| In Loving Memory of Gray McGhee Seeing this on a printout? This page is at: http://www.ronreason.com/remember.html
  [This is a photo taken by Sandy Johnakin of the Poynter staff, showing part of the crowd assembled for the memorial service on July 25, 1998. Kenny Irby, family friend and Poynter colleague, delivers introductory remarks. More than 220 people attended.]
MEMORIAL SERVICE PROGRAM: | |||
| On July 25, 1998, more than 220 guests gathered in the Great Hall of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla. for the memorial tribute to Gray McGhee. The Institute owns the St. Petersburg Times, where Gray was a much-admired staffer for more than 10 years. Poynter is also my employer, and sincere thanks go to all my Poynter family for making this special event happen. I decided to post this remembrance online for the many friends and co-workers of Gray who were unable to attend the service. If anyone ever has to confront the difficult task of writing or delivering their own remembrance like this, feel free to email me! I have many thoughts on the matter. It was a difficult thing to think about and do, but ultimately, it was easier when I just felt that it was the thing that had to be done.
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MEMORIAL SPEECH FOR GRAY McGHEE By Ron Reason, companion and best friend Delivered July 25, 1998
At first I wasn't quite sure about having this service at the place
where I work, but after reflection I realized it made great sense on a
number of levels. Not to get too far into my story, but Gray was an
intensely loyal company man. He wasn't a journalist really but he adored
the newspaper where he served as Advertising Art Director for the past
few years and worked for more than 10 years total. This place, in my
mind and the minds of many others, serves as a spiritual headquarters
not only to the St. Petersburg Times, but in many ways, to the newspaper
industry worldwide. I'm so thankful for my Poynter family for pulling a
lot of this together, and I'm thrilled that we can conduct this event in
this beautiful space, under a glass skylight, which just might offer
Gray a better view of all of us here today.WHO WAS GRAY?
This kind of speech always requires that you take an accounting of
the person's life you have gathered to remember. Some of you know some
of this, but few of you know all of it, so here are the headlines, in no
particular:
- Gray, as I already have said, was a loyal company man,
almost to a fault. (Who here today has ever worked with Gray at the St.
Petersburg Times? Or passed him in the hallways? Please raise your
hand.) A lot of you know the late hours and weekends he spent there,
going the extra mile for this project or that. But one story of
dedication stands out for me. On May 20, Gray received the distressing
message on his answering machine from the doctors telling him that they
had diagnosed his leukemia - it was that urgent - and that he should
RUSH, not walk, to be admitted to a hospital. Despite this news, Gray
just had to go into the office for more than four hours that day
because, well, there WAS so much important work to do.
A week later, at Moffitt Cancer Center, with chemo being pumped into
his body, he insisted that he had to call in to work to check on how
things were going, to contribute to some staffers' reviews, and so on.
Many of you sent me some terrific tributes about his skills in the
booklet we passed out today, so we all know that Gray was a wonderful
artist, photographer, and manager. But it was this dedication to the end
that I find really astonishing.
- Gray was a natural teacher, even to some of us who weren't
natural students. (Who here has ever learned anything from Gray, either
in a class, on the job, or in informal conversation? Please raise your
hand.) Not only did he teach four semesters of advertising and
publication design at the University of South Florida in Tampa in the
early '90s, but he was constantly sharing his knowledge with others, on
and off the job. The stock investing club of which he was vice
president, his hobbies of cooking, swimming, weightlifting and art, were
all subjects for learning, teaching, and just passionate conversation in
general. Even when he didn't know all the answers, he was sharing the
questions that he had thought about so well, and so many of us
benefitted.
- Gray was a fantastic cook. (Who here has ever had a meal by
Gray, or talked cooking with Gray? Please raise your hand.) I just don't
mean a Christmas and Thanksgiving kind of amateur cook, he was really
serious about it. He even had a customized database of recipes on his
Macintosh, searchable by fat content, preparation time required, or
whatever. Only Gray. It wasn't unusual for me to come home on an
ordinary Tuesday night, and find him scurrying around the kitchen making
sauteed scallops in champagne sauce over orzo. Maybe with a red pepper
glaze. (Yes, as many of you have told me, I was really quite spoiled.
