What Pat Will Say at St. John’s When Robert Dies
Pat’s Eulogy for R. F. Laird
Here I am, in the same church where he grew up watching the tale of the pastor who died at sea, where he learned from the main man in his life that “in my father’s house there are many mansions.”
My husband spent his life exploring the many mansions and much else besides. He was a great warrior against the counter-culture anarchists he recognized for the first time when he was 15 years old. But he was also a great writer, maybe the greatest of the second half of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st.
How do you measure a writer? Height, width, depth? Also fearlessness, greedilessness (yeah, try saying that), purity of soul, lovingkindness. He had all of that, not always in equal measure. He was no saint. But he was a lot closer than most.
Robert died poor. I stand before you to attest that simple truth.
His dream of this day, which he told me repeatedly, was that he would be without ceremony at his funeral, like Edgar Allan Poe and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, forgotten and unmourned. Not that he belonged in their company, he said. Just wanted to be.
But some of you are here, and so I have an obligation to tell you why you should be here.
I said he was a great writer. Yawn, right? What if I told you the same guy wrote the longest poem in the history of English literature and also a sonnet timed in the writing from first to last, by me, in 30 seconds. True story.
But was he any good? Here’s one of my favorite poems by R. F. Laird. (Others are too long to read or too brief to penetrate.)
Portents
The raceme was longer than an age, its flowers blooming routinely along the axis of mortality, without hesitation or prejudice.
2.
“No dice,” sang the whale and closed his spout for repairs. Disappointed spectators demanded refunds.
3.
Portia rethought her position.
2 “The quality of mercy is definitely strained, particularly in the temperate zones, where the natives use colanders and potato ricers to achieve a uniform and generally pleasing effect of virtue.”
4.
Excalibur languished by the pool for most of the afternoon, accumulating spots of rust as children splashed energetically in the shallows.
5.
The stock market crashed on takeoff, decimating a suburban housing development and littering the landscape with charred fragments of bulls, bears, and brokers.
6.
Wearing an attractive mask of myth and pseudoscience, the sun rose and set seven times in rapid succession.
2 Regarding the phenomenon as a signal, Japan declared war on Germany.
3 The rest of the world looked on uneasily as the moon swelled from new to full in a single night and sank without trace in the Caspian Sea.
7.
The return of Prometheus, after his long retirement, made the covers of three major news magazines.
2 Interviewed at a Beverly Hills party given in his honor, the resurgent Titan announced that his memoirs were soon to be published by the firm of Harcourt Brace Javonovich.
He denied rumors that Al Pacino had already been signed to play the lead in the movie version of the book.
8.
Japan bombed Germany with a continuous barrage of stereo components, compact cars, televisions, and paper flowers.
2 In retaliation Germany launched an intercontinental Mercedes Benz at Tokyo.
3 Following the explosion, strains of Wagner formed a fog that lingered over the stricken city for weeks.
4 The United Nations authorized a task force to investigate reports that as a result of the atrocity, Japanese babies were being born prematurely, many of them wearing Prussian army helmets.
9.
Maddened by an advanced case of oxidation, Excalibur plunged into the ocean somewhere off Long Island Sound and drowned.
10.
A fungus infected the raceme. Repairmen were called in: they referred the case to Portia and went back to work on the whale’s faulty spout.
11.
Without much warning, the Carthaginian Empire mounted attacks on four continents simultaneously.
In just six hours, biochemical weapons devastated the populations of 142 nations.
2 In London, numbed millions massed in Trafalgar Square, where they began a spontaneous and futile chant calling for the return of Nelson.
12.
Prometheus died of a drug overdose in East Hollywood and made the covers of nine tabloid newspapers, whose headlines hinted darkly at the possibility of foul play.
13.
The raceme sickened, turning brown with disease. Portia prescribed a pound of flesh every four hours but offered little hope for recovery.
2 When she appeared, grave and composed, at the televised press conference, she said, “The vital signs are far from stable. Overall, the situation is deteriorating hour by hour.
