Charles Wilfred Savage, September 25, 1918 - December 12, 2007

Today I attended the memorial service for my Great Uncle Charles, who passed away earlier this month. Tio Carlos, as he was called by my family in recent years, is pictured as a boy with his two sisters Mary and Agnes to the right. The eldest Mary, my grandmother, stands behind him, preceded him in death earlier this year.

Charles was a sweet man with endless intellectual energy. Beyond the random and frighteningly apropros Shakespeare or Catullus quotations he thrust upon us at family gatherings, I knew stories of him as a younger man, practicing psychiatry, in which he was trained on at University of Chicago, and of which he instructed at Johns Hopkins. Charles was one of the earliest researchers into the clinical applications of LSD (a cited contributor to LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug, one of the seminal books on the drug, published in 1964, with introduction by Timothy Leary)-- undoubtedly one of the more interesting anecdotes that stuck in my head at a very young age. Then as a young adult, I watched Charles go back to school at Middlebury College, where he obtained a Masters of Arts in Spanish in his 79th year. In his retirement, Charles spent much of his time in mission-based clinical health care in Guatemala, where his Spanish skills were put into practice, and his inspiration was fueled for his side hobby of crafting poetry in two languages - English and Spanish.

My father wrote about his uncle, and shared his favorite of Charles' poems, which was read by Charles at my father's funeral shortly there-after, and repeated here:

Silence Falls on Lamentation Mountain
by Charles Savage, M.D.

The bell-like ringing of our axes fades
and silence drifts across the fallen snow.
As wearily we rest our careworn blades,
the campfire, too, has quietly burned low.

A sudden blast of wind, an icy breeze,
stirs up a sparkling glow from ebbing fire.
The frozen limbs in answer softly creak.
Their aging branches dance but start to tire.

My surly boots tramp down the darkening snow,
and mix it with the fallen leaves and mire
to form a resting place beneath the boughs.

We are the dying ones that still can cling
to life abandoned by our fellow leaves
while we defy the silence that snows bring.

Recently, as Charles faced his conclusive days, he scribed on...

Death, My Teacher, Walks By My Side
by Charles Savage, M.D.

Death, my latest teacher, is walking by my side.
She tells me how to live until my Savior calls me home.
'You must eat every crumb, however loathsome, so you'll survive to meet your Destiny.

'In southern prison camps, your Grandfather ate worse food, and he survived when many
died. Are you a lesser man?'

Death, my teacher, comes in hospice garb and talks to me through a legion of indignities that
those never ending, always changing, ever present keepers visit on my shrinking form.

When I object to glistening tubes that sometimes chain me to this mattress, she calls me,
'Ungrateful child! They're keeping you alive until I say 'It's time to go.'

Meanwhile, she takes me past the woods, down to the river's edge and shows me where the
arbutus bloomed. In early spring the tiny blossoms, pink and white, poked slyly through the
woody leaves to cast their trailing scent abroad and catch a memory.

She shows me where the bloodroot bloomed-- its stalk so delicate, it bled once when
touched by mortal hand. Will it bleed again? Will I?

There are probably lessons yet to be learned, but Death, my teacher, bides her time. And so I
resolve to pray and laugh and even love until Death, my lover, walks by my side, waiting to
lay her final kiss upon my lips and say, 'It's time for us to go.'

Comments

[Aitziber Barrutia]

I new your Great Uncle from one of his trips to Guatemala while I was working for a year in Crownsville Hospital Center. He was so special to me that today, when I´m writing the dedication for the book I´m jusy going to publish, I wanted to make sure I was writing his name ok, because I wanted to dedicate it to him. That´s when I´ve found this blog. I´m so sorry to now about this... anyway as I´m writing in my book, he´s the kind of people that although only knowing him once stays with you for ever.