I'm painfully aware of it now.) Even after working a 10-hour day with the stress of a
management position and often driving to and from the Times regional
bureaus, he would come home and whip up dishes like this. Occasionally I
would be winding down from work in the other room, and I'd hear an
ebullient "YES!" In the kitchen was Gray doing a Dilbert-like power
pull, rejoicing that he had successfully interpreted a recipe from Bon
Apetit or Food&Wine - scoffing at their call for four sticks of butter
and making it work just as well, if not better, with 1/2 teaspoon of
margarine and half a cup of chicken broth instead.
- Gray was a wonderful son who loved his parents, all five of
them: his mother, June, his dad and stepmother, Jim and Sandy, and
my parents, Chuck and Carolyn. He loved his brothers, Russ, Chris and
Michael, and he long ago "adopted" my sisters Carrie and Kellie and
their families, especially their children, who several years ago sort of
"figured it all out" and started sending Christmas cards addressed to
"Uncle Gray." (Please raise your hand if you are from the families.)
- Last, but not least, he was a fantastic, forgiving companion
and best friend, and I'm proud to say I am the only one here who can
raise his hand on that count. I want to point out a few things about our
relationship here. I've received many nice comments, not just in the
past two months but even before that, about how some people, straight or
gay or whatever, found our relationship to be inspiring. A few people
even have wrongly used the word "perfect." I never said nor really
thought that ours was a perfect relationship, but I do think that it was
a great one on many levels. That's an important distinction to me. We
stuck it out, overlooked lots of little flaws (mostly Gray overlooking
mine), had eight really great years, and here we are today.
A lot of you wrote to me and said you'll miss that incredible smile,
but I'll especially miss the goofy looks, the silly nicknames, that
signature with the amazing flourish, the exciting times as well as the
quiet steady presence, and the endless faith and confidence and support
in everything I did. Even to this day, he remains an inspiration to me.
My organizing of this entire memorial, from the design of the booklet
to the writing of this speech, was inspired by him, as so much of my
work in the past has been.ON GOODNESS AND OPTIMISM
Earlier this week I sat in this great atrium and tried to tell Rev.
Hall, who will speak in a minute, about the type of person Gray was, and
the more I blabbed on the more he must have thought, no one could have
been this nice. But all of you here are my witnesses, and Donna Clark
said it appropriately in the memorial booklet that she regarded Gray as
"goodness itself." He was always so much more concerned about other
people than he ever was himself, and probably everyone here has their
own story about how Gray showed concern or compassion to them in some
meaningful way.
On the night of May 20, I returned from a day trip to Orlando and
got a phone call from Gray telling me he was in the hospital and to come
right over. He didn't say much more, or tell me why he was there. After
heading to the hospital and riding up in the elevator marked "To cancer
ward," I started to figure it all out, sadly. I entered his room, and
the first words he said to me were: "I'm so sorry for putting you
through this." Can you imagine? "I'm so sorry for putting you through
this." That was Gray. To him, the big inconvenience here was to us.
It wasn't always easy being the other half of "goodness
personified," let me tell you. By contrast if nothing else, you tend to
come off looking a little bad. This really became apparent about four or
five years ago while I still worked at the Times, and the newsroom
clerks one day decided that they would take a poll as they did their
errands around the building. They surveyed not only me and my friends
but many people who didn't know us, or our story, very well. The survey
question they asked was this: "Who would you rather be? Ron or Gray?"
Think about that for a moment.
It turned out to be a trick question, of course, the answer being that
you should want to be Ron because then, you would get to be with Gray.
Get it? There were some in the newsroom who never did shake the
notion that I was Pure Evil to Gray's Pure Good.
One characteristic about Gray that always astounded me was his
eternal, effortless optimism. It wasn't a polly-anna-ish kind of
"everything's coming up roses" outlook, but a genuine desire to see, and
point out, the good in the world, in people, places, or events, even at
times when no one else could see it.
