Each day in picking up the daily newspaper, I almost cringe when turning to the obituary page.
Too often there is the name of someone I know or someone whose name is familiar or someone who is my age or someone who is much too young to have completed their life.
Death seems to be a common topic when we gather with friends. Not that we are morbid about it, but we note with sadness the loss of people we know or who we knew long ago. From my Aiken High School Class of 1966, we have lost more than 100 of the 379 members. Perhaps it might not seem so out of the norm since we are approaching our mid-’70s, but that is a huge vacuum that will never be filled.
While there are many who I could mention whose passing is more than noteworthy personally, today I focus on three – Tom Moore of my high school class, Coach Eddie Buck who has been a football fixture for decades and Patrice Doherty my first-grade teacher. All three left us in the past two months.
Tom Moore was one of the top students in our high school class. He went to The Citadel and through advanced education and much experience became an expert in strategic international policy and arms control. In high school, who knew that was even a thing?
After his quite serious career, Tom went back to school and got two master’s degrees, one in the history of the Irish Revolution and one in creative writing from the University College in Cork, Ireland. It was shortly after he published the novel “A Fatal Mercy: The Man Who Lost the Civil War” that I ran into Tom for the first time in decades.
With my Friday barbecue crew in New Ellenton, I was seated at a table when Tom recognized me and came over for a chat. He was back in Aiken, and we later had lunch together when he gave me a copy of his book.
Fast forward a couple of years to February, and I got an email from Tom telling me that he enjoyed one of my columns. I asked if he had another book in mind, and he replied, “Yes, working on another book, but a long way from the finish line.” He died on Aug. 27. One never knows when that last time we get to communicate with someone will be.
Coach Eddie Buck was a fixture, not only at high school football games, but also at other sporting events – even church league basketball games. Our paths criss-crossed several times. When he was football coach at Aiken High, our next-door neighbor was one of his assistants. Often following a Friday night game, several coaches and a few others gathered to celebrate or lament the result of the game. That was our first introduction.
When we moved across town to a new home, Eddie and family lived one street over, and we saw each other in the neighborhood. My daughters attended South Aiken High, where Eddie had become the driver’s education teacher. While our girls didn’t take his course, Eddie still knew everyone at the school and our meetings became more frequent for the dozen years we had Thoroughbred students in the family.
After retirement, my wife and I often saw Eddie at a breakfast diner we often visited. We always spoke and inquired about each other’s health, families and goings-on. It was one of those times of eating out that I last spoke with him, and I enjoyed reading recent stories about Eddie by Kyle Dawson in the pages of the Aiken Standard.
The third person, Pat Doherty, passed away on my birthday this year. She was 96 and our paths also crossed multiple times over a span of more than half a century. Mrs. Doherty was my first-grade teacher and the one who taught me to read and write (well, at least print).
I went into her classroom in the fall of 1954 at the old North Aiken Elementary. I recognized my first name printed on a piece of paper taped to one of the desktops and still recall my difficulty in trying to duplicate it. Why did my parents give me a name with two E’s? The lowercase E gave me trouble as I guess I lacked the small-motor skills to effectively reproduce the exquisite printing of Mrs. Doherty.
In spite of that, I managed to pass first grade and later graduated from high school and college. After returning to Aiken with a job as a reporter, I was assigned to take pictures and write a story about the first day of school. I went to the old Aiken Elementary as school was letting out at the end of that initial day and snapped a photo on the playground of a frazzled teacher, her hair slightly amiss.
I went and identified myself as a reporter and asked for her name. She gave an incredulous look and said, “Jeffrey, don’t you recognize your first-grade teacher?” I hadn’t.
Many years later we moved again across town, and I retired. A morning walk with my dogs became the new normal, and I met people in the neighborhood who were also out and about with their pets. One morning I passed a woman with her pooch – it was Mrs. Doherty who lived five houses away.
The passing of those three – as well as many more – showed me once again how often there are multiple connections that we have with others. We are not in this life alone, but part of a web that connects people sometimes just once, but often over and over.
Many people impact our lives, often in many ways and at different times. We should recognize that we, too, have an impact on the lives of others and it’s up to us to try and make those impacts as meaningful as possible.
THIS AND THAT: Death is too often a topic these days - Charleston Post Courier
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