Not including ad libs, and including things that weren't read correctly or read at all (both out of nervousness and inability to read my own handwriting):
I’m Chris Bartle, Stuart’s eldest child.
Two thank yous: First, I want to thank the church and Reverend Tuck for letting us use the church and Tad Evans for leading the service. This church was very important for Mom and Dad and Tad’s role in their lives cannot really be overstated. He was in the broadest and strongest sense of the words their spiritual advisor.
Second, I want to thank the community here in the Berkshires for giving my father and mother full and happy lives. They truly loved it here. You might even say they reveled in it. In fact, Berkshire County is the first place they lived that they chose entirely for themselves – New York, East Hampton, Boston, Charlottesville, even Zimbabwe were choices driven in some way by family or external considerations. A good part of their mutual journey was trying gently to untie the knots tied by their Upper East Side upbringings – they did that here.
So the Berkshires represented freedom. In any event, they came here solely because they wanted to and they eventually adopted it as their year-round home because they loved the people here – in other words, because of you. You know who you are – Barbara and Stuart’s friends, and Dad’s colleagues. It wasn’t the mountain scenery – as nice as it is – the culture – not even close - or the sailing – as challenging as that may have been – or the July 4 5k race he ran well into his 80’s. Mental Health Services of the Berkshires gave Dad the greatest job satisfaction of his life. As a person who watched his journey closely my whole life that is a big deal for me.
In the last few months, he really wanted to get back here – at age 89 and 1/2, he surreptitiously – that is, against orders from his daughters, and, I’m sure, the wishes of the local constabulary here – got his license back by escaping Cambridge (he would have said the gulag – as Bob Crichton called it), getting himself to the DMV in Watertown, wobbly gait and all, and then tried to buy a car, essentially on the Internet – all of it mainly to drive back here, where he would likely have been arrested or worse, if he had actually made it. Anyway – thank you Berkshires.
So we are all here. So much sooner than I wanted. So much sooner than I had planned. He was only 90, after all… But, then I always had unrealistic expectations of him. I thought he could do anything. He was the smartest person I ever knew, so I was sure he had some survival trick up his sleeve. That’s because his life story shows that he could survive almost anything and do nearly everything – as long as you don’t count organizing himself or paying more than cursory attention to his appearance.
(As an aside, as you may have noticed, he had a fine disregard for where he put things. Clothes were left on the floor exactly where he took them off. Papers were left exactly where he took his eyes off them. Kitchen implements exactly where he stopped using them. Drove Mom (and others I assume) crazy. Not me. All my life I have been attracted to people like that – they seem to me to go through life free – turning to the next opportunity, meeting the next person, taking the next risk.)
I really don’t know what to say. I am devastated, distressed, angry and hurt by Stuart Bartle’s death. It feels as if the oxygen content in the air has been reduced. I adored him. I never got tired of talking with him. I adored his story – his life seemed to me to be a kind of legend, a kind of aw shucks, duck and cover quest, with landmines, and bombs bursting all around him, almost until he got here to the Berkshires, where things calmed down a bit and he finally felt he fit. (To be altogether honest he may have had something to do with it. For instance, he said that during his time in combat, to show his nonchalance to the replacement troops – many of whom wouldn’t make it - and with foreknowledge of the various sounds different types of bombs and missiles made as they approached, after the initial sound of the missile launch, he would stand and wait until the very last second to drop to the ground… but only if the missile was indeed coming close.)
Stuart Bartle seemed to emerge – balanced and intact - from a family and life history filled with tragic stories and very near misses - of his grandmother who died having an abortion, his namesake uncle who intentionally crashed his stunt plane in an airshow in front of his estranged wife, his rescue as a 5-year old on a runaway horse at a gallop by his beautiful mother, the sudden disappearance of his charming and utterly unreliable 9-handicap polo-playing father, the equally sudden appearance of a mercurial, charismatic, nearly omnipotent stepfather (who seemed to own practically all of New York City and a large part of East Hampton, who was capable of producing nearly anything - a giant windmill floating down the beach, midtown hotels to play in, a cornucopia of antique cars and fire trucks, boats, seaplanes – and for Dad a 1909 Stanley Steamer to rebuild - that’s where he claimed he became interested in pulmonary physiology - and a baseball signed by the 1927 Yankees that included all of murderers row), a stepfather obsessed with self-improvement, who hired a terrifying 6’6” barrel chested man to swim miles out in the Atlantic with him, a man built such that he could balance a glass of water on his chest standing up, but whose main job was to toughen Dad up, and a German lady whose job it was to force Dad to eat more to gain weight, a brother who excelled at every sport and with girls.