A few days after being admitted to Bayfront, we finally got word
that Gray would be transferred to the Moffitt Cancer Center for
treatment; there was some debate on whether he would have to taken over
in an ambulance but finally they said I could drive him over. It was a
warm, bright sunny day, and a terrible, awful drive. I could sense that
Gray was in a lot of pain, and experiencing a lot of fear, but I didn't
know quite what to say. Who knows what to say, or ask, at a time like
this? That drive turned out to be the first leg of a long waking
nightmare for us both. But as we neared the hospital in Tampa, and
pulled onto Bruce B. Downs Boulevard, Gray looked out the window and
remarked, "look at that beautiful lake." Ever the cynic, I said, "Oh
Gray, that's just a drainage ditch." You know, it was just something to
say, to fill the void. It's a remark that I may always regret, but I
have asked for and I think have received forgiveness. (It actually did turn out to be a lake, but it was pretty
hard to distinguish behind a thick stand of scrub trees and a chainlink
fence. Honest.)
But Gray was used to this kind of stuff from me. Very shortly after
we met about eight years ago, we were going to lunch or dinner on
Central Avenue and were approached by a street person seeking some
change. Gray stopped and pulled a couple of ones out of his pocket. He
told me he always carried a few bills on hand for this purpose. I said
"Gray, you know you really should just write a check to the Free Clinic;
that guy's probably just going to spend that money on Boone's Farm, or
heroin or something." He turned to me and simply said, "You don't know
that."You don't know that.
Now, before any of you start to think, Jeez, that Pure Evil business
is right on!, I did have a good excuse for my sometimes chronic cynicism
- after all, I attended journalism school. But needless to say, I keep
a couple of bucks in my pocket these days, just in case.WHERE WAS GOD?
I wanted to talk a little bit about a question that I know many of
you have asked at some point in this ordeal, and may still be asking.
THE BIG QUESTION of Why? Why Gray? Why this disease? Where was God? How
could such a thing happen to such a person? For me personally, it was
important to give up the question of "Why?" early on. It's amusing,
really, but when you consider that we never will know the answer, it's
not a productive thing to dwell on. I found it useful, eventually, to
ask the question of "Why?" with a little twist.
Seconds after Gray died on July 13, his brother Russ had left the
hospital room so we could be alone, and I stood at his side, holding his
hand, whispering just one more goodbye as if one more on top of dozens
might finally get through. My other half of eight years had just passed
away. I recall being struck, absolutely crippled, dazed and amazed as
though the wind had been knocked out of me. I looked up and around, and
wondered, "What on Earth has just happened?" But it wasn't the brutal,
eight-week illness or the cruel, untimely death that had punched me in
the gut and sent me reeling. It was a sudden and huge rush of gratitude
and privilege for having been in the presence of such a person for eight
years. I
wasn't sure if he could even hear my words, but I whispered to him in
his final horrible, beautiful moments and told him that I felt I was the
luckiest man on Earth. I meant it then, and I still mean it, hard as it
may be to comprehend and to put into perspective. I look back on it and
am still a bit shocked that I could come to that realization at that
particular terrible time, but that was the overriding emotion.
So if you sort of turn the question around in your mind a little
bit, and ask "Where is God?" you have to consider that just because God
didn't grant us the big miracle we all wanted in the end, that doesn't
meant there wasn't some kind of great power at work. Maybe God looked
down on me a while ago and decided, you can have eight great years with
this person (or however many any of you had with him), but sorry, no
more than that.
It's helpful for me to return to what I've come to consider the
GREAT MYTH: the great myth is that any of us are guaranteed any
specified amount of time here ourselves, or an amount of time spent in
the presence of anyone else. We like to think that we'll have 80 years
to go on doing whatever it is we want to do, but no one ever really
promised us that, did they. Any of us could go tomorrow, or next week,
or in forty years. It's the GREAT MYTH, and we all need to beware
it.
