A Poem for Tim Edwards 1958-2010
Gerry Hassan
July 15th 2010
It has been a moving last couple of days. Today witnessed the sad and moving tribute to the life and passions of Tim Edwards, who died suddenly at the age of 51 just a week and a half ago. And yesterday witnessed the fourth anniversary of the passing of my mother, Jean Carr, at the age of 73, after a long, painful illness.
Tim was a good man – that goes without saying. He was a gentle man and a passionate man and that’s a mix I have always found affirming and positive. He cared deeply about people, life and the planet, and tried in so many small and significant ways to make life better for people and to shift assumptions and power. Tim stood quietly and with grace, challenging the messed up, rotten state of so much of our society and world. And seeing how we could navigate ways out of this.
He was also a man of quiet, powerful, sincere faith, a passionate lover of all sorts of types of music with an endless curiosity for new sounds and experiences. We shared a love of the wonderful hard rockin’ storytelling band the Drive-By Truckers. Govan was close to his heart as it is to anyone who knows the romance and hope of the real place. And the same was true of Dundee, my hometown, where Tim spent many of the formative years of his life after university.
Today’s service at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral caught the spirit, the hope and the love that was within Tim and that he brought to so many people’s lives, and it was so appropriate that afterwards we went to one of Tim’s favourite places, the wonderful Pearce Institute in the heart of Govan.
Here is a poem I read today which made me think of Tim – ‘’Simplify Me When I’m Dead’ by Keith Douglas, a young Scots poet who died at the tender age of 24 on the beaches of Normandy in 1944:
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I’m dead.
As the processes of earth
strip off the colour and the skin
take the brown hair and blue eye
and leave me simpler than at birth,
when hairless I can howling in
as the moon came in the cold sky.
Of my skeleton perhaps
so stripped, a learned man will say
‘He was of such a type and intelligence,’ no more.
Thus when in a year collapse
particular memories, you may
deduce, from the long pain I bore
the opinions I held, who was my foe
and what I left, even my appearance
but incidents will be no guide.
Time’s wrong-way telescope will show
a minute man ten years hence
and by distance simplified.
Through that lens see if I seem
substance or nothing: of the world
deserving mention or charitable oblivion
not by momentary spleen
or love into decision hurled,
leisurely arrive at an opinion.
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I’m dead.
Tim Edwards 1958-2010