So the shy boy escaped to Pomfret, where he realized very late – actually he was told in no uncertain terms – that he was underachieving and so sprinted to academic success in his last year, although not quite as far as he wanted, graduating 5th in his class. Then drafted into the infantry, where he met the Fish – his friend called “the Fish” – who, among other tricks, stuck thumbtacks in his leg to get free drinks, and trained with a unit of Indiana farmers who sang “Columbus Stockade Blues” as its rallying song. (“’Say, did you say way down?’ ‘Yes, I said way down,’ ‘Way down in Columbus, Georgia?” “Way down, in Columbus Stockade.”). Then the war, with most of its horrors unspoken until he was in is 80’s, where during the winter of 1944-45, for four months of nearly every day combat, he never even got on a jeep – he crawled, walked, ran, ducked and dived across western Germany – and where his unit had a 400% replacement rate. (Whenever I wonder how much to talk about his war experience, I remember that the password to his electronics always involved the word “infantry.”)
Then college, where, as you have heard, he wasn’t all that serious, but where he met Bob Crichton – his best friend – and the wonderful Crichton family and where occurred what I call the “great opening” – his 5th Avenue/East Hampton mind was opened to a raucous, intellectually challenging, confidently progressive world. College, where again, he prodigiously underachieved, and then again sprinted to the finish line – this time medical school – by acing organic chemistry the summer after graduation.
(Getting into medical school did not occur without bumps – he got caught in a lie during his Yale Medical school interview when he said he had taken a speed reading course and the interviewer said “show me!” He didn’t get into Yale.) In Charlottesville he participated in the surprisingly scary civil rights movement and fought his work demons, which finally were put to rest by his residency in psychiatry. In psychiatry, he fought to feel truly useful, and he finally found that usefulness here in the Berkshires – where he had a 3rd career beginning at age 64 that by itself would have been a fulfilling life.
Spring always came – the Nazis surrendered, exams were passed, new jobs were found, there were new races to train for. I relied on his journey and the joy and gratitude he radiated from surviving it so much more than I realized until recently – it’s really a story of multiple redemptions. I have identified with it my whole life. For me, it’s very hard to accept that it’s finally over.
As he did with you, my father unfailingly enthusiastically greeted me every single time I saw him, and halfway through any conversation I found him rooting for me, having turned the conversation away from him - again. And again, this is not different than the experience of so many others. (But, if you knew some of the stuff I put him through it might at least be a little surprising.)
He contributed his eclectic, funny, subversive, wry and deeply sympathetic thoughts freely in every conversation – but you knew that. He loved underdogs, he was exceedingly tolerant of oddballs, and he gave you his best self almost all the time – but you knew that too. He really could talk to anybody who was not utterly pretentious, and even them he usually found a way of forgiving. He was like this with everyone, so I wasn’t so special really, but oh my, it really worked on me. I was not jealous of the attention paid to others, I was proud. He ensorcelled my and Andy’s friends – many of whom in my teens were as at odds with the world as I was – with a kindness and tolerance and made them think I might be worth knowing. By far my biggest disappointments with him were when he fell asleep – after dinner when I wanted to talk to him – the famous post-prandial dip, born of the famous Bartle low blood pressure.
A great Massachusetts senator said of his brother that he didn’t want to enlarge him in death beyond what he was in life. But for me, my relationship with my father started with hero worship and ended that way. He was the most wonderful dad a kid like me could ever imagine – as a kid himself growing up in a maelstrom, he retreated into a magical world of puzzles, numbers popping up everywhere, measurements, gadgets of all kinds, secret shortcuts, baseball statistics and baseball heroes – mainly the New York Giants – ultimately, Willie Mays. He imparted all of that to me, to my everlasting joy.
