| Notes |
- David Richard Huff: In Memoriam
By Steven Huff
On August 20 of the year 2000 my brother David took his life. This is an act some in civilized society would condemn. But no one dare condemn my brother while I am around.
To condemn David's final action is to completely misunderstand the last 10 or so years of my brother's life, perhaps the trajectory of his entire life. It was said many times among family members immediately after he died, but it bears repeating; my brother was the victim of a terminal illness. Like other life-ending diagnoses such as cancer, AIDS, heart disease, manic depression takes a certain percentage of victims each year. Technically the mortality rate for this organic brain disease is low, as suicide is considered a choice perhaps made by someone in full control of his or her faculties. If someone were to do forensic psychological workups on most suicides, however, and correlate this number with manic-depressive illness, I am certain we would find the mortality rate for people with bipolar disorder to be high. The disease is treatable with medications like Lithium or Depakote; but for a man as vital, as powerful as my brother, I wonder now if the medications were not just as unbearable as the disease. David valued his energy, his vitality at its best was something as unstoppable as a force of nature; I can't see how my brother could appreciate medications that made him sleep for hours on end and dulled his quick and agile mind. Grandpa Huff would have said of my brother, he was "much of a man," -Grandpa's highest compliment.
We would not have come to honor him if we did not all have many memories of David; I ask you now like me to reach for the good ones-I know there are many.
I tried to settle on one thing, but I got to thinking and couldn't just pare down my memories of my brother to one signal event; No, I remembered 52 card pickup, how he loved joke books and would read from them aloud, he, my father and me laughing till we were red-faced-I remembered how mercilessly he'd pick on me, I would run to tell on him, and as soon as my parents had finished fussing at him I would go barreling back into him for more; I remember sitting with him in one of his black cars I am sure he totaled not long after, reading Marvel Comics-how he made me giggle till my sides hurt by turning the villain of the story into a complete swish. Mom would probably let him have it even now if she knew that I remembered being small and riding on the back of one of his motorcycles neither of us wearing shirts or helmets.
I also remember from my teen years one thing that stands out about my brother; one thing that has always spoken to me of his root character; of what was best and brightest in him.
I was 15 and it was my first summer working for Dad's company. We were installing runway lights at the Smyrna Tennessee airport, and I was my brother's 'helper' on the crew. Something I am certain he was not too thrilled about, though he never let me know. I was arrogant though, proud of being as big as him finally and determined to show him I could take whatever he dished out. He and the other guys dished out a lot to the boss's 'little one' but the event I remember had nothing to do with the rest of the crew.
We were working in a ditch. Whenever you worked for Dad you always had to dig a ditch at some point, and this one was deep with sloping sides. I don't remember why we were digging the ditch. I do remember that the Smyrna Airport is built over a swamp and for every inch or two you would dig sludgy red mud would seep back in.
One of those classic afternoon Tennessee thunderstorms was blowing up; far across the flat expanse of the runway and airfield we had watched the thunderhead come, throwing out its angry arcs of white light. As it blotted out the sun the rest of the crew valiantly fled for an "early lunch" till it blew over.
Rain was starting to come down and for some reason my brother remained in the ditch, digging steadily. He told me I didn't have to stay out in the rain-I could listen to the radio in the cab of his truck while he worked until it was actually lunchtime. To him, we were on our father's dime and would work exactly what our Dad expected us to work.
I was happy to obey, climbed in the cab and listened to the radio as the rain beat down harder and harder. Just as I was sure the storm would calm it gusted, and I could see my brother bend his head to his work. It was futile-for every shovel full of muck another one washed down the side, but David dug in, brown water rising to his calves.
Something about him standing there alone doing such fruitless determined work wore me down; I jumped out into the sideways-slanting rain and grabbed a shovel, slid down into the ditch to dig.
We didn't look at each other, we just kept digging, but I think about it now-I have always recalled it as a moment I felt deeply proud to be this man's brother. Whatever force, grit, steel that kept him bent to his work-to say someone so strong and determined was my brother gave me in my heart a powerful sense of our common bond, our blood. Though I was becoming a man myself, and was full of that pridefulness-I still felt in awe of my older brother.
I remember digging a ditch, and I remember the brother I loved. The brother I love. I ask you to remember the David you loved.
Maybe you shot pool with him or drank beer, or rode bicycles that became dirt bikes that became motorcycles-Maybe you talked of cosmic mysteries or Tarzan novels or trucking-maybe he took up for you in a fight, or just took up for you, period.
He was a man at the mercy of a merciless illness. Though it is too late to save him somehow from its grasp-we can all do him the honor of remembering the man he could be, was, apart from his disease.
He was our son, husband, father, brother, cousin, friend.
He was a real man who wanted to work, do good work, he was a man who loved to work hard.
He was indeed, as our Grandpa Huff would have said, "much of a man."
(Drafted 8/29/2000)
Poem written by Steven Huff after David's death.
A Psalm of David. (David Richard Huff, 1958-2000)
At first the reverence.
Silence, broken by the speaking o's
And the vast maw of humdrum whiteness,
The days passing,
And the hands
Kissing me to rest.
The reverence.
At first reverence in the blue
Bright yellow scream of it all.
Hungry, happy, dreaming.
Reverence, silence.
At first the bliss of not knowing of all this.
There once was an eastertide kiss to
Forsythia photographs blue, honeyblonde,
Copper red and wandering with children.
The damned wide decades had yet to be crossed.
We were yet to miss any world of reckoning-
We were children awaiting a cigarette kiss.
