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Tex: a graveside service of remembrance and healing
From formless to form and from form to formless, so passes Tex. He was known as many things: a great friend with a great laugh, a good man and a not so good father, a brilliant man, a weak man, a honky-tonking, tough, crusty SOB. He was not an average man. Sensitive in some ways and shattered for sure, he put himself back together with glue that was harder than the pieces it mended. He was happiest when he was unfettered and free, and now he is.
Tex had friends, family and Navy buddies scattered across two continents and the seas between. Many now are gone, his siblings are in their final time. We stand in their stead to honor a life, a life of many journeys, many miles, many stations. Yet it can be condensed to one thing, his name. Remember the dead with me by speaking his name.
Tex would have been 80 in December, his waning years cut short by a hot dog on which he choked. John Wayne to the end, he wouldn’t even let his family grieve. Wry humor was Tex’s saving grace. He got great joy from baiting the Jehovah’s Witness who had the misfortune to ring his doorbell. It probably pleased him immensely that he went out on a joke. It matched his refusal to mourn.
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A seeker for many decades, Tex loved knowledge. His teachers were many. He could see lessons in the light of Jesus as well as the darkness of Kali, in the agelessness of archetypal myths and the transience of blooms in a country meadow. A self-educated man and a voracious reader, he had an immense curiosity. Tex was cynical yet hopeful. All his books showed what mankind could rise to, his experience showed how far it could fall.
Somewhere in honky-tonk heaven, Tex continues doing the two-step, knocking ‘em back at the bar, loving a good argument and the way people laugh at the stories of a rambler. May he find peace. Repeat with me: May he find peace.
I’ll pass around some rosemary, an aromatic herb long associated with remembrance. Take a pinch of it and smell it. Hold it for a moment while you remember Tex. While you do, I will chant the last line of the Heart Sutra of Buddhist scripture, often said at funerals. It means: gone beyond where the wisdom is.
When ready, please take your time, sprinkle the herb onto the grave. Release along with it all the memories of Tex that you no longer serve you well. And know that in your now empty open palm you hold the soul of a man.
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