This needs poetry, but prose is all I have to give it, at least today. An old friend and colleague at St. Barnabas Church in Denton, Texas, has died—Bob Lockwood. The obituaries will tell you he was Robert Minturn Lockwood, III, M. D., whose profession as a radiologist hardly defined him. They will tell you of his devotion to Ann’s Haven Hospice in Denton, a pioneering effort in the hospice movement and one of the large works of his life. I didn’t know Bob at the time Ann’s Haven began and can’t speak of that, but his friends and acquaintances who are quoted in the newspapers speak eloquently of his service to the community and how it grew out of his grief over the death of his beloved first wife.

Bob was almost a renaissance man when I knew him, as close to that ideal as any son of the twentieth century could come: physician, scholar, poet, playwright, churchman, birder, naturalist, gentleman farmer—a longer list could be made. He was also an idealist with an almost Emersonian edge of Yankee shrewdness (though he wasn’t literally a Yankee) in spite of all the years he spent in Texas. He was a brilliant man who chose to find his destiny in the community of scholars assembled around two universities in the little town of Denton, Texas, a long way from Harvard and Penn Med. Circumstance was part of the reason why, but also a certain venturesomeness, I thought, coupled with a tendency to discount his accomplishments. Bob sometimes spoke of his career at Harvard as though he had been a failure and treated his medical credential as slight achievement. He was not a proud man, at least not when I knew him. When he retired he sold his radiology practice and went to work for the people who bought him out. But he also translated Brecht’s Theepenny Opera once, because he thought the popular adaptation (Blitzstein’s, I guess) was too tame. Bob’s father had been a professor of Latin and the Librarian of Haverford College, also the college’s informal historian and a devoted teacher. Students dedicated their yearbook to him in 1924. Maybe some of Bob’s interests, as well as the shaping of his character, began at home.

For the better part of ten years I knew Bob at St. Barnabas—many knew him better than I. But we served together for a year in a discernment process that brought us close, and we shared a heart-wrenching experience of the death of a beloved priest and friend that surprised us like a thief in the night. When I learned of Bob’s own death, I first turned to a poem he wrote in 1993 as a memorial to Charles Williams, the rector of our church at that time. Charles had been diagnosed with lung cancer just shy of his fiftieth birthday and was taken from us swiftly, in less than six months. Bob’s poem is a powerful reflection, not just upon Charles’s time with us and his death, but also upon how Charles talked with us about his death as he was dying—in a series of wonderful pastoral letters. Just before he died, Charles asked me to put together a small book of his sermons; I asked Bob if I could include his poem in the volume. I’ll not quote it entirely, just the conclusion.

And then you died—and were no longer there
       I saw your chest x-ray myself.
       It said DEATH—soon, no matter what.

So then, we cared for you (with a little help from the hospice).
And as you died
       you learned
       you grew
       you bloomed.
It was beautiful, it was terrible.
We wept.

Now please live on in us your friends
We are now more connected, more a Church, more the Body
Because you cared about us.

In the willow-meads of Tasarinan—may we meet again in the spring.

In his second life, the only life in which I knew him, Bob devoted himself to land and to practicing what we are now coming to call sustainability, raising chickens and bees, the farm where he lived with his second family a favorite resort of at least a couple of generations of children at St. Barnabas—a chosen place, a Vergilian place if you will—it’s useful at my age to learn what one thinks. I didn’t know Bob’s family, never went to his farm. He always came to church alone, as I do mostly now, myself, church being something my beloved and I do not share. I knew about Bob’s second life, the private part of it, only from conversations with him; but I believe the farm had been his renewal, or perhaps his last reinvention, of himself.

Now as I reread Bob’s poem I particularly think about its last line, an allusion to a place invented by Professor Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. Treebeard sings of it in a wonderful song that recalls one of the Genesis creation stories:

In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the Spring.
Ah! the sight and the smell of the Spring in Nan-tasarion!
And I said that was good.

Tasarinan, in the legendarium of Tolkien’s Elves, is part of the lost flat world, now “under the waves,” that preceded middle earth in the same way that the legendary world of gods and heroes preceded classical antiquity, where the stories of that former world were regarded as history. As the members of the ring fellowship bid farewell to Treebeard midway in their journey, Treebeard speaks these poignant words: “I too must bid you now farewell. I do not think that we shall meet again. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I—I smell it in the air.” To which Elrond replies, “Maybe not in Middle-earth, Fangorn. But when the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again, then in the willow meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring.”

Did Charles and Bob read Tolkien together? I don’t know—I’m not sure I even want to know. But I think I understand that in wishing his dear friend and priest a pagan immortality, Bob meant to wish Charles a place in a time out of time wherein the difference between Pagan and Christian has been erased—and the world in which humans dwell with fire and water, beasts and great trees, no longer innocent, has found a new beginning.

—I can think of no better wish for Bob himself, or for us all.