Make of our mother a saint and our father a god
For the only oddness that is allowed is the badweather
Blood of time hauling us down its shadowed path.
The myth of forsythias yellow in easter bloomed at the
First glimpse of the road.
Now the shadows have groaned with their lonely
Burden and someone's hands have gone.
I have no time to reckon with death.
Dies Irae Dies Illa
Little wandering one beneath the fixed and hissing sun
Solvet saeclum in favilla
Little wandering one undone with buttons askew
Dies Irae Dies Illa
Little wandering one coming for the new
Teste David cum Sibilla
Little blue memory you have yet to make.
Dies Irae Dies Illa
Start with the snake of days
Solvet saeclum in favilla
And disgrace yourself as you back into the haze
Dies Irae
Will a little shining one come?
Dies Illa
Solve the riddles of the same unknown sun?
Solvet saeclum in favilla
When he is old and about undone by
The broken mothering of years?
Teste David cum Sibylla.
Rapt with this mass of my own making
I sing.
Wrapped in this mess of my own aching
I sing.
Wet with the kiss of my own breaking
Open vault of unsaid things
Winging my way to that not yet dead.
That myth of Icarus I have always said
Was meant for the mourning of golden ones
Who had a glittering and jittering love of the sun.
Once, motionless and red
I was a small dead thing on the shore.
I watched him command his chariot, he could soar.
I have yet to find his face in the glass of the sea.
Begin O God of light to reveal him to me.
What O what will you have me do now that I am sad
And the night has claws of music to bring stars to my door
And cats to the porch to scream their dirge to me?
What O what will you have me make with these wandering hands
Trying to slake a thirst unquenched yet by pushing word over
Word to tumble out as if in a confused and impotent rage?
I will quit asking questions of you, O God.
I will make no psalm or play my lyre and I will
Not kiss the fire of your days with the herald song of my
Mad voice raised unceasing.
I will go back to erasing the child in the land
Before the silence of the vast white maw of o's at the end
Hissing and kissing you to sleep.
It is the same, the same.
We lay on a soft white bed dead to the world and the white maw is
Filled with open o's as we remember the sun they cry and beg
Us to sleep the satin sleep of the comforted gone to the dark..
It is the same, the same.
The easter sun rose and it came and it burned and it went
And by summer the yellow blossoms were spent,
The dresses were packed and the suits were
Buried and the closets held secrets of mice and play.
The next day was just a day, and you were not reverent among
The wondering o's.
The mouths turned away from you and began speaking anew
Of whatever trash time was throwing when you slept on the first satin
In your silence.
Perhaps black glitters better when I remember.
I don't know.
My brother in his black cars towered and sped.
His great blonde head and wild smile.
He hurled himself everywhere and sang as he went
He danced as if the end were there and not here.
Colors don't fade in the brain.
They grow brighter and the sky grows bluer and the sun
Hotter. The brother grows taller and his mind is madder.
Colors
Forsythia yellow
Easter blue
Mother pink
Father red
Brother dead.
Colors don't fade in the brain.
His fat face in the rain is the same insane face
Of Icarus I saw in the towering cars, home from
The bars past midnight and breathing beer as he begged
'don't tell.'
Can't cash it all in yet.
I was young, and striped. Colored.
Fresh and washed. The pictures are too blue and
Too bright and too autumn to the forsythia
Easter and spring.
Can't recall all of it.
Can't believe my lack of me then.
He was what I thought you were when you were tall
And straight and crazed and running and riding
Wild metal death straight into the sun.
Icarus meant nothing but I could see when
One's body has enslaved one to time and
Now I think I saw his path laid and just watched
Amazed.
I so envied his razor sharp gaze
And how he tried to fly.
I stood by.
Now, here I've come to tell you,
Tell you all of what amazed me and
Emblazoned on the years to come my mantra
For life, and how it is to be lived as if god is above and
Invisible and cruel and true.
Did he die with grace?
When the wings gave and the sun laughed him down
To past midnight somewhere in the bad part of town
Was there ballet, was there amazing beauty in
The arc described by his hand as it raised itself to his temple
And was there strength in the final lucid pull of the trigger?
Crime scene analysts know that there are patterns to be read
In the splatters you find when one has finally and truly blown his mind-
Like ancient shamans with entrails what did they see spelled out in
My brother's spattered blood?
He died with psychics on his mind.
For twenty-five dollars and an hour he learned his fate
Was to move on and then he bought the gun
And said his goodbyes and did the deed all the
Graceful ones do when their time in the sun has
Run its course and the world must move on.
At first, with reverence the world rises like pink towers
In the white maw above, and there are round o's of mouths and singing
At first the world is ringing with the legend that will one day be you.
Then you are through and the sun even dims in August as the dirt falls dry
On the casket of the flying one who has burned his last bright run
In the white arms of the sun.
Run on then. Oh, run.
The last test has been taken.
You are done.
The last bullet has spoken.
In the end you were not broken
No
Perhaps you had only begun
To understand the flight of days.
We all see these things different ways.
Run on, then, run.
I finally saw your son again and he revealed nothing
Save your chin.
Run on.
The old house is all but gone. It sits green on green
And no one mows the lawn.
The trees still grow
Still bear our scars.
The driveway still holds the secret ruts of your many
Black cars.
Run on, oh, run.
I sit in my green dark peace of another day
Always a life that would be but strange to you
And each distant roar in the night
Of great trucks hissing south is you.
In from the night you came once.
Glorious like the sun.
Quiet and small
All I could do
Was stand by.
And watch you joyfully die.
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1958 - 2000 (41 years)
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