Bryan Coffey passed away a few days ago. He is survived by his wife Shirley Schaubert-Coffey and children and grandchildren and so, so, so many of us.
They have a saying in Spanish:
The words are grieved.
Means that some things are so heartbreaking that it’s folly to try and speak about them. But speaking, writing, songwriting is how I process these otherwise cataclysmic emotional detonations. So I’m going to say some things, especially since I cannot make it home to the funeral today:
Bryan Coffey was my great uncle, an honorable man, though private, and a hard worker. The irony of private men is that we never quite mind when you speak well of us in public — I know this because I have people like Uncle Bryan to thank for my own love of privacy, a love deep enough to inspire my forthcoming novel Faceless, a love that’s disguised as a weird exhibitionism through my blogs and videos.
Quite frankly, I seldom speak to others of my inner life. As public as I pretend to be online, only a handful of people in the world have glimpsed the real me and even fewer see that mythical, shy refrain of my identity on a regular basis. That’s the truth of it and I share that armor of privacy with Uncle Bryan, even though we did not share a direct bloodline.
When performing as Mearcstapa here in Manhattan, any banjo song I play? That’s Bryan Coffey’s banjo. It’s the same banjo I used to record this forthcoming album. He never quite learned how to play, but he promised if I learned to play he’d give it to me outright. Well I learned quickly and came home to play some serviceable Christmas songs and he smiled and laughed — he’s the kind of man who would accompany such jovial outbursts with the garnish of a “Gee Whiz” or “Well I’ll be: isn’t that something?”
It was something. I’m not a musician but that didn’t matter to him. And he wasn’t a Carnegie Hall audience but that didn’t matter to me. He was a captive set of eyes and ears; I was caught up in playing for him.
I’ve often told the story of how Uncle Bryan once bet my father (I think it was my father; it is at least my father who tells the story most often) a forty dollar bet that Dad he could one-time a squirrel through the neck with a nail gun. Dad, of course, took him up on the bet: nails often come out crooked from a gun with all of that copper housing to get in the way. Not to mention both the lack of fletchings and the presence of a giant backstop called the nail’s “head.” In short, they’re about as far from aerodynamic as humanly possible, often flying end-over-end.
Uncle Bryan, not to be deterred, pulled the safety off the nailgun, leveled his sights, and pulled off a shot. The nail flew end-over-end like a tomahawk. And, like a tomahawk thrown by a chief, it met its mark, one-timing the squirrel through the neck. “Forty bucks,” Uncle Brian said.
Or something like that.
Turns out, that wasn’t Uncle Bryan but another guy named Willy. But the fact that I thought it was FOR YEARS tells you everything you need to know. How I cherished his inventiveness.
He was a gentle man. The kind that used to leak that riding crop virtue onto others, that riding crop virtue behind the definition of the word “gentlemen.” I remember his house smelling of baked goods and wood lacquer and this musk he wore, the kind you expect to encounter in the din of a large game hunter. He and Aunt Shirley were some of the few from our hometown to support us on our voyage out here to New York. Many others from many other places backed us, but a minority come from my hometown. Only in his hometown is a prophet without honor. I feel that often when I’m home, a stranger in a strange land that was once familiar, however much I love Salem, but I never ever felt it with Uncle Brian when I came back to the fatherland. The man was always proud of me and always encouraging me towards the end of my being’s spectrum, which made him most proud. He may have seen cowardice in me alongside courage. Though proud of both, he made it clear that he was most proud of courage. He may have seen me perform on a stage for myself and for others. Though proud of me for existing on a stage, he made it clear that he was most proud of the times I performed for others.
He was also a deviously inventive man — this is a guy who hooked a squirrel feeder up to a bug zapper and a metal door mat up to an electrified screen door so that either the annoying neighborhood squirrel or the annoying neighborhood cat would complete the circuit. That same innovative spirit leveraged at the demise of pests in his life was used to benefit young children and family alike — this is a guy who matched my Grandpa creation-for-creation, and my Grandpa’s the one who made us cork guns and wooden swords out of old shims and forts out of spare lumber. I will miss his engineering mind, for better and worse, for you cannot miss a man unless you miss all of the man — all that he was and all that he could aspire to become or improve about himself. I hope my great nephews one day remember even my worst qualities with the kind of joy and nostalgia and longing that I remember Uncle Bryan’s with. I mean simply to speak for the dead, to do what Ender did in Speaker for the Dead:
“But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can’t hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can’t hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart.”
― Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
His final cause, in the end, was always a good one. The end in his heart was a joy and a courage. And I will love him forever for that.
I can’t speak for Uncle Bryan’s kids or grandkids, I can only speak for myself when I say a great light has gone out in the world. Family’s an interesting thing. They’re the people that you’re stuck with, family, but if you’re lucky they also stick with you. Uncle Bryan took an active role in sticking with me, going above and beyond the role of the typical great-Uncle. He was, in many ways, a true uncle. It’s weird growing up with as many great-uncles as I had, growing up with seven out of eight great-grandparents alive, one of whom is now a great-great grandparent to my brother’s son. I consider myself lucky, of course, the shadow proves the sunshine. This man casts a longer shadow than any other great uncle of whom I’ve heard any tale told. He will be missed.
I suppose, in the end, if family are the people who are stuck with you (and sometimes who choose to stick with you), then family is either growing or shrinking to that effect. I suppose it depends on the perspective. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve certainly lost far more relatives than I’ve gained. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Family is meant to be an exponential thing — the healthiest people at the start of Gladwell’s book Outliers were those little Italian communities in Pennsylvania that had multiple, multiple generations living in the same house. Perhaps I have Gladwell on the mind because I’m writing this from inside the lobby of the ACE Hotel where he wrote Tipping Point, but I doubt it. Much more likely is this:
My mourning over my own incapacity to carry my legacy around in a womb has converged with my longing for big-H “Home” in some idealized sense. I’m stuck wondering how long it’ll take me to grow my family, to leave a legacy. For years this one thing has occupied much of my meditation: that entire nations were named after men who begat large families. Egypt, Israel, Moab, Amerigo were all once men. If Brian was anything, he begat a large family. He was an Esau. He, a Joseph with his not-so-technicolor dreamcoat. Carpenter among carpenters. Man among men.
I have no point other than I’d like to see more Schauberts brought into the world than taken out. More Coffeys. More Shanafelts and McCormicks and Meiggses and Wigginses and Kemps and so forth. Say what you will about population control, I believe more life in the world is better than less life in the world.
Who am I to veto my progeny before they have a voice in the vote?
I refuse the tyranny of my generation upon the next.
I hope to let them speak.
Like Uncle Bryan Coffey let me speak. Like he implored me to speak. Like he applauded when I spoke from a stage or played an instrument or… there are so many things.
I started reading Stephen King’s On Writing again yesterday. There’s a part where he says:
“If my wife had suggested that the time I spent writing stories on the front porch of our rented house on Pond Street or in the laundry room of our rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me. Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, there’s someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
Uncle Bryan, for reasons only God knows, believed in me. And on occasion on some dark night, that made all the difference. Rest in peace, Uncle Bryan. Thank you for these wonderful, wonderful gifts you’ve left us all. See you soon.
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