A Eulogy for Mike Stine

As some of you know I managed to be at the site of Mike’s crash some time between when it occurred and just before the arrival of the Montgomery County coroner.

Mike, at that time, should have been should have been riding back into his driveway, tired, sweaty, but energized thinking about the shower and cold drink waiting for him.
 
Words barely work, even in your own mind.  Unreal, surreal, stupefyingly unspeakable. Flashbacks to dinners,  parties, long and deep conversations,  the pink flamingoes we would secretly plant in each other’s gardens,  the hideous Elvis lamp we would regift over and over again, stories, histories, inside jokes, to all of the ups and down of enduring friendships. How in such a moment all of these memories come flooding back leaving you awash in the reality of what in life really counts – the quality of the moment?  You think of how easy it is to take for granted, this time, this now.
 
While I waited with the police detail for the Coroner to arrive, I needed to explain to Detective Boughter who this man on the ground was and why his loss will be so hard and will be felt so long and so deeply by so many.

 How could they know?  Would they ever have imagined that this free thinking, humane, literate, loving Lutheran chaplain educator who specialized in pastoral counseling had just spent the past five years teaching his special brand of humanity to military chaplains at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington?  Could they have known his outrage at the carnage of war he saw there?  Could they know that he was ready to put his career on the line to explain to the world the real human costs of war? The shattered bodies, the shattered dreams, the shattered lives? It was and is to be the documentary film, “Aftershock” that we have been working on with film maker Will Stanton for the past three years. 
 
Could they know that years ago Mike had been a Navy chaplain in Viet Nam and that he took the painful and difficult and very public path of challenging the abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons at the time calling the responsible leadership to account on 60 Minutes and in the national press.  That he marched for civil rights in the heat of the struggle in Selma Alabama.

Or that he had just this spring taken a teaching position at Georgetown University in Washington, again to share his vision of the caring pastor with oncoming caregivers?  Could they have known that Mike was a talented artist, a loving husband and father, a true, and loyal and selfless friend?

The tough men at the scene seemed to soften, to understand to appreciate the person lying on the ground before them.
 
I left the scene when the coroner arrived and before I was asked to leave.

What else is there to do but to turn to the tasks that Mike would have counseled us to tend to – of grieving, of remembering, of honoring, of sharing, of caring, of living, of never forgetting Mike

Bun Gladieux
August 2, 2007