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My friend Chuck Tillotson died yesterday

Posted on June 26, 2008July 14, 2010 by Staff


By Gary Phillips

I dreamed of him as a bird last night,
migrating in the dark toward some vast coastal outline.
Other fliers joined as we flew.
Up ahead somewhere I could hear raucous welcome cries
and what sounded like a thousand gossiping voices.
Chuck made for it.
He shook me off somewhere
over the noisy shore with a tender but definitive dip,
and I woke up in my own body.
There were gold finches at the feeder, explosions of yellow energy so intense that it took me a raft of seconds to recognize them as being part of the real world.

Chuck Tillotson was a carpenter, a guitar player, a legendary party boy. He laughed a lot, admired his friends and stayed true to them, gave himself freely to strangers. He was a father to beautiful boys. Chuck played a slow style of poker that drove some people crazy. He was a handsome man with a gentle mien and a long unruly white mustache. He had a voice like hot honey: low, whiskey-filtered, languorous and warm.

Chuck had a great love in his life, his wife Veronica. They had struggles, as all great loves do, but many people envied the laughter they carried together and their love gravity, the way they leaned toward each other over and again as if they shared a rich warm secret.

Chuck was alive and living his life and then he was in trouble and then he was slipping away from us, one foot on the Long Road and no more than a slim thread connecting him to the dirt and sweat and precious air of this world.

The doctor called us in for a conference, into a lounge so full of people some had to share chairs or sit on the floor. He brought in his whole nursing crew for support. The doctor was gentle and his eyes misted, which comforted us, but his message was unequivocal. “I could do an intervention here,” he said. “It’s what we’re trained to do as doctors. I could maybe give Chuck two or three more weeks, stem the infection with surgery and powerful drugs, but it would all come to the same thing, and I don’t think Chuck would want us to do that.” He blinked.

In a room just a few yards away Chuck lay, sedated and pierced with tubes. He looked so vulnerable it broke our hearts.

Veronica took her courage in hand and made the decision: Chuck would be taken off life support and his family would gather and make him as comfortable as possible. She talked with his sons and their strong fine mother, called family members, made arrangements with the nursing staff, had a final consult with the doctor.

I stood in for the family during the extubation, while the doctor and staff freed Chuck from his coil of tubes and separated him from the respirator. This procedure took over an hour. Nurses and doctors were tender and respectful, talking with Chuck as if he were conscious and making every effort not to cause him pain. They treated him always as a human being, as the treasure of a person we all knew.

At calm times during the procedure I worked with Chuck, and the staff gave me room. I blessed him with water and sang songs and prayers of release from many traditions, like this from The Pagan Book of Living and Dying:

“Beloved Chuck, you are
dying
But you are not alone.
We are here with you,
The beloved dead await you.
You go from love
into love.
Carry with you
only love.
May our love carry you
And open the way.”

Lauren the floor chaplain walked up to his bed and said: “Chuck, you are a lucky man. You must be a lucky man to inspire such love, such careful attention, so many friends.”

After Chuck was made clean and comfortable his boys and Veronica came in and hugged him and whispered to him and held him in their arms until he died. We all cried a bucket of tears but it was a great loving send-off, with 20-30 more waiting in the hall who came in after to have their time with Chuck and with the family.

That same evening, a whole boatload of Chuck’s friends met at a community building on the Chatham/Alamance line, and a riotous emotional wake broke out, with music, dancing and another raft of tears, floating us toward that Other Shore so close we could almost see it, but not ours, not yet.

My sweet daddy died this year as well and almost as unexpected, and I saw a conservative Baptist community I had fled taking care of its own, with food and witness and stories and a thousand acts of kindness to our family. Both these deaths, Chuck’s and my father’s, were hard and shattering to me but they each had a sense of rightness somehow, not that they happened but that both deaths were surrounded by dignity and love and community support for the survivors.

Now my father speaks through my bones in the morning dew and sometimes Chuck Tillotson will slip into my dreams. I’m glad for both, and all that went before.

3 thoughts on “My friend Chuck Tillotson died yesterday”

  1. Anne Miller says:
    May 11, 2009 at 5:28 pm

    Hi Gary..Knew Chuck in the late 70’s, @ old Pyewacket when he and Bev were together.W’out long explanation, he came to my mind a few days ago in sonnection w those times and then saw Meg, my sis. She told me about his death through yet another tangential conversation.He was such a sweet man…..

  2. Anne Miller says:
    May 11, 2009 at 5:31 pm

    Anyway….it was one of those moments in time…I am still in contact with Marta Avalle Arce, who was a dear friend of his back in the day. I will contact her in Oregon and let her know…I am so glad you and his more recent friends were there for him and his family. A beautiful strong soul….

  3. Scott N. Collard says:
    July 14, 2010 at 11:23 am

    Thank you for your words, Gary. Chuck was my cousin and we had been outside of each other’s lives for many, many years. I knew he was out there, just didn’t know where. I learned of his death well after the fact. The news came from his mother and sister. Their news felt so strange, as if they were telling us about someone they had heard of instead of the boy I had wrestled with on the lawn of my grandparent’s big house in Massachusetts.

    So with the news of his death, came the not knowing of the rest of his life. Your article told me so much about how he lived and how he died. I am grateful. It’s a loose end tied up now.

    I am especially grateful to know that he enjoyed the love of so many in his final days; that he went “from love into love”. It’s exactly what I would have hoped for him to have.

    Thank you, Gary.

    Sincerely,

    Scott Collard, Son of Merrel A. Collard, Jr.
    Brother of Joanne (Jody Collard) Tillotson

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