I suspect that I’ll be blogging several times over about my dear friend Walter,  once the swirling sense of shock has subsided a bit and I feel like I can form one or two coherent thoughts about who he was and what made him so special. Right now, I think all I can talk about are the three biggest shocks I experienced last week:

  1. *the phone call –  My colleagues and I had just begun our second day of hearing voice juries when our very able departmental assistant, Kylee Flister, stepped into the recital hall (between singers) and told me that I needed to call Kathy at school right away.   “She’s okay,” Kylee thoughtfully added …. which meant that my mind raced to all kinds of other awful possibilities.   Those few seconds of uncertainty are really terrible in their own right because for a little while it’s almost like all of those terrible things are true …   is it her dad? Someone else in her family?  Someone in my family? Marshall?  Had something bad happened to our house, like a fire?   And then when I replayed how Kylee had said that Kathy was okay,  it made me wonder if something terrible had happened at Schulte where she teaches.   It’s amazing how rapidly the human mind can race through dozens of terrifying scenarios, all in the space of a few moments. What is astonishing to me – and maybe even embarrassing – is that none of those scenarios that raced through my mind involved my friend Walter, even though I knew he was in the hospital and  struggling.  But Walter had fought back time and time again- an amazing fighter in this respect, if in every other way an intensely peaceful man-  and I think most of us had no doubt that this is how this latest bout with difficulty would end, with Walter’s arms once again raised in defiant triumph.

Which is why when I heard Kathy say, through sobs,  “Walter died this morning,”  I was absolutely shocked and completely thunderstruck.  And just like that, we were crying together over the phone – although I suppose one or two of those tears were of gratitude that our friend’s suffering was at an end.  But most of the tears were of sorrow that we had lost someone so precious to us.   By the way,  Kathy said more than once over the phone, “I am so sorry to have to tell you this over the phone” (she was so sweet about it) but I am so glad that I learned the news this way and not from an email or a facebook post. It made such a difference to hear this news from her.   And when I returned to the recital hall,  I so appreciated the concern of my colleagues Amy Haines and Evan Bravos, who were sitting down at the end next to me.  When I whispered to Amy the news,  it was like a jolt of electricity coursed through her body – and she was so sweetly concerned for me the rest of the day.   And Evan,  who has only taught at Carthage one semester,  was also very sweet … and was also the willing, gracious recipient of one sarcastic remark after another from me, all day long.   One way I was able to get my head back in the game and do what I had to do was to become the court jester and he could not have been more good-natured about it.  Eventually the news filtered down to at least most of my other colleagues, who were very kind as well.  But in some ways the richest comfort came from the fact that I got to spend the rest of the day listening to so much great music and fine singing. (One of the first juries I heard after getting the news was from a young woman who sang Mendelssohn’s lovely “O rest in the Lord- wait patiently for Him.”    And when my own students took the stage and sang marvelously (and in a couple of cases, absolutely magnificently) it just did my heart a world of good.

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(pictured above: my colleagues in voice juries- and closest to the camera are Amy Haines and Evan Bravos, who were so kind to me that day.)

  1. *Kris in the Choir Room –  Thursday night just happened to be rehearsal for the senior choir at church,  and I am so glad for the timing of that because it meant that we had a place to go with our grief that evening, and a place to be together.  It was a really precious time.   But what made it even more extraordinarily special and touching was when Pastor Mark walked in just as we were about to begin – and right behind him, nonchalantly,  walked Pastor Kris Capel,  who had been the assistant pastor at Holy Communion for several years and is a beloved part of our church family.  She was also a colleague of Walter’s and a very close friend of Lynn, but she’s now a senior pastor herself at a large church up in the Twin Cities.   So to have her walk into the choir room then and there was astounding.  I remember so vividly the feeling that three hundred tears instantly formed right behind my eyeballs, straining to burst forth – but I fought them back.  But I hope I never ever forget what it felt like to see this dear dear friend who had somehow made her way down to Racine so quickly –  and whose very presence, before she had said so much as a single word to any of us, was a source of incredible comfort.   And to my amazement,  she and Pastor Mark weren’t just paying a brief, momentary social call.  They settled in between the basses and tenors and stayed for the entire rehearsal …. which wasn’t a normal rehearsal at all so much as an opportunity to just sing together –  beginning with my song “Pace,” which we will sing Christmas Eve and dedicate to Walter’s memory.   The song includes these words:  “In the midst of things we cannot understand,  may we know the comfort of the Master’s hand . . . “

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  3. (pictured above: Pastor Kris at the end of the choir rehearsal she unexpectedly visited. She’s in the middle in the red coat, surrounded by Val, Kathy, Kate, Heather, and Kylee.)
  1. *the chair –   The next morning,  I took out the Racine Journal Times and braced myself to read whatever article would be there about Walter.  (As an incredibly powerful force in the community, I knew that Walter’s death would warrant a prominent article in the paper.)  And indeed, it was a lovely article that beautifully summarized the impact which he had on both our church and the community.  What left me stunned (and surprisingly so) was the photo which accompanied the article,  showing Walter leading worship at our church . . . in a wheelchair.  It is a sight I’d seen literally hundreds of times, to the point where it’s actually all but impossible for me to remember Walter leading worship while standing.   But there was something about seeing that image in a photograph in the paper that jolted me in a way I could not have predicted or expected.  “O my gosh,” I thought to myself,  “he was really in a wheelchair!”

Obviously, I knew – everyone knew – that Walter was in a wheelchair and had been for many years . . . so that photo should not have been shocking in the least.   But I think that a lot of us stopped seeing that chair after awhile, in large part because for Walter it was not his identity – just his means of locomotion.   And it helped that Walter carried himself with such grace and natural dignity.  If he was ever the slightest bit self-conscious about being wheelchair- bound, I never saw so much as a hint of it.  And if he wasn’t fixated on that chair, then none of the rest of us needed to be, either- and we weren’t.   In fact,  I almost think that if I had to tell describe Walter to someone who needed to pick him out in a crowd,  I’m not sure it would have occurred to me to say “he’ll be the guy in the wheelchair.”   He was so many other things before he was “the guy in the wheelchair.” And whatever gets said about my friend Walter in the days and weeks and months to come,  that’s one of the most important.

Pictured above: Walter leading worship at Holy Communion.