(P.S. to the marriage story)
The story of our marriage ceremony didn’t really do justice to Chuck, and newspaper obituaries are such fleeting things that I thought a little less transitory memorial was in order for the kindest, gentlest person I’ve known.
I’ll rush through the historical details so I can get to the good stuff. Chuck was an ordained Presbyterian minister, but for most of his career only served in an associate role at various churches. His first love was social justice, which led him to his master’s in social work and a variety of positions with mental health counseling agencies and elder-care agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area. As the long-time executive director of San Leandro Community Counseling (a precursor to the successful Davis Street Foundation in San Leandro), where I first met him, he invented a novel way to leverage talent. SLCC had been founded as a drug counseling agency during the 1960s, when Great Society and, later, Revenue Sharing money flowed freely. A decade later, however, public funds began drying up and the agency began having trouble meeting its payroll. At the same time, students pursuing a counseling degree were hard put to find someone to supervise them during the hundreds of hours of (unpaid) internship they were required to put in. Chuck put the two problems together to form a solution. A paid staff of five experienced counselors would oversee an intern staff of some twenty degree candidates who would do the actual counseling. It was a four-to-one return on our money. Chuck also marched with Cesar Chavez, was detained by the KBG for attempting to smuggle Bibles into the Soviet Union and worked extensively for the inclusion of LGBT clergy into the Presbyterian Church. *** Enough bio. Now for the stories. At age 60, Chuck finally decided to come out as a gay man. In typical Chuck fashion, he threw himself a birthday party, the invitation to which ran to two typewritten pages. “I hope that none of my friends will think the less of me because I’m gay,” he wrote. At the party, I turned to a table-mate and quipped, “Ah, Chuck will do anything to get attention. He’ll turn 60. He’ll turn gay...” To Chuck himself, I said (and I was not the only one), “Chuck, how goddamned stupid do you think we are? Everybody knows and nobody cares.” *** Chuck died about three weeks after performing his last wedding, for my step-daughter, Kristi. At the reception, he told me he had booked a flight to France to see his friends there one last time. “If I have to say goodbye to them, I want to do it in person,” he said. But he came home weak and was almost immediately hospitalized. He knew he was dying, and he called my office. Damnit, I wasn’t there, but he spoke to Marianne and told her his plans. “I think they’re going to let me go home tomorrow, and I want to have a potluck party for all of my close friends. I know you’re going to miss me, and I want to tell everybody not to. It’s going to be okay, and you shouldn’t spend any time grieving.” Chuck died the next morning, his last thoughts having been for the welfare of his friends, and not for himself. If I am reborn, I don’t want to come back as a white cow. I want to come back as Chuck McLain.