Somewhere along there – adolescence and beyond - inevitably, we had a long battle. I may be one of the few who ever really had a battle with this gentlest and most forgiving of men. And to have it, I had to provoke it. It was very tough to get any kind of negative reaction, though I did eventually succeed. His way of being a dad was unusual - as you have heard and you know anyway, he was a self-effacing person and he himself had a lot of trouble with authority – of almost any kind - and even, in the third big chapter of his life, the lodestar of his belief system, peer-reviewed science, came in for challenge, thanks to Tad Evans.
These were deeply embedded traits, carried way past the point of usefulness. Example: as one of 3 people to arrive in Berlin from the original 150 or so soldiers in Company K of the 3rd Battalion, 310th Regiment, 78th Infantry, you might have expected him to get a battlefield commission or even just a promotion – nope. When he did get it, finally, in Berlin, he quickly lost it, and was happily and honorably discharged as a private.
We recently found something he wrote on leadership. It’s not typical of what you would see in a business school. Here is a quote: “I have hardly ever been a leader… I think my hatred of leadership goes back to childhood. But it is more than that, it is a lack of belief in myself as being able to tell someone else how to behave.”
In case you were wondering, he carried that principle into fatherhood. You might say his credo was, “Give ‘em a chance to do right, and they might…” with the corollary, “And if they don’t, tell ‘em they’re on the right track anyway.”
So here’s how my one-sided battle with him ended – he showed me how to act by being himself. He never gave up and he never told me what to do. When I occasionally did the right thing, he made me think I had done it on my own – in fact he congratulated me for it. (He got some revenge in the end – when Andy and Buffy found his papers, he had a little file that had only documentation of some of the lowest points of my life – letters related to getting kicked out of high school 3 days before graduation, a psychological examination showing some rather serious problems, tuition bills, a letter about the feckless pursuit of a long-forgotten career, a letter asking for money.) As the poet said, “What did I know, what did I know, of love’s austere offices?”[1]
What ultimately I sought from him was his character, a character formed not by backbone, but by reliance on his connection with things outside himself, not by his accomplishments but by commitment to a project that could not be completed in a lifetime, and not by grit, but by unconditional love.
…
At the end of his life, he was worried about Mom. They were, as most of you know, married for 65 years. She was his only real girlfriend – only girlfriend of any kind. He used to say, “I have to stay alive for your mother.” But the kidney disease would not let up. We knew he was letting go when he finally said, “I think you can take care of her.” He died March 26. As I said, spring always came for him, but this year, he was tired. He summoned the will to survive and he made sure he got as far as spring and her birthday – March 21 – and came to her 88th birthday party (he hated to miss parties). So from him to her, from Stuart to Barbara, by way of Yeats (with apologies to him for changing the meaning slightly from love unrequited to love reluctantly – very reluctantly – taken away), here is a poem[2]:
[When You Are Old]
"When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars."
But not forever, as he is waiting for you, when you get there.
And for my father, here is a poem written by his favorite poet, from Berkshire County[3]:
Two Friends
"One
is pared back into serious angles…
The other,
stands in hubbub or in corners, slightly bent.
Like the white-tufted heron,
his eyes dart at possibilities
while he carefully listens
for minnows under water.
He startles when you touch his arm ...
almost flies away.
Lacking radar,
he is likely to flap North in winter,
drawn by boyhood dreams
and fantasies of being Fisher King.
He's the one I'd call if death were due.
He'd drive me there,
(missing the exit, of course).
We'd talk improbabilities and laugh.
He'd snort my favorite snort.
We'd end up on the North Pole,
where magically,
the stones are warm."
And now, here we go, ‘way down’: [Harmonica]
[1] Robert Hayden, 1966, “Those Winter Sundays”
[2] William Butler Yeats, 1893 “When You Are Old and Grey”
[3] Laird White, 1999 “Two Friends” – written for Stuart on the occasion of his 75th birthday
