Eulogy:
Edward Rees Dabbs
As delivered by his younger brother, Thomas Winn
Dabbs
I've had the pleasure of visiting an old friend in Pembrokeshire, Wales, several times over the past few years. On one visit he
took me to his church, a very old church, with one annex that dates back to the
13th century. As we were passing the grand cemetery nested there in the drizzle
and deep greenery surrounded by tall trees, I noticed a large old stone marker,
with the inscription, Rees, spelled R-E-E-S, and then I reckoned that whatever
our family roots are on my father's side, our mother's maiden name inscribed on
that old marker, put us at that location. I thought about my mother, my
brother, and my son, too, who all bear the name, Rees.
I thought about the continuity of that
old stone marker, and there was comfort in the thought of coming and going and
yet remaining. This thought today belongs with Brother Rees and with all of us
as we must come and go and yet remain. For reasons I can't express, it seems to
me that continuity is the thing.
It doesn't take much time at the local
Welsh pub to find out that Welsh folks are an intense bunch, much like their
similarly fired up Scottish brethren, and much like many of us here who share
parts of a recombinant DNA, rowdy but also genteel. This oxymoronic DNA was
very much entrenched in Rees Dabbs' character.
When Rees was in Intensive Care, I had
a chance to ask him what he wanted folks to remember about him. The most
immediate point he wanted to make about his life went directly to his childhood
growing up here at the Crossroads. Rees admitted that he felt lonely growing up
in the country. He yearned to have, like those boys in nearby Mayesville, the
numbers to strike up a good baseball game. He wanted more people, he said.
People were the thing with Rees.
In his adult life, he lived for people,
for repartee and good sport, and he filled his life with that which was not
there when he was growing up. He came to love that old world game of intense
and unruly engagement with folks, the sharp jokes and wit and artful manner he
had that took a routine conversation to another level, sometimes uncomfortable,
but also comic. Rees was the only person I've ever known who could consistently
turn insult into laughter. He could find that rowdy part of us that wanted to
be insulted, and we loved him for that.
For all those of us who knew him, even
the most casual meeting with Rees was an event. He challenged us even in our
most mundane moments, because nothing about life and people was mundane for
Rees.
This intensity led Rees to become a
flyer, a jet pilot in the U.S. Air Force. He retained throughout his life this
flyer’s intensity, sometimes with mixed results. Most of us love the safety of
firm ground, but flyers love the air. After leaving the service, at a young age
he became president of a jet charter company in Midland, Texas. Business
management was not his thing, so in the mid-1980s he returned to South Carolina
to fly corporate jets.
Though too much of his adult life, Rees
was plagued by alcoholism. We live in an age that has seen unprecedented
technological achievements and wondrous advances in science, and to us it seems
that the old malady of addiction should be part of a bygone era of afflictions
that we only read about, like the Black Death in Europe. But the plague of
addiction remains, and all of us have suffered it on some level, directly or
indirectly. I am told that Rees survived this struggle and found, in the years
before his death, recovery and the hard path to redemption. I guess that many
of us remain puzzled by the vocabulary that surrounds the recovery from
addiction, by the vagueness of how personal fault is mixed in with a disease
tied to the continuing mystery of DNA and how the brain functions.
But I know that in his final days, his
hospital room, Rees had recovered, and he was visited by friends who shared his
struggle and whose lives he had touched. In recent years, he worked as a
volunteer in a local prison and also volunteered in other capacities, touching
and challenging that rowdy DNA in the hearts and minds of all he met and worked
with.
In this remote country crossroads, Rees
was born an aviator, and he carried through his life a love of flying. It is
impossible for most of us to understand the intensity of taking a fierce but
delicate piece of metal through the air at twice the speed of sound. It is
difficult to imagine what it must be like to guide that craft, to push it to
its limits, flying high in maneuvers, in formation, helmeted, on oxygen, at
supersonic speed, holding a steady hand on that stick that is just a
centimeter, a breath away from certain death.
Jet flight, this art, requires courage.
It also requires a sense of abandon coupled with utter calm, a curious and
contradictory blend of recklessness and finesse that seems the natural
descendant of that rowdy but gentile DNA, its continuance from times past, from
an old green world of tall trees and old names that live on. This art of
navigating planes and people in the gleeful spirit of challenge was the rare
talent that Rees inherited and cultivated in his better years.
He was always the flyer exploring the
natural limits of nature, circling the bounds of life and aiming for a good
ball game with people. Rees’s final flight would leave a hole in our lives but
for the fact that he was, for all of us who knew him, among the most
unforgettable people we will ever meet. He flew with recklessness and finesse
through our lives and our memories, and he will continue to fly with us, forever.
He
was our son, our brother, our kinsman, sometimes our nemesis, but always our
dear friend. May the name of Edward Rees Dabbs join into formation with that
old stone marker in Wales, and may his name continue to resound in our hearts
and minds, and thoroughly beyond.