In recent weeks I have found God in many places, not always the
loud, bright, obvious ones. But a lot of great power is found in
retrospect, when I look back on what Gray and I were able to experience
together in eight years. Oh, God, were we lucky!:
By and large, everyone's support was positive and strong during our most
difficult times. But a few folks wrote or came up to me, maybe only
naturally, to say "how awful it was that I was forced to be utterly
helpless in this terrible situation, watching on the sidelines and not
being able to do anything at all." I'm sorry, but I didn't feel helpless
at all. Distraught, disoriented and terrified, maybe, but not helpless.
No, I couldn't cure leukemia, but I spent almost every day for eight
weeks trying to provide some support to Gray, his families, his friends
and even his nurses, in a hundred small ways. I was making a
contribution, and I know he would have done the same for me.
The reason I mention this is that most of you at some point will
encounter some horrible thing in your life that may seem unconquerable,
and you may in fact feel utterly and completely helpless when the crisis
begins. But if you try hard enough and find the strength, you don't have
to feel helpless at all. Gray also fought like hell, you really must
know this, and it was an astounding thing to see. If any of you ever
endure a battle like this, as a victim or a caregiver, I know Gray would
want all of you to try your best to summon the same kind of strength he
did.Early on, I was so resentful that this evil cancer had come
along and derailed our otherwise "fantastic" lives. Even back when we
thought we could beat it, I hated that we had been sidetracked by this
"detour," and the disruption of our work, home life, travel or whatever
that it entailed. But the more I thought about it, and experienced it,
the more it became obvious to me that this didn't seem like a detour at
all, it seemed more like the destination. Certainly it was the
destination for Gray, but it really came to feel like the destination
for me as well - a major defining moment that 34 years and 11 months had
only prepared me for. Everything up to that point suddenly seemed like
the detour in retrospect. There's no arguing that this past two months
has been the single most important thing I've experienced to date, and
likely will remain so for my lifetime.ON "MIRACLES" AND SIGNS I
want to share a couple of unusual incidents from last week, at the risk
of heading off into "LaLa land," so bear with me. First, on the day Gray
died, I came back to the house, shared the sad news and my sense of
relief with my parents who were staying with me, and instantly I started
looking at the world around me in a different way. One of the things I
noticed was that on that particular day, the patio area of our house
seemed flooded with birds, like an aviary from a zoo, all day long. We
had had a bird-feeder there for many months, and never had more than a
few birds a day there, really. In fact, we usually had far more
squirrels than birds. So why on this particular day, were there not only
any squirrels to be found, but suddenly bright red cardinals, blue jays,
and mourning doves, all in abundance? Why on this day?
I looked out the kitchen window and had the strong sensation that
what I was seeing was Gray trying to cheer me up. Sure enough, the flock
has been back each day. The mourning doves in particular seem to be a
good sign; in a small honeycomb of the window outside Gray's room in
intensive care, a mourning dove would occasionally sit in those final
days. When it appeared my spirits would soar; when it was absent my
heart would sink. I would talk to Gray about this, how hopeful that bird
made me, even when the daily lab reports predicted doom. I didn't know
at the time whether he could hear me, but I wonder after witnessing this
new flock at our house if he did hear me after all. Gray the artist was
a huge fan of Audubon's bird portraits, and he knew the names of so many
birds, so I know he would find all of this fitting.
My second anecdote is a little more unusual, and you can all file
this under "Believe it or Not." This story starts in the middle, with a
wind chime that was given to us by our parents at our other house, where
it rang like crazy on the patio, even on relatively calm days. But for
the past year and a half at our new house, even though this chime was
hung with the same northeast exposure, that darn wind chime never rang.
Not once, not even during the horrible storms we had last winter. Gray
and I used to joke about it, and once I suggested that we tie a fishing
line from the wind chime to the dog's hind legs so that when she ran
around the patio chasing lizards, it might produce any sound at
all.
So about four weeks ago, during an especially desperate moment at
Moffitt, I talked with Gray about what would happen if he didn't make
it. I told him that I knew he would go to a beautiful place but that I
wanted him to let me know he was OK if he could think of any way to do
it. I asked him, "Why don't you make the wind chimes go or something?" I
literally pulled this idea out of thin air, and forgot about it after
that day's tears had dried.
