On Hearing of the Death of Jack Clement

 May 30, 2023

I heard yesterday that Jack Clements died. In a fall in his bathroom. This first thing I thought is “he was probably drunk”.

I am sobered by this news. It’s been a long time since I spoke to him and even longer since I’ve seen him. He was appreciative of my calling him last time we spoke - it was January 2022 I think- and he was severely drunk and the call ended abruptly when he (I assume) dropped the phone or fell. 

I thought of him as a quintessentially Southern man: looks and drawl. He introduced me into Gestalt therapy. Floss and I visited him with some frequency when we lived in Atlanta. One night he prepared a gourmet dinner that, by my recollection used every pot, pan, and piece of silverware in the house. All of it left overnight to be cleaned in the morning.

He knew his assessments and even mastered that most bewildering and arcane of all tests, the Rorschach. He was generous, ironic and funny. I recall being put out with him one time because I panicked after turning over in a kayak and had my head underwater. He said “as long as we can can hear you there’s nothing to worry about”

I had it in mind to call him and it’s been on my Reminders list since January. There’s perhaps a lesson for me in that. 

Sam Keen writes:

“compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth. That is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings, and awareness of the tragic sense of life. In that final surrender that marks the egos defeat in the hard fought battle to defend its illusions, we are forced to confront the implications of our mortality. Many small differences separate us from one another but one large thing unites us. We are all citizens of the earth household, destined to dwell together in a democracy of death, in which there are no distinctions of race, color, creed, class, or gender. Without our consent, we are formed by the iron laws of corrosive time, prey to decay and disease, and haunted during our brief days by the anxious knowledge that we are like the grass of the field…

…in place of romance, compassion introduces us to the necessary suffering of love, and therefore, to abiding passion. To feel others pleasure we must be able to feel their pain. Only those who recognize each other as fellow strangers-in-the-night can forge the bonds of true kinship, and learn to be kind. And kindness, not wild abandon, is the essence of an abiding passion”.