3 “I pray for—but will not predict—a miracle.”
14.
The Carthaginians prepared to launch a second attack and ignored all communications requesting them to list their terms for a cease-fire.
2 In desperation, the United Nations arranged for a worldwide radio hookup that broadcast into Carthage the sobs and cries of terrified billions begging for mercy.
3 Carthage failed to acknowledge the transmission.
15.
His spout pronounced unfixable by the repairmen, the whale sounded for a final time and came to rest on the ocean floor, Excalibur transfixing his heart.
16.
On the day of the final attack, the moon rose from the Caspian Sea and joined the sun in the east.
2 The two circled one another in a slow intricate dance that seemed tinged with the sadness of farewell.
3 When they had finished, the leviathan chariots of Carthage drove them screaming from the sky.
I’ve always loved it. Robert said it was just satire of post-modern crap poetry. You be the judge of that. Another one you all might relate to better. Robert thought it was a letter…
But yes , it was a prayer…
Jaysong
Guy named Jay
Crackle guy
Give you grief for
Oh, being young old
Not from his county
Wife named Sue
Crackle girl
Give you grief for
No particular reason,
Doesn’t keep her bargains
But always kens the seasons
Girl named Anna
Streamy girl
Took photos at Longwood
Red particular flowers
Smartest of the brood.
Jay is on the left, quivering
Jay is on the right, hovering,
He is maybe listening, knowing
Anna’s the story to write:
“Guy named Robert
Lost his knees but not his way
Did not earn the life of Jay
Daughters, labor, current strife
Or at any point the pain-free life.”
And now we jettison the rhymes and poetry…
We did it, Jay, we ran the bikes all the way to the Delaware Bay Shore
Remember how the salt smell came and went
Through the bleak we saw so so flat
I had the bigger bike that day
But you didn’t care about that.
What we saw
What we saw
What we saw
Seagulls swooping singing, rocks and waves and no one there-ing.
Salt smell. Sand. Throttle up. We rode two monsters home.
That day was just you and me
You saw an ocean you hadn’t known
Private lovely bay shore wild
And we rode and rode down upward
To the mighty Delaware
The lovely edge of where.
I owe you a Harley. It is yours.
I just want you back to that old
Hale hearty husband role
No excuses, 1200cc cooold.
Sportster boy, fairly old.
Brothers. All we ever were. Me 10 years older and colder. You, ten years younger and wanting my Harley. Who was colder?
I don’t care. You can have it if you get off that awful, sterile, godawful bed and go home to Sue and Anna.
Yours,
R
FROM THE EULOGY TO COME: Life. He knew life was a bitch. You probably don’t know about his. His whole thing was to seem boring, so you wouldn’t ask. Everyone here knows life is a bitch. Like most, you probably think he was some rich kid who got lucky and found Pat to provide for him.
Things I’ll tell you about my husband Robert you never knew and he never boasted of.
He was a clear genius, not the technically MENSA kind, all show and no go. He skipped second grade and when he went to the prep school his father insisted on (his), they wanted him to skip to tenth grade. But he was still just 13 and his dad demurred.
He graduated from Harvard at 19, having been not a Rhodes Scholar but a Final Club President. Because he was the best looking guy in the silver spoon set who wasn’t gay. He was always beautiful physically. And in his last of three years at Harvard (yes, he graduated in three), he came very close to dying. Fifth floor of the back of the infamous Porcellian Club, opposite the Porcellian Gate, he took the next step off the railing in order to see inside. There was nothing inside. But he didn’t die. God was looking out for him.
Then he went to Cornell Business School and blah blah blah, until he made determined efforts to kill himself at high speed in cars.
When I met him, he was 27, down on his luck, and I was a hiring manager. I had the worst of all hires, a failed, pissed-off Harvard grad who was going nowhere.
