April 11, 2008 is the day that my best friend was killed in Iraq training the Iraqi special forces and "advising" them on an early morning raid to pick up high profile targets in Sadr City. Below is the Eulogy that I wrote for him and read, never once without balling my eyes out--"what a pussy" Mark would say with a wink and a nod.
Mark and I met in college in the late 80s, we were members of an elite club –passionate surfers going to college in Chicago at Wheaton. Later we became roommates, went on surf trips and various adventures together, both married women named “Sarah,” both moved to Laguna after marriage, and both are raising our families on Brooks Street.
My wife and I moved to Laguna, when we were looking for a new home in Southern California, because Mark said he’d kill me if I moved to Newport. Joe pushed it by moving to the DMZ, Corona Del Mar. Mark & Sarah helped us find a relatively inexpensive rental that would work for our family when we moved down. He also made me go to his church, an Evangelical Free Church, which was a flavor of Christianity that I would not have chosen, but am so happy we did. He helped me and my Sarah find a home on Brooks, across the street from them later. Sarah & Mark introduced my wife and me to the Day family and Growers First (http://www.growersfirst.org
), an organization that we now support as much as possible. Sarah Metherell and I service on the Growers First board together. Mark and Sarah plugged me and my family right into the community in a very deep way. Much of who I am today is a very direct result of my friendship with Mark.
Mark was an anomaly. He was extremely unique. It’s very hard to encapsulate someone who lived his life in such a large and meaningful way into a summary or a nutshell or even words. To steal from Derrida, Mark was the nutshell – pieces of his life don’t really tell the whole story very well. It was the whole thing that was so amazing. But we don’t have time for that this morning, and I don’t think that I could deliver that story on my own.
At a men’s group met for breakfast last week, we all shared what we knew and remembered about Mark. We used a format to keep us all from rambling too much that used the Inklings at Oxford, CS Lewis, Tolkien, TS Eliot, and their friendship and work together sharpening each other’s writing as an example. At one point, a member of the group died and Lewis said something to the effect that, “While he’d miss Charles personally, what he’d miss the most was how Charles made him a better person.” Brad’s question was how did Mark impact us to help make us better people? I think it’s a good question for a gathering like this one today.
Honesty, loyalty, humility and love would seem to be qualities that best characterize Mark to me. He wasn’t loud and he hated being in the spotlight. He probably wouldn’t like all of us sitting here talking about him and he really wouldn’t like the big memorial service that’s going to happen this week, but he’s just going to have to get over it.
My favorite story about Mark’s dislike of the spotlight is also reflective of his love of mission work. He and his wife, Sarah, who both were passionate devotees to developing missions in this church and making it the focal point it is today, had just gotten back from a trip to Mexico with Growers First, a group that helps rural poor farmers around the world. Jay Grant, saw them sitting in church, knew they had been on a recent mission, and asked Mark and Sarah to stand and talk a little about their trip. They both got up, I think Sarah did most of the talking, and after church Mark went up to Jay and said, “Don’t ever, ever do that to me again!” Now Jay knew that Mark had been a Navy SEAL and was very effective at his work and didn’t know Mark very well, and from what I understand, Jay was a little careful around Mark for a while after that. Mark used to love that story and always chuckled when he told it.
Mark didn’t try to be cool. He hated facades and veneers. He reminds me, in a strange way, of William F Buckley Jr. Hosting him at a fundraiser years ago, I remember that this very well-heeled writer and publisher seemed to be intent on maintaining his school-boy disheveledness. Shaggy hair, frayed cuffs, a huge old Louis Vouitton bag that would seem to hold a Volkswagen that he just threw everything into. Bill’s first impression seemed intentionally to not be about first impressions. Mark was very similar. He avoided first impressions entirely. He loped when he walked, like a big golden retriever or Mr. Snuffalufagas, he never wore jeans, his uniform was khakis (long or short), t-shirt of a well-worn variety, flannel shirt and “flippity floppities” as he called them – flip flops. He was always shaggy-haired and the harriest man I know – diametrically opposed to body razors. The worst criticism he could give you was, “Wow, that’s cool, Dave.” It meant that you seemed to be trying to be something you weren’t. Something that I’ve needed a lot of help with in life, and something that Mark was better than a brother at helping me manage.
But that was part of Mark’s core personality – he was very quiet with new people. He didn’t need a lot of friends. He was polite but also very blunt with people that felt they needed to espouse some version of BS. He seemed to have this efficiency with words, probably because he thought a lot about who he was talking to and what he was saying before he spoke, that were more powerful from their economy.
