Part 9: The Dedication of Pat's Bench and Plaque

July 17, 2007
Stanford Center
Berlin, Germany

It’s hard to believe that a year and a half has passed since Patrick died, since we’ve all suffered the shock of his demise by his own hand. For my own part, it’s been a journey of humility and pain. As I told my father before he himself died a year after Pat, I feel like someone smashed me in the face for no reason, like I’ve been stunned without knowing why. But this memorial is not about my reaction or suffering. It’s about Patrick, because no matter how much I hurt at losing my beautiful son, it’s not nearly as much as he suffered.

I am struggling to come away with some kind of truth that will channel the pain, and I haven’t uncovered the answers. Like Pat’s favorite line from Tulcholsky, “There is no untrodden snow.” I only know that in my search, I might have stumbled on the path that took Patrick to his death. I think he was trying to understand the sorrow he bore, and he found that understanding in the literature, music, and the intellect of this great country, which is also the embodiment of monumental pain. Berlin itself, with its war torn past and rejuvenated present, symbolizes the extreme range of emotions Pat endured. He soared from the height of accomplishment to the depths of sadness.

It is because he was capable of great disparagement that I am especially grateful to all of you for giving him the solace, the encouragement, the freedom, the acceptance, and the happiness that he craved and that I so wished for him. Berlin brought out the best in Pat. He felt more comfortable here than any other place on earth because Berlin welcomed him. It embraced his humor, his honesty, his silliness, his intellect, and his lifestyle. He could be himself, and from all that I’ve seen since his death, that was more than enough for everybody here. The fact that you are honoring him here is the most meaningful gift you could give him. Even though he lies on a pristine hillside near his home in Pomfret, CT, I feel that he would be most excited to be recognized in the city and school he loved.

And yet the love that he felt could not heal him. There was sorrow in his heart, a sorrow that no one could reach or satisfy, a sorrow that I didn’t understand, and a sorrow that Pat could not control. He turned to literature and music, and those carried him along for many years. He wrote of this admiration and the distancing it caused in school. He describes his isolation because of his ties to a force greater than mankind. I think if we listen to him, we can better see his own path for understanding of pain and, possibly, the transformation he made in the last days of his life. I ask your indulgence in listening with me to Pat’s portrayal of a boy lost in dreams:

The strains of Brahms’s second piano concerto reached his ears and enveloped them with warmth. The gentle current of the music lifted his heart and he let it carry him away. He succumbed to the pure and irresistible flow of emotion, rising and falling as it did. A connection seemed to grow then between the souls of listener and composer; Brahms’s heart was speaking across the centuries in an utterly clear and perfect voice. The boy marveled at the mystery and magic of such a connection.
The boy realized with certainty that in that moment, borne as he was among the swells and waves and thrusts and threads of sound, in that moment he had been granted access to a source greater than words, than mankind. Perhaps it was like an invisible stream bubbling noiselessly through all time, from which composers’ pens plucked out masterpieces. But it had to be something greater than mankind. How else could it strike him so purely, so directly? Brahms, too, and all other humans had been granted access to this medium; but the boy guarded jealously the emotions frothing in his own heart. He knew not everyone was given a soul like his, a soul which could be molded and shaped by a man centuries dead.
With religious zeal he envisioned his own hands performing the piece, recreating for others the sensations he felt. But “recreating” was not the word. No. He was taking part in a mystical experience, bathed in the glow of the concert hall, channeling a force which filled him with joy as it passed through his body. It inhabited him, it nourished him, it elevated him. And in a secret way he imagined that the audience worshipped him. He was above them operating a gleaming ebony instrument—yes, an instrument, a tool whereon he forged a dazzling array of emotions. He was above; he was the vessel for a shimmering outpouring; they sat below in silent, rapturous devotion.
The music in his ears climaxed in a long-held, grandiose chord; but soon it ended and there was nothing beyond. The boy felt drained, betrayed even, in the silence that followed. His laughable images of godhood were shoved aside by the realities of the soreness of his clamped ears and the hard, rough carpet under the back of his head.
I am a fool and a dreamer, the boy said aloud.
Walking onto the crowded (school) bus (the next morning), he was frightened by how hostile and alien the children looked. He no longer felt one of them, but above or below them—he could not tell which. His mind counseled patience; his time would come, it told him. But he sat in an empty seat, and his heart felt very cold and small and sad as the bus rolled away.

Let us hope that Pat’s heart no longer feels “cold and sad,” but that he is above us, “the vessel for a shimmering outpouring” as we sit below in “silent, rapturous devotion.”
Our hearts want so much to realize that godhood for him. We felt it within his grasp when he was alive, and now, as we struggle to understand the pain that drove him to his death, as we attempt to grasp his decision, we find solace in the same ways that he managed, in the music, the literature, and the intellect of this great country. Let us always try to ease our pain in the way that he did his own. We will learn from his journey, and we will hope to be as prepared for our own demise when our time comes.



Karen assumed she would not attend Pat’s dedication. She was suffering terrible back pain and could walk only with crutches. She wrote the following to be read in her absence. But after a serendipitous doctor’s appointment, which allowed her to take Lib and me to see her horse and drive through Pottsdamm earlier that day, Karen gave these remarks at Pat’s dedication.
These words must be spoken in my absence about an absence that has deeply and irrevocably saddened us all. It breaks my heart that I could not spend this day with Lisette and Lib, and be here with all of you for Pat.

This tree and this bench, sponsored by the Bing Overseas Studies Program and Bragg family of Los Angeles, friends of Pat’s grandparents who have a special connection to the City of Berlin, will prompt memories of Pat in perpetuity. I think of Pat often. I will never quite fathom what troubles led him, in a moment of desperation, to shorten his life. I will never again pick up the Sorrows of Young Werther without thinking of Pat, bringing home, in the most bitter of ways, how immortal a poet is Goethe. I will think of Pat each time I come to this bench to have a to have a moment by myself. The first of Pat’s apples is struggling for life on this tree. Life continues.

But Pat’s death was not Pat’s life, nor does the tragic memory override. All of my exchanges with Pat were happy ones, and I will remember him that way: as a sensitive, gentle, engaging man who clearly loved life and demanded a great deal of it. I will remember his flashing blue eyes, windows to a perceptive and inquiring mind, a mind of depth and mirth; I will remember his beautiful smile as a wide and happy one, and his quick wit, that so often made us smile. And his music, of course, which was sometimes somber, but often lighthearted—as music is, and as Pat was.

I hope, Lisette and Lib, that coming here has helped you to share some of the happiness Pat found here; to better understand how this place engaged his highly honed aptitudes and skills, from language to math to literature to music; how many friends he had and how highly they esteemed him. That will not outweigh your loss, but I hope that to allow into the foreground the valid memory that Pat brought much to many in his short life, and that he lived deeply, will help you to heal. Don’t lose touch with us, Pat’s Berlin Diaspora: And remember, you are part of it now, too.


With love,

Karen