Remembering the Legend, Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy, October 26, 1945 – March, 4 2016
The Lowcountry Has Lost our Prince of Tides but Gains a Legend in Great Love
Whether we knew him for a minute or for a lifetime, Pat Conroy made people feel like any of us who met him were the most important person in the room, echoing his famous salutation of ‘great love.’ There has been no writer more generous, accessible and at the same time tortured. Haunted by his memories of childhood at the hands of a notoriously abusive father, USMC Col. Don Conroy, a.k.a. the Great Santini, his youngest brother’s suicide, and agonizing divorces, Conroy also struggled with alcohol, giving it up only several years ago to turn over a new leaf. He opened a gym and worked out daily, became the editor of his own fiction imprint for the University of South Carolina Press, Story River Books, reconciled with his estranged daughter and commenced writing his next novel. Life was on the uptick for him until he was thrust into his final fight with pancreatic cancer for the past three months, slipping from us while facing a golden Lowcountry sunset across Battery Creek in his Beaufort home, embraced by friends, family and his beloved wife Cassandra King.
Celebrating Life and the Lowcountry
Celebrating his 70th birthday at the end of October during an unforgettable three-day love fest of fans, family members, movie stars and great Southern writers, Conroy addressed his audience with one of the most moving unplanned, unscripted five-minute panegyrics bringing a packed house to tears saying,
“My readers are extraordinary. Finding you has been the most wonderful thing in my life. In my writing, I always wanted to be the complete and brave man that I wasn't in my real life. I thought that if I could explain my life to myself, maybe I could help explain yours to you . . . that if I was brave enough to write about my own pain, maybe I could help you face yours. All I want now is to write as well as I can, for as long as I can. To honor my teachers, my family, my children and grandchildren. And to honor you."
His memoirs, The Water is Wide, My Losing Season, My Reading Life, and The Death of Santini, are as achingly beautiful to read as are his novels, The Boo, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, The Lords of Discipline, Beach Music, and South of Broad. It is difficult to tell where the factual and fictional Conroy diverge in each and every one of his works. If it weren’t for Conroy, the city of Beaufort would likely remain an obscure destination for tourists. No writer could ever bring the South Carolina Lowcountry as completely to life as did Conroy whose character Tom Wingo in The Prince of Tides explains,
“I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation. Scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, ‘There. That taste. That’s the taste of my childhood.’ I would say, ‘Breathe deeply,’ and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life, the bold, fecund aroma of the tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater.”
Of his works, Ron Rash—who Conroy called ‘possibly the greatest living American writer,’ said, “Most books, you enter. Few books enter you, but Pat’s do. There is something very American in his exuberance, like Walt Whitman or Thomas Wolfe.”
In Memoriam
His words on paper and in person touched the lives of so many and on March 8th at 11:00 a.m. roughly a thousand members of his flock gathered for the Mass of Christian Burial for Donald Patrick Conroy who lost the last round of a tough fight with pancreatic cancer on March fourth. Cassandra King Conroy shared the insight that even her husband’s choice of a death date charged his followers with action in the form of the command to ‘march forth.’ It is what he would have wanted us to do.
Excruciatingly aware of life’s fleeting nature, Conroy writes in My Reading Life, “Some of us read to ratify our despair of the world; others choose to read because it offers one of the only safety nets where love and hope can find comfort. The subject of all writers is the terrible brightness that wards off the ineffable approach of death…” In My Losing Season, his heartfelt examination of loss, he says, “There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.” Conroy’s loss shall transform all of his devoted readers and with hope inspire us to overcome our own adversities with what his best friend and author Bernie Schein said was his greatest secret weapon: love. Not just love, but ‘Great Love,’ which was his recurring salutation in his signatures. He was also known for his great loving bear hugs.
After the understated mahogany coffin proceeded up the central aisle of St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Beaufort to the song “The Water is Wide,” and was later sprinkled with holy water by altar boys and priests, cloaked in the smoke of Frankincense, and shrouded by the loving hands of his daughters and wife Cassandra, Reverend Monsignor Ronald Cellini proceeded to liken Conroy’s magical gifts to us to that of a chocolate cake. Cake is inherently good, he explained. This was an extension of his reading of Romans 8:28, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” He explained that the individual ingredients of Cocoa, flour, and shortening do not taste good alone, yet together, just as we all were that day, things work for good. He also noted that Conroy’s tumultuous life, lived in the largest of ways, was full of broken, painful parts; parts that Conroy wove together with the binding threads of his inimitable prose to create magical works of art to explain his life to himself and to help explain our own.
The Emotional Jujitsu Master’s Legend Lives On
The emotional jujitsu master, Pat Conroy, imparted his gifts of love, understanding, and justice all spiced with crackling dark humor, in the forms of his books and in his interpersonal relations. One of the more memorable highlights of the 70th birthday celebrations was the closing reading of James Dickey’s hallmark poem “For the Last Wolverine” by Dickey’s daughter Bronwen who delivered with bravado its benediction, “Lord, let me die, but not die/Out.” The stable of Story River Books writers including John Warley, Ellen Malphrus, John Lane, Mary Hood, Bernie Schein, Catherine Clark, and Maggie Schein will all continue to bring us stories in the spirit of their great mentor, friend and editor whose voice will echo in their minds and hearts forever, not allowing Conroy’s legend to die out. His books, these writers and those nurtured by Story River Books in the future are Conroy’s eternal gifts to us. The great blue heron of the Lowcountry has been lifted from its occupation indeed to escort our literary Prince to the heavens where his wings will continue to fan our hearts and help ease our pains. Fly on Prince Conroy.
Carry on the legend
Gifts in Pat Conroy’s memory may be made to the Friends of Story River Books to carry on his legacy at www.storyriverbooks.com.
