On October 3, 2021, my dad passed away. Those last two months of hospice were an intense journey for me, and I’m thankful for the way we spent that time together.
I gave this remembrance at his memorial service on November 27, 2021, and want to share it with you here. Please let me know what it stirs in you.
Remembrance of Chuck Alexander by Mark Alexander
11/27/2021
We’re here to remember Chuck.
There have been a lot of blessings over these last few months. Among them is one that’s no small thing: I’ve been able to meet lots of people from my dad’s life. That’s people like you, gathered here and online. People like Lucky from this congregation, who I got to meet for the first time during this final chapter. Lucky helped us, just like so many of you helped us: because you wanted to.
The blessing in this was in hearing the way people talked about my dad. How people just liked him. This was one more window for me into the warmth that he had — a quality of engagement that people liked.
This was the guy who taught me woodworking. He wasn’t an incredible woodworker. But when I wanted to build a pinewood derby car or a catapult, he helped me select the wood, shape it, assemble and finish it. He taught me how varnish works. And he taught me how paint thinner works and how sandpaper and rasps and saws work; when to use nails and when to use screws.
We didn’t connect all that much in the course of any given week. But we connected over projects. That’s where we were both in our element – I wanted to build something, and he wanted to show me how. Along the way he took the chance to show me the deeper layers of how these things work. And from that, what to do to get the best result.
Chuck is the one who taught me that there’s layers and layers of depth to be heard in a piece of music. Even though I might only be listening on one level today, at some point I’d see just how much more there is. And that taught me to look beyond what I’m seeing on the surface.
When I was 10 years old he taught me about wave physics and the Fourier Theorem… which is pretty advanced for a 10-year old. I didn’t get a lick of the math, but I saw his enthusiasm for it — the gleam in his eye, and I could tell there was something more below the surface. And over the next 15 years, that blossomed into my deep love and fascination with wave mechanics and signal processing.
Some of my earliest memories of my dad were us just cracking up and laughing. I was probably three years old, and just having the best time ever, on some evening after work before going to bed.
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I would get frustrated with him. You may be acquainted with his legendary determination and even stubbornness. And what seemed to me like an inability to see beyond a concrete worldview.
His beliefs ran deep. Yet he had real openness. He always had a desire and a craving for more. I saw that especially in these last four years. During this time, his rather academic interest in the mystical got very practical. He started investigating in earnest: what. this. existence. is. and what experience is actually made of. It was amazing for me, because this is what fascinates me the most, and it expanded the common ground we had.
We’d go back and forth in emails and occasional long conversations about “OK, what’s non-duality?” and “How do we know that there’s an external reality?” Really deconstructing the limits of what we can and can’t know.
And in that, something else blossomed: he expressed to my brother and me his desire to really go for broke in exploring tools to open the doors of consciousness ever wider. And he took those journeys, and each time, he wanted to go back for more.
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In the final months, as his paragraphs went to sentences, and then sentences shrank to words, and then even the words slowly faded away, the connection that we shared didn’t waver. In fact, I can say that our connection increased. It was incredible.
His strong desire for connection was revealing itself. It was there right through the last day. And the remarkable thing — this connection didn’t exist in the realm of words. It was in his gaze. In that gaze was intense immediacy. Two solitudes saluting each other.
I want to close with a poem that he asked me to read to him, and my mom and my brother, in his bed on his last day. It’s by Rilke:
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
“You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.”
Superradiatingfieldmagnet 