On August 30, 2009, Edward R. Kuhn, DMD, ended his life early in the day, using the semi-automatic rifle he had at home because he had been a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Active Reserves. I received a call from a mutual friend about four hours later. Neither of could say anything; we were in shock. Marion said he would pick up Ed's daughter at LAX along with his own son and drive them to Palm Springs. Later that afternoon I called Ed's wife and when her cousin answered the phone, I asked her to relay my deepest sympathies to her. I had to go to Palm Springs to be there at their house. I did that, stayed overnight with friends, and went to Ed's home again on Monday. Those are the facts of the beginning of a period of grief, sitting with Ed's in-laws not knowing what to do or how to be helpful. The sudden loss due to suicide does that.
I met Ed and Marion at the Officers Club in Pionier Kaserne, Hanau-am-Main, West Germany in early 1969. Over the next two years, we became friends, good, close friends in the special way that bonds soldiers stationed together. I have never had such close friends before or since. I had other friends from my own unit with whom I kept in touch years after I finished my term of duty. But none was as close as were we, known at the Club as the Mod Squad. Marion was the Provost Marshal in Hanau. Ed, one of Marion's platoon leaders was stationed in Auschaffensburg as provost marshal. Ed, whose hair never made it short enough for US troop standards, and I was the intelligence officer for our combat engineer brigade who, like them, would rather be in the States and were politically and morally against the war on the other side of the planet. We hated the racism that began to infect the troops on base. Marion and I would get into deep discussions about racism in our culture, and what US troops encountered with the Germans. Plus, back home society was having its own war between the mores of The Greatest Generation, hippies, and African-Americans. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated just months before. Anger and frustration characterized the times. Also, the Tet Offensive happened in Viet Nam during this period and the level of fighting ratcheted up another notch. Ed would participate to some extent in our talks, yet was rarely seriously engaged and angry. He was the hippy of our group. His relaxed way of talking was soft and earnest, but I could tell he'd rather be out on his surfboard off Goleta, waiting quietly for a good wave.
Ed knew just the time to break into our significant discussions with his eyes twinkling and a devilish smile. Ed found humor in our daily lives that we were too serious to notice. Ed would quietly ask if we wanted to go to his apartment, one he often shared with his current girlfriend of the season, and get high. For the rest of that evening we would laugh at ourselves, our circumstances and listen to the music of the times. I think we drank German beer from flippies, inexpensive brews in bottles kept closed by a porcelain cap one had to flip open to drink those really good beers of Germany.
Ed and Marion were transfered to Korea for 1971, while I remained in West Germany. Our three-year commitments were over in the Christmas and New Years holidays beginning 1972. Marion and I corresponded a lot while he was in Korea and he kept me current on Ed.
We kept in touch over the next three decades, celebrating marriages and children, professional education that made Ed a dentist and Marion an attorney. I became an administrative executive in higher education and health care institutions. I was in the San Francisco Bay area for most of the intervening time and Marion was studying law at the University of California, Berkeley. Ed bought a practice in Palm Springs. As fate would have it, Marion moved from his job in Detroit to Orange County and was able to enjoy Ed's company on bike marathons, hiking and was Ed's patient even. Time passes and we led our unique lives, always knowing were the other two were.
In May 2008, we had a reunion of the Hanau Mod Squad in Palm Springs, Marion with his wife Amanda, Ed with his wife Patti, and me. The three of us felt the bond of 40 years friendship. I had moved to Southern California, too, so it was especially comforting to me to live close to them. In fact, it Ed who was one of the reasons I was planning to move to Palm Springs, as well as the other attractions and people I liked there. To me, Ed was the linch pin of our group. The three of us truly enjoyed each other as a family. Then I received Marion's call.
During the 1980s and '90s I was living in San Francisco during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. Friends and partners were dying, I would go to concerts and memorial services at least once a week; a one point, I was overwhelmed with the loss of a generation of San Francisco's most talented, creative and interesting, mostly gay men. I had to choose carefully among which memorials I would attend. It was during that period that I read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "Wind, Sand and Stars," written during his French air corps experience early in the 1940s. This one passage captured the survivor's life during the AIDS epidemic; it came to mind after Ed died:
...hidden gardens, gardens inaccessible, but to which the craft leads us
ever back one day or another. Life may scatter us and keep us apart; it
may prevent us from thinking very often of one another; but we know
that our comrades are somewhere 'out there' ---where, one can hardly
say---silent, forgotten, but deeply faithful. And when our path crosses
theirs, they greet us with such manifest joy, shake us so gaily by the
shoulders! Indeed we are accustomed to waiting.
"Bit by bit, nevertheless, it comes over us that we shall never again
hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked
against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which,
though it may not be rending, is yet a little bitter. For nothing, in truth,
can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand.
Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured
together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is
idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to
sit in the shade of the oak.
"So life goes on. For years we plant the seed, we feel ourselves rich;
and then come other years when time does its work and our plantation is
made sparse and thin. One by one, our comrades slip away, deprive us
of their shade."
¸
Antoine de Saint Éxupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1943
ˇ
Ed, rest in the peace you sought. We miss you a lot.
Labels: Friendship, military life, suicide
# posted by Sherfdog @ 21:41
