I am having to edit and review all the posts and pages since changing blog themes. I just updated and fixed the eulogy and wanted to share it again.
I link this glorious and devastating eulogy with Mr. Conroy’s permission. In the oft circuitous connectivity between all of us, it is by sheer happenstance that I have this lovely, intimate glimpse into a man’s harrowing grief over the loss of a beloved friend. I have a long dialogue with a good friend, Janis Owens about depression and creativity. It started many years ago with a discussion about a non-fiction work on the family of Walker Percy. Doug Marlette was a great connoisseur of the quiet genius of Walker Percy. Just before his unexpected death, Doug Marlette wrote a piece on Walker Percy for Garden&Gun magazine, a magazine steeped in all things southern. I did not know that one of my most loved authors was Mr. Marlette’s closest and most intimate friend. When I first read this eulogy, I cried….and cried. As I edited it to add to this new blog theme…I am crying again. I envy a heart so blessed with the luxury of a friendship like these two men shared. The fact that one can speak so eloquently of that love is both visceral and ephemeral. To have loved and lost is far, far, far greater than to have never have loved at all. But the loss leave a gaping, sucking chest wound that feels fatal. I imagine, with this kind of loss, one wishes it to be fatal. I felt then….I still feel now…thankful to witness a love so grand.