I’ve got about a million things I’ve been wanting to post, from thoughts about events in the Middle East to my personal first sign of spring to some musical ramblings, but in addition to having been away for part of last week/weekend, I’ve also been pretty shell-shocked following news last week of the death of my friend Dan Bentele, who left us on March 2 as a result of complications from a seizure disorder. More than a week later, I’m still reeling a little (and My Favorite DJ™ just dedicated Lucinda Williams’s “Pineola” to Dan, which got me choked up again).
I’m a little surprised, though maybe I shouldn’t be, at how hard Dan’s death has hit me. He was an online friend (though I saw him a few times a year, generally, since he lived in St. Louis and I’m there fairly often), and as such, he wasn’t part of my day-to-day life, so theoretically, it’s not the same thing as losing a “real world” friend. A few other online acquaintances have died during my years on various music lists—there was a very troubled young man named Alec Horgan who killed himself shortly after a bunch of us met him at Twangfest, and there was a great guy named Mark Domsic, a veteran noncommercial radio DJ who died of a heart attack, and a brilliant, likeable, unusual Postcarder named Robert Morris, who died far too young for reasons unknown (unknown to me, at least). And in all those cases, I grieved but wasn’t quite sure how to grieve, because these were people I didn’t know well, exactly, and yet their lives touched mine enough that I felt their loss.
(Oh, geez, now John is playing “Let the Mystery Be.” I’m going to be weeping all over the keyboard in a minute here. )
It’s somewhat different with Dan. For one, he was one of the first online friends I made, way back in the AOL days before I even had real Internet access—late 1993, I’m thinking. We had a mutual friend, a lovely gal named Jenny Lau, who used to work for the Bodeans, so I was predisposed to like Dan before I even had any correspondence with him. He was enormously likeable, as it turned out, so I didn’t even need the predisposition to like him.
(And now it’s “Windfall,” which I was singing in memory of Dan as I drove to work this morning. Need to pause for a second to fight back the tears; I am at work, after all.)
Over the years, we corresponded one-on-one less frequently, but we were always at least vaguely in touch, and as mentioned, I saw him in St. Louis regularly (and at SXSW a couple of times too). He always had a hug and a smile and a bunch of questions for me about how I was doing, etc. He knew how much I love St. Louis, and he was always trying to come up with job ideas for me there. He also promised to come up for a Chiefs game sometime, though sadly, that never happened. He was the consummate good listener, which meant that I knew less about him than he did about me, but I did know that he’d worked in a bank but left to teach English as a second language, that he loved working on his family’s farm with his brother, Doug, and that he was very close to his family even though they didn’t share his politics. I could never figure out why he was still single; he was practically the definition of A Catch.
Reading people’s reminiscences about him on various lists, I was struck by how many of them had similar things to say about Dan: “He was one of the first people to introduce himself to me at Twangfest,” “He took me under his wing at SXSW and made sure I met people,” “He always came up and shook my hand and reintroduced himself, as if I’d have forgotten who he was.” That was Dan—a guy with a big heart, a big smile, and an easy way with people that made running into him an unalloyed pleasure; he was one of those rare people who never really met a stranger.
It’s painful to write about him in the past tense, and I can’t help feeling that he had a lot left to do in this world, but on the other hand, he lived every minute of his life to the fullest, something I admire tremendously because I know I don’t do it. I’ll miss him. I already miss him. Rest in peace, Dan.
(Talking to my dad about this last night, I found out that he had also learned of the death of an old friend recently, a friend from Peace Corps days. He worked for the Peace Corps back in its earliest days, in the early ’60s, and when he started talking about the memorial service for the woman who died, the list of names of people who were there took me back to a time in my life that I remember fairly vividly (considering I was just a toddler at the time) and very happily; they’re names to conjure with, for me, and the news of the death discombobulated me a little. It’s been a very disorienting week or so, for a number of reasons, the rest of which I’ll get into later.)