In the course of common small-talk, lately I’ve been committing a cardinal sin, breaking that basic social contract by bringing up matters less trivial than sports and weather. Lately I’ve been forced to tell people, “my friend Ben Ward died.”
Ben was a professor, a part of the Duke community for more than 30 years. He was an active member of the Pitchforks since 1980, the a cappella group where I first met him.
I insist on phrasing it like that, “my friend Ben,” because that’s how I knew him. Some may think of Ben in terms of his incredible accomplishments and stories. Ben stories are almost their own genre: they sit somewhere between tall tale, urban legend and Greco-Roman mythology, but are somehow entirely true—100 percent reputable.
He spoke eight languages and held a doctorate and dean position at Yale by the time he was 25. He taught philosophy, German and Arabic. He toured as a concert pianist, accompanied Coretta King at recitals, played the organ at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral, fasted for a month to avoid the draft, spent five nights a week cooking meals at a soup kitchen. All these stories, and there are more, make very clear that Ben led an incredible and incredibly full life.
But this is not how I choose to remember this genius, this prodigy, as President Richard Brodhead called him after Ben’s memorial service.
I remember him as the guy who’d quietly sneak up behind you, wrap his long, dramatic fingers around your neck and jovially throttle you for a bit longer than you’d expect. Then he’d move seamlessly into a hug. He’d check in about your dogs, parents and siblings—all of whom he knew by name—and ask whether anyone had been missing those sneakers he’d stolen from the closet during a Pitchforks trip to your house.
That was the Ben I cherish most: the Ben who liked to curse out the “hussy” on the GPS, who’d sit and talk with you for hours and teach you the world… so long as you didn’t take any of his strawberry ice cream. Perhaps Ben’s greatest accomplishment—of all of the many great ones—was in the sheer number of people he touched, and the ease with which he touched them.
The Ben I first met was a sturdy 6 feet 4 inches, and well above 200 pounds. It saddens me that the picture I am left with of my friend is of the weakened man who needed that cane, and not the towering figure who earned in full the nickname, “Big Daddy Ben.” Although his illness was salient, I usually remember Ben’s cane as his weapon of choice—that blue bludgeon with the Hot Wheels logo emblazoned down the side—not as a weakness.
When Ben would go in for his treatments, he was never interested in hearing much from the doctors or nurses about his cancer: Ben wanted to chat about how they were doing, about the Durham Bulls, about Mozart’s birthday, and then he wanted to pop in his headphones and listen to some music and not be bothered.
During Ben’s treatments, he would rest all day until late at night, when he was wide awake. Thus began the biweekly update emails, sent to the Pitchforks and Pitchforks alumni. You might expect that “update emails” written on the day of one’s chemotherapy treatment would be all about one’s health and prognosis—but no.
Ben’s emails were almost formulaic. They included one independent clause about his treatment, one sentence bragging about his weight, and one more thanking his recent visitors. Then followed six paragraphs discussing the Bruckner Symphonies he’d listened to, with an explanation of why the 1997 performance by the Berliner Philharmoniker was, by all measures, the definitive recorded version.
“I also had my treatment yesterday, and the musical choices were easy,” he wrote in an email Nov. 23, 2013. That was his last email to the group, sent only three weeks before his passing.
Some very clever and nuanced Spanish translation yielded the nickname Papa Grande, which Ben used almost exclusively in these emails, always in the third person, and often shortened to just “PG.” Papa Grande never much bothered to be a cancer patient, and never much bothered to be dying. Papa Grande rarely missed a rehearsal, almost never a show and absolutely never a note.
Only a few months after Ben’s diagnosis in 2010, he went beyond attending the Annual Gothic Christmas Concert. And he did not only lead all the rehearsals and teach all the music, but he also conducted the whole show with the exact same fervor. I remember his demonstrative hand waving and wild gesturing—conjuring up crescendos from the depths of his body, and quiet cantation with the sudden flick of his finger—all from the comfort of his wreathed and ornamented wheelchair. One year later, he did the same thing, this time standing.
This is how it always was, and how it would be until Dec. 2013, when Ben was ultimately admitted to the hospital just two days shy of another Gothic Christmas Concert. But the show went on—both in Perkins Library and in the halls of Duke University Medical Center, outside Ben’s room. I’m guessing he conducted along to a few songs, and I’m sure there was only one “Hall” decked with boughs of holly, as was originally written in 1862, as Ben always insisted upon.
From the onset, there was plenty of talk of five-year survival rates and very low odds. Even when in September of 2011 Ben celebrated his remission with a full piano recital in the Nelson Music Room—appropriately titled “With Renewed Strength”—we knew his cancer would always be lurking. But, as was Ben’s way, he didn’t tell us just how sick he had again become. We just knew what lovely music he had been listening to.
On my last visit to Durham, back in October, I was unable to see Ben. I thought nothing of it. I’d be back soon. We lost Ben on December 14th after a weeklong vigil, dozens of visitors and even more emails