeburg. I was on the Old Columbia Road near one of the entrances to the Kodak Plant when I happened to look into my rearview mirror and saw something small bounce away from the trailer. I pulled over and inspected things, and soon found that one of the four wheels had lost three of its four lug nuts. I was just about to panic (a highly refined skill of mine) when an old joke cropped up in my mind.
A man is driving and has a flat tire right beside the fence of the State Hospital. He gets out of his car, opens the trunk, and takes out the jack, spare, and lug wrench, all the while being watched by a patient on the other side of the fence. This just made the man nervous as he sat and hurriedly removed the lug nuts, setting them in the hub cap on the curb. Then he jacked the car up without really paying attention to what he was doing. When the flat tire lifted free of the ground it fell off the axle and onto the hub cap knocking the lug nuts out and down a sewer drain. The man threw up his arms in frustration crying out, “What will I do now?” The patient looked at him, tilted his head and said, “Why don’t you just use one lug nut from each of the other wheels? That will get you to the shop.” Stupefied, the man just stared at the robed figure before being able to stutter out, “How did you think of that?” The patient just grinned and responded, “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”
Well, Déjà vu struck me once again the other night as I was reading some news on line. It seems apparently in Belfast, Ireland, someone had stuck the Confederate Flag on a flag pole opposite the house of a 13 year old black boy. When his football club coach saw this, he and the rest of the team immediately took the flag down. What struck me as odd was that in the articles I read, not one asked how a Confederate Flag came to be used in such a way in Ireland.
This is when the Déjà Vu moment began for me. I recalled that when I was at Clemson, a dear friend, running buddy, and mentor, Dr. Don LaTorre, told me a story. Don said early in his professorial career he taught at Winthrop College. One day, one of his colleagues killed a squirrel in the campus commons park. Don was outraged. He took his issues about animal cruelty as far up the administrative ladder as he could. After much debate and investigation, it was determined that the squirrels in the campus commons park had become too domesticated for their own safety. So the administration took the only logical course of action and had the remaining squirrels exterminated to restore balance between beasts and humans.
There is nothing wrong with passion, it has carried the human race to heights it could not have reached without it. But passion often does not come without a price. In the case of the Confederate Flag, the recent tragedy in Charleston, along with both related and unrelated racial tension issues have leveraged passion in an all-out assault on the Confederate Flag. Wanting the removal of the Confederate Flag from the South Carolina State House grounds is a good thing and should be done. That flag was specifically raised in the face of fight for civil rights back in 1962 and has no place there now.
However, in our passion for its complete destruction and removal, unintended consequences both silly and serious have begun to fall like dominoes. TV Land pulling reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard (a show picking fun at rednecks and not racist in the least) simply because those Duke boys’ car; the General Lee, had a Confederate Flag on it is misguided and silly. The Confederate Flag seen flying in Belfast raises the fallout of our passion to serious.
Where will these dominoes stop? In our righteous anger and indignation of just some of the symbolism of the Confederate Flag has given the flag bolder new hate status. It is quickly being pushed to the point that it can only be seen as a harbinger of hate, and worse than that, it appears now this sole damning view of the Confederate Flag is now becoming our hate export to the world. We are driving the Confederate Flag underground and worldwide.
Hating hate is not the opposite of hate. Love is the opposite of hate. This is the lesson from Charleston’s reaction to the horrible shooting at the Emmanuel AME Church. This is the lesson we should carry out into the world, that we are bigger than the hate, bigger than hate’s symbols, that we love our brothers and have their backs. In the face of the world’s evils we should always turn first to love, so that we may act rather than react, so that we may heal rather than perpetuate.

Mother's Day

We first live inside our mothers
Their womb dark warm security
Their feelings our first taste of pure love
Before there is a heart to beat

The nurturing and love unending
They follow, guide, surround
Amniotic fluid of our external lives
Metaphorical womb we can always return to

Your love defined my love
Your gentleness, my emotional guidepost
Your presence is ever with me
Your life gave me my life and I love you

To Dennis with Love

The horrible part of needing to write is in the ache to express in words those pivotal moments that changes one’s life when at such a time words cannot hope to suffice. Our friend (and this term falls infinitely short of what he truly is) Dennis lies in a bed tended by hospice, our son Michael, their neighbor Trish, friends on demand, and his heart and soul for the past twenty-eight years; Marc. Dennis is in and out of awareness of what is going on. He eats little or nothing now, and is being made as comfortable as possible. How I hate that last phrase, because it never leads anyplace good for those of us who watch and wait and pray.

I cannot talk about Dennis without talking about Marc. They have been a couple and inseparable for twenty-eight years and married for twenty-five. They are Marc and Den, inseparable, one. If couples can be said to have soul mates, they are ours, and we are the richer and better for it. Over the twenty years we have known each other they have become part of our family, and we part of theirs. Our hearts are breaking, and I wonder if they will ever heal because I am not sure they will ever stop breaking from this.

Since the devastating diagnoses of cancer for Dennis, Marc has been brave, doting, caring, and protective. He has been all we hope we can be when placed in such a situation. Even in tragedy, Marc sets a high bar. I think if the dictionary had a picture by the word “stoic,” you would find his handsome, bearded, and smiling face.

Dennis in health was a lanky handsome man of the earth, loving to tend the gardens both at his work (the College of Charleston) and at his home. Sometimes I think his goal was to make things as fertile and lovely as his soul. To see Dennis at labor was to know a truly intimate part of him.

Dennis in decline is a pallid, frail saint. Shuffling when he could still walk, but the movements of his hands though impeded by his health are oddly somehow beautiful and graceful punctuations to his raspy, ruined speech. He clings to his dignity, and tries to ask as little of the people around him as he can. Even when he needs nurturing, Dennis attempts to be the nurturer.

Our favorite nickname for Dennis is Mother Theresa, because he embraced all things so readily. Wanting to help or improve or simply lighten a load. I still laugh at the look Marc gave Dennis, when Dennis brought home a baby fox nestled in a box with a towel. Dennis had found the fox at work (then the El Pomar Foundation in Colorado Springs) abandoned outside its den. I believe the pup went to the zoo for rescue, but Dennis’s first idea was to raise him as one of his own (only Marc in his wisdom stayed Dennis’s hand in this). In the battle between nature taking its course and Dennis having his way, odds were always in Dennis’s favor.

It is not easy to say goodbye to such a heart and spirit. Selfishly I do not want to. Selfishly I want him bound to this earth and in our lives for much longer than we have had. My faith assures me that he is going to a place better than this, a place without prejudice, a place of pure love, a place that will only be enriched by Dennis’s soul. I take comfort in this. I know that ultimately death is harder on the survivors, and that the pain is now squarely moving to our shoulders.

Dennis, Jean-Marie and I love you truly and with all our hearts. We will miss you more than we can say. Thank you for all you have meant to us and done for us. Thank you for your comfort, friendship, and love through the too short years that seem like no time at all. Thank you for leaving your mark on this earth as the Godfather of our grandson. Thank you for being Uncle Den to our Children. The world is better with you in it, but now you are needed to tend other gardens and set another place to bloom. We will take care of Marc. Goodbye.