His very best friend took the place of Joe and Dave and I almost 10 years ago when he married Sarah Ochs. They became Mark & Sarah, a unit. Someone recently said that no man will love Sarah as well as Mark did. I’ll take it a little further and say that few men love their wives and treat them with the respect that Mark did. It may sound like this is candy-coating my friend, but he really did love Sarah as close as any man I know could come to the way Christ loves the church.
Recently I was talking with Howard Hills, a long-time neighbor on Brooks Street and very good friend of Mark and Sarah’s. He said that Mark seemed to know what he needed to hear and how to say it without any direct effort at trying to convert Howard or proselytize him, just to deliver something true that would provide value to Howard. You can get the whole story from Howard, and you should – it’s powerful, but the part I love is that when Mark was trying to get across to Howard that the Christian life isn’t about being good, it’s about realizing the state we are all in, that we live under this state of original sin, and we can’t get out from under it on our own, and we’re all pilgrims on the same journey just trying to help each other out. But we can’t journey together until we all agree on the fundamental assumption that we can’t do it ourselves. He paraphrased that for Howard by saying, “Howard, what I have come to realize is that basically, I suck.” He just left that statement hanging in the air, and Howard talked about how it made him stop and deeply reflect on how big of a statement that was coming from such an amazing human being.
Mark lived his life for others. I don’t know all the details of what he was doing, but I know something of what he did. He was a soldier and he worked very closely with local people in countries where he operated in ways that were unique. In Afghanistan, he actually lived with the tribal people he was serving and training. He was invited to an Afghani wedding, something that never is allowed for foreigners. He was one of them, he loved them as people, because he believed that we are all children of God. When he died, Mark had essentially put himself in the lead vehicle in a convoy going into a dangerous area with Iraqis he had trained. He realized that if he was going to be an effective leader and if the Iraqis he loved and trained were going to be able to stand on their own without him, then he had to lead by example so they could do the same. Like Stonewall Jackson, Mark lived the way he expected his team to live. He did not lead from the rear. We read a lot of he same adventure stories by Bernard Cornwell. The worst characters in those novels are the leaders who are dishonest. Who lie to themselves because they try to lead while eating different food, sleeping in different beds and removing themselves from hardship and from harms way. Mark realized that to be the tip of the spear, you have to ride point, and if you expect others to do that then you have to be willing to do it yourself.
We all lie to ourselves, especially us men, and I’m pretty bad at fooling myself. The quality in Mark that I will miss the most was how he was brutally honest with me, which forced me to be brutally honest with my own lies. It is probably one of the best qualities, assuming love, that you can find in a friend.
It seems funny that such a quiet guy could leave such a hole in my life, and I am sure a crater in Sarah’s, but it is a hole that creates tremendous substance from the vacuum it leaves. And in a horrible way, I think that the economy of that void will help make me a much more honest person in much the same way that Mark did.
But I don’t want to talk about Mark in the past tense. I am a firm and resolute believer in the very real body of believers, the communion of the saints living and dead.
When my own older brother died from Leukemia14 years ago, I remember asking God to show me that he was safe and whole and happy again – I knew he was a believer and that he was living a complete life in the presence of the Father in Heaven, but I needed to see it. God granted me a vision of my brother smiling deeply and joyfully and wholly again. His look told me that he was living entirely in the joy of the sovereignty of God.
My older brother and I started surfing on the Great Lakes together. Mark helped fill part of that hole as a brother, like my younger brother Joel does. It’s a bond that creates a tribe among surfers. You see it here in Laguna with the Laguna Bros, the Hakamoms and other rogue gangs. Every time that I would go surfing, it seemed that I was having a baptism of water and the spirit, it was a place that I could always go to feel closer to my brother.
One of Mark’s favorite verses is Genesis 1:2 “. . . and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
Mark is more alive now, more real now, more true now and more whole now than he ever was on Earth. The difficulty is that we have this veil between us that separates us for a time. For me, getting in the water – getting our gills wet, as Mark and I used to say – helps bring me into communion with the body of believers beyond the veil. It is where I find the spirit of God most often and all the saints, living and dead. I find great comfort in being a small part of that body, it keeps me close to my brothers, some who are alive and some who we are separated from, for a time.
now more real than me
st mark intercedes for us
hovering over
