Burt, We Hardly Knew Ye.

For Burt Vendel

Husband of Deanna

21 Roadrunner Trail

December 25, 2009, Christmas Day

Yesterday, Christmas Eve, at around 9:30 in the morning, my husband, Dave, went to go run some errands. At around 9:35 he called from down the road, his voice thick. He was weeping. “Burt died,” was all he could say.

Burt lived across the street. He was 59. He was a master gardener, a kind soul who really did look like Santa Claus, a biker with a heart as big as his Harley, and a classically good neighbor.

We were not close friends, but something about his sudden passing hit us both hard, particularly my husband. He came back to the house and we spoke for a little while outside.

He told me that he’d met Vinnie and his wife, neighbors from down the street, who had told him that Burt had a heart attack and died on Christmas Eve morning at around 4:30 a.m. I'm a psychotherapist and I hear an awful lot of difficult and often very sad things. But this left me speechless and stunned.

“I was up at 4:30,” Dave said vaguely. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Did you hear something?” I asked.

“No, more like felt something,” he said.

Over the years, I’d come to respect his “feelings” that way. He was uncannily sensitive. When we spoke later, we tried to understand what had upset us so much. And we came to see that it was not about what will be missed as much as what was missed.

“I lost a friendship that was in the bank,” Dave said. “He was a friend that I never really enjoyed. There was always something that got in the way, some work, some errand, some weather, something. The ride we were gonna take together was always pending. And then it was gone.”

We had just gone to a neighborhood Christmas party together. Burt approached Dave in the room set aside for the bar and had, in typically generous fashion, offered some help with a kiva problem we’d been having. He had been thinking about it (without even being asked) and believed he had found a solution to putting in the grill we’d been struggling with. Dave was fielding another conversation and felt bad separating himself from the other fellow. So, noticing that Dave was a bit socially torn, Burt graciously said, “Well, I can see you’re involved in another conversation. We can talk about it later.”

He died within a few days. There was no later. We never got to hear his ideas. Burt was a clever, industrious, kind-hearted man who would do anything to help a neighbor. He was also very humble. He had the most beautifully sculpted Southwestern garden we’d ever seen and every day as we walked our dogs past his house, there he’d be, hip deep in sand and prickly pear, turning something ordinary into something unique. And every time we told him so, he’d just laugh and say, “I just like playing in the dirt.”

Burt, we would like to have said many more things to you, heard many more things from you, seen what you would have created with that garden in the next few years, watched what you did with that beard as it reached your belt buckle, taken a ride or two with you and your wife and seen where we would’ve wound up. We can’t pretend to know the grief and sorrow your family must be feeling right now and  we can’t imagine how big the hole your passing has left in the lives of those who knew you well and loved you deeply.

We don’t know the divine plan, but in our time you were taken too soon, way too soon.

I think most eulogies, most deaths, most losses are about that—opportunities or conversations missed, things not said, times not had. They are often reminders that the clock is ticking, the hour is near and the opportunities are passing as we sit, busy with things that we think we must get done at the expense of the only things that count.

We salute you, Burt, as you ride down the ever-winding road to pastures more perfect than any garden we can ever create here, to conversations more illuminated than any we can conceive on this earth, to opportunities always fulfilled and a soul always satisfied. You—and all those rides we might have taken together—will be sincerely missed.