Burying Clete

The gold cuff links slipped through the always troublesome slits of the white shirt's French cuffs. I paused to admire the unique wonder of them, each a little gold calendar of the month of June. To either side of the month were the numbers 19 and 32. On the 30th day of that month, a Thursday, sits a small ruby. June 30, 1932, the day my parents were married.

The cuff links came via the usual lineage chain: inheritance. I received a number of my father’s personal effects. Split them with my brother, in fact, at the time my mother said to us both, “he would’ve wanted you to have these.”

But the reason for dressing up wasn’t for anything enjoyable or delightful or happy or fun. I was going to bury my friend Clete today. And that called for me to squeeze into a pair of dress pants and haul out the aging white shirt that my wife said had ring around the collar. Before that it had been a wrestling match between should I wear the cheap suit or abandon ritual and sport a double-breasted blazer with a pink tie. I’ve learned how to dress for a funeral. Actually I’ve learned how to dress someone who was already dead for their big send-off. My father. He was an artist and a colorful dresser, always. His appearance sparkled with dashing style, which was instinctive to him. It didn’t take my mother, two sisters, and me very long to dress this man for burial in splendiferous attire. A striking figure in life, he went out in a burst of color. We saw to it. The lingering effects of that passage 19 years ago have influenced the way I dress for another’s entombment.

So, when I was asked to be a pallbearer at Clete’s funeral service, I knew he would have approved of my preferred farewell celebration attire. Blazer and pink tie it is. I had noticed at the previous night’s visitation that Clete had been interred in a very stylish black country-western dress suit. It looked great on him. We had known each other in various incarnations since first meeting in the fall of 1969. Both of us were fledgling songwriters at Nashville’s famed Tree Publishing Company. Photos of us from that time show hopelessly bowled early-1970s hair, mustaches, and mutton chops, or some combination thereof. During the mid-1980s, Clete sported the traditional de rigeur Music Row haberdashery, the straw curled-brim cowboy hat. The Clete of late, from 2002 on, wore a gracious face and, thankfully, was hatless again. He was lean with a smart braided ’tail, a sweet and dear man.

Our friendship, though, got off to a rocky start. Unbeknownst to me, until he told me just two weeks before he was murdered, Clete early on eyed me as a rival. He had come to Tree as a tunesmith, but in the guise of a duet. Clete and his first wife, Kathy, wrote and demoed songs together and were enjoying their situation at the giant country music publisher. He told me, “And then you and Pam came to town and stole our thunder!” Clete, in a huff, let it be known in the hallways of Tree that “he might just be looking at going over to Cedarwood,” a rival song publisher. In retelling the event 40 years later, Clete, a master at self-deprecating humor, put that Am-I-The-World’s-Biggest-Dumbass-Or-What look on his face, and said, “My God! I left the No. 1 country music publishing company in the world ’cause I was bent out of shape over you guys coming to Tree!”

He was a man of a thousand stories. After Clete found himself backed into a corner by his own half-hearted threat, he did indeed leave Tree and our paths wouldn’t cross again until 1985. He was forming an acoustic country trio then and had already lined up the name for the group. White Crow. Would I be interested in joining him and multi-talented singer/musician Scott Jarrett? Most certainly! The trio cut several songs, among them an uncelebrated tune, “An Angel You Love,” that deals with a couple in love who cannot connect in this lifetime because of prior attachments mate-wise but who look forward to another time—in heaven—when they will finally get to share their love together. The song was eerily prophetic. Clete had found his true love—in this lifetime; a woman named Marj whom he had been married to for the last 15 years.

Marj had accumulated some wealth through two previous marriages to men who had predeceased her. She and Clete had built a $1.5 million-dollar home on middle Tennessee’s Tims Ford Lake and were just putting the finishing touches on the landscaping, when Marj passed from a quick-acting cancer. In a surreal turn of fate, Clete lost the love of his life just one month before meeting his own violent death. Now, implausibly, “An Angel You Love” would begin Clete’s funeral service, and like the song, reconnect him with the angel he loved.

Living with senselessness

My wife Caroline and I had discussed how odd it is that people suffering the loss of a loved one are supportively bolstered at the time of death by friends and family, who then appear to abandon the bereaved in post-burial haste, everyone going back to their usual lives almost as if nothing had happened. The survivor, though, embarks on the opening leg of a journey of aloneness. With that in mind, we invited Clete to dinner one week after Marj’s funeral. Three weeks later to the day, he too was gone.

The murder part of it is too horrible to think about for long. Maybe that’s why people unconsciously tend to soften an event like that in their minds when pondering it; we linger on all that was good about a person, not the circumstances under which they exited. But I found that when a dear friend was shot multiple times in his own home in what more and more appears to be step-family involvement over estate and money, I frantically looked for anything solid to hang on to, for anything that could make the off-the-charts shock and pain just the least bit bearable. Once more, a formidable foe direct from the calendar had intruded again.

Me and the 23rd, we have this thing. It takes from me people I love. Three times I have lost a friend on December 23rd or have buried them on that date. A drunk driver took the first one, a massive heart attack felled another friend like an axe; now a murder. On top of that, I was jailed overnight 27 years ago on Dec. 23rd for partaking a tad too strenuously in pre-holiday merriment. The 23rd day of the twelfth month is a date I’d like to ban from future calendars.

At the funeral, the first-ever occasion I’d been asked to tend to the dearly departed as a pallbearer, I laid a firm hand on the casket containing my friend, helping guide it into the hearse then again from the hearse to the burial site. I was the last to throw a spade full of dirt onto his casket before the undertaking crew, like ants descending on a meal, completed the sizeable job in mere minutes. Something about being involved with Clete’s burial comforted me. It felt like we bore him home.

When I think about those times when someone close to me has passed, I notice that I tend to look for a positive spin: They were ill and death was a blessing, they were old and feeble and were mercifully taken. If a sudden accident or a wartime death, the hastily held belief became Hopefully it was quick. Death’s inevitability humbles all. We don’t want to think that it’s worse than it already appears. See you in heaven. We’ll be together again one day. All fit comfortably in the uneasy contemplation of death. But none of those stop-gap self-consoling phrases work when the disquieting shadow of murder hangs over the deceased.

Also weaving its way through this emotional morass is a most incongruous intruder—Christmas, of all things. Yet, while undergoing this current blue Christmas I somehow feel connected to the pervasive holiday spirit in a different, subtler way. Somewhere in all the madness, in all the shock, in the loss, the senselessness, the pain, and even with my issues with the 23rd, those eternal words of that tiniest of embattled characters from Dickens’ Christmas classic come pounding through with more pertinence than ever through its imperative plea for hope in a desperate time:

“God bless us, everyone.”