This is an eulogy delivered for Rick Herreid at St. Olaf Lutheran Church on Saturday, November 9, 2019
I last saw Brother Herreid upright at a dinner party in his home. This was six days before he was struck down. Rick fed 20 people that night: pork loin with sweet apricot sauce. After the meal, Julie and I went out into the chill night, walking down his steep, black driveway. We were a little flushed with wine and shots of Jaegermeister and Aquavit. And, then, I thought surely there will be many, many nights like this in the future.
But, now, we know in bone and marrow that no one has tenure here. For a brief time, we dig our toes in to the clay of this rapidly warming ball of earth, but it is all temporary and will pass in the blink of an eye.
Now, I’m conscious that what I say is insufficient. To be truthful, I don’t know what to tell you. This morning I am dismayed, disheartened, and downcast. Honesty compels me to admit that I am baffled, astonished – shaken to my core. Rick’s death opens a crack in creation, it creates a void that no words can fill. How is it that someone so vibrant, so impressively alive, can be snatched away from us without warning or premonition?
Although there’s nothing I can say sufficient to this loss, I will tell you this: first and foremost, Rick was an explorer, an adventurer. This may seem odd for someone whose life was so well-ordered. But Rick was the consummate traveler. Curiosity was his passport. For more than 35 years in our Great Books group, we read authors from Iceland to Japan, books written in Sudan, Peru, Mexico and Russia as well as many other places. Rick’s curiosity spanned not only the globe but the ages. We argued about Gilgamesh, the Bible and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, studied everything from Beowulf to David Foster Wallace and, most recently, George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo. (This was only three weeks ago.)
Brother Herreid read with attention, good sense, and generosity. He didn’t condone nonsense and on more occasions than I wish to remember, he called me out on my improbable or fanciful hermeneutics. But here is the remarkable thing – his criticism wasn’t harsh or malicious. Rick simply didn’t have the DNA to be nasty to anyone. In more than 35 years, I never heard him say anything derogatory about any one that he knew. And without fail, he was kind, polite, civil, and well-spoken. To both literature and life, he applied his scientist’s powers of observation to regard the world honestly, with neither cynicism nor wishful-thinking.
Rick’s far-flung interests, his intellectual citizenship of the world, was matched by his actual travels. He seemed to have been everywhere: France and Belgium’s World War I battlefields, Norway’s fjords, gloomy Russia and the sunny beaches of the Philippines and too many other places to list. With Karen, he made the necessary pilgrimage to the hallowed places in American history – the bridge at Selma. Birmingham, the Delta and Memphis. This was part of his unerring commitment to justice and equal rights for all. He traveled easily, as if it were no big deal. Somehow, he made things seems obvious and simple. Whenever possible, he ate memorable meals in remarkable places. In every picture from every faraway city or village, he is grinning at the camera. Travel intimidates me – it makes me anxious and afraid. But Rick was fearless. I will tell you that once, he sailed around the turbulent and storm-vexed Cape Horn. I like to think of him on that vessel, under white sails and amidst the glacial fjords of Tierra del Fuego, the fabled land of fire. In my imagination, he is the fortunate traveler: resourceful, courageous and determined to make the best of the fearsome squalls at the very ends of the earth. There he is: a peerless human being – in every photograph, he flashes his warrior’s smile into our memories. Of course, his ancestors were Vikings. Then, a gust makes the sails billow and the little ship takes wing, surging across the whale-road, prow pointed toward the undiscovered lands ahead.
Fantastic!
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