But he was a rocket. He says his number is 19. The facts say his number is 17. He left Stone & Webster after a year and five months when one of his female supervisors tried to seduce him, and then he went to Datapro Research Corporation, where he spent a year and five months graduating to NCR Corporation, where he spent a year and five months rising from the position of competitive analyst to top consultant in the effort to teach senior executives how to learn from the debacle his division had become.
Then he did the same rocket job at General Motors, ultimately, within months, rising from the be-all and end-all of JIT manufacturing at Inland Division (where the Wright Brothers played), to Inland Fisher Guide Division, where he made the Europeans play ball, winding up writing a speech for the president of the Automotive Components Group, at that time the 8th largest manufacturing corporation in the U.S. As a side note, he became the only outside consultant ever to be named a member of the prestigious UAW/GM Quality Network. That took more than a year and five months. He quit when it turned out the UAW was every bit the leg-breaking mob he’d always suspected them of being.
From there he went on to Whirlpool Corporation, where he pioneered, led, developed, and delivered training to teach international communicators how to, uh, think, based on a company wide improvement model he had scrawled on a napkin in a bar in Italy. Yes, it really happened, just that way. Climax? – A call from a client on Christmas Eve. The Harvard Business Review had a scheduled interview with the newly global Whirlpool CEO that made him sound dumb. Could he fix it? In 24 hours?
The HBR editor was extremely skeptical. “We don’t work with outside consultants,” the editor said. What the consultant said: “I know this company, I know this man, and I can fix it. And you don’t have anyone else who can do this kind of rewrite in one day.”
Exactly 24 hours later, the HBR editor apologized and offered a job. Robert pitched him a breakthrough story about corporate consciousness he was inclined to accept. Then the editor got let go for a more politically correct version of himself and Robert decided to quit consulting. How life turns,,,
He, meaning “I,” failed. You can’t teach people how to think. He met a man on an airplane who told him he was done. The man was right. Robert fell into the hands of a woman who, typically, thought he was beautiful.
Result? He now has a belovèd stepdaughter. And all these years later he has me. Because he called me when he was at lowest ebb. And we’ve never looked back. Since we’ve been together, we’ve produced 22 books, more than a hundred videos, and he has been working too hard to fight his 50 year war. Ask me about that before you dismiss him as a snotty fool.
And now he lies dead before you. Glancing at the wider world, some will be quietly pleased at his passing. But I’m standing here thinking of things he told me, and told me, that seem relevant to the question of who has the last laugh today.
“Most Christians are atheists,” he said. “Something bad happens, they lose somebody, and they turn on God, who has personally let them down. Why, why, why, they scream. And the atheists in the audience try to answer their question. Which has no answer in a godless universe.”
My Robert was a Christian. He believed in this guy behind us hanging on a cross. He believed in an afterlife, which is the only ever answer to the screams of why, why, why. As a writer, he conceived of Christ’s cross as a cross road that makes all things happen in a quantum universe where all possible outcomes do occur, endless intersections that seem like coincidence and are really the universe of divine meaning tapping on your mind in what he termed “serendicity.” As a writer, he believed in every story ever dreamed of, and he lived a lot of them himself.
My Robert had plenty of faults. He was vain to an extraordinary degree, understandable only if you are hostage to the illusion of Dorian Gray, whose fictional life he somehow mirrored.. He was a stone drunk, who used his addiction to keep working when he no longer believed in the altruism of mankind apart from his own. He thought he was important, which may or may not be true, as he would have freely conceded.
His reading, his knowledge, was encyclopedic. He always said he was just leaving a record for those who would one day come after him to reclaim the honor of living as moral human beings. Why he wanted this day to be as close as possible to the funeral of Jay Gatsby, little mourning over the remains of that “poor sonofabitch.”
Wow. I think he did it. I’m here. You’re here. And I’m pretty sure I’m the only one here who cares.
I’ll end with another quote he offered up shortly before the end. “Life is no game for amateurs,” he said.
Thinking he was a pro at it. Goodbye, Robert. Well done.
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