So, flash forward to earlier this week, Monday night, as I stayed up
late at home writing this speech and was in an especially sad mood. It
was 1:30 at night and I could write no longer. I got a glass of wine and
went and sat in bed with some reading I had put off all day: a poem
written by my colleague Roy Clark; a long letter of support from our
friend Scarlett's mother, whom I have never met; and a small book about
grief and recovery loaned to me by Kristin Brett. All of a sudden I
heard the chimes out on the balcony - clearly, steadily, distinctly for
several minutes. I sat there and smiled, wondering, maybe this is my
sign? But I had to know, is it a silly coincidence? Is a storm front
blowing through or something? I got out of bed, opened the door to the
balcony, and walked out to the most still night air I have ever felt.
Not the slightest breeze stirred any leaf. The only sound was tree frogs
roaring in the neighbors' yard. And I felt so happy.
One last little miracle I want to relate is about my difficulty in
finding someone else to speak at this ceremony today, someone with more
religious credentials than I. I really wanted someone with some kind of
connection to Gray or me, but it's kind of a short list. Two
possibilities both had to decline as they were heading out of town on
vacation, and I was becoming a little anxious about who else I'd have up
here with me today. Then, out of the blue, last Wednesday I got a call
from a man who identified himself as the Rev. Al Hall, the chaplain from
Bayfront Medical Center a few blocks from here. He had read the story
about Gray in the paper and told me he was quite touched by it. I
thought maybe they had met while Gray spent the first few days of his
ordeal at Bayfront. No. The man on the telephone continued: "You're not going to
believe this, but I was the leader of Gray's youth group at the
Greenstreet Baptist Church in North Carolina when he was a teenager."
And now here he was, living in St. Petersburg, and recognized Gray's
name in the paper. And I'm so happy he agreed to join us here today and
will be speaking after the song in just a few minutes.ON REGRETS
At a time like this, it's only natural to assess one's regrets. I don't
think Gray would look back, if he had the chance today, and say that he
missed out on much. You know those things people probably say when the
end is near: "If only we had gone to Paris! If only we had bought a boat
and sailed the world!"
Sure, we both would have loved another 80 years, but that's the
Great Myth, as I said. No, I think Gray would look back on the
experiences I have shared with you, and say "Wow! Was I ever lucky."
And, I'd feel the same if I walked out of this building today and got
hit by lightning. No big regrets. It's something to feel good about. But
while there weren't any major misgivings for either of us, there were
little ones for sure. I regret taking so much of his presence for
granted. I regret the nasty remark here and there, not sending flowers
often enough, focusing too much on work as a lot of us do, not taking
him to lunch often enough to escape the daily pressures for a while. I
regret all these but they are small in the scheme of things; I think to
dwell on them is to do a disservice to the wonderful things that were
experienced. To try to do better in the future to those who are still
with us is the best way to seek atonement.ON TEARS
One of my funniest and one of my saddest Gray stories involve
crying. Gray was never much prone to tears, but I on contrast tend to
break down during things like "60 Minutes."
A few years ago we went to see "The Bridges of Madison County."
During the final few minutes I was just losing it, a crying fool. As the
credits started to roll and the lights came up, Gray turned to me and
said: "Are you crying?" "NO," I sniffed. "I'M NOT CRYING!" He looked at
me in amazement and said: "You are crying!" About 70 percent of the
audience was crying, men and women both, so I wasn't totally out of
line. I couldn't believe he didn't notice any of us going off in the
last few minutes of the movie. He just couldn't believe that I was
affected by it that way.
In my last moments alone with him, moments after he died, I gathered up
my book, our CD player, my briefcase and cel phone from his hospital
room, and looked up and said: "You're probably looking down on me and
saying, "Are you crying?! You're crying!" Well, "hell yes," I told him.
"I'm crying and I hope you're finally noticing it." I wondered if it
would be at all possible to guess what Gray would want all of us to take
away from today. As I said, he was the inspiration for this speech, and
so many of my friends here today have always accused me of speaking on
headlines, so here's what I think Gray would want you all to remember:
Lyrics to "Angel" by Sarah McLachlan
Spend all your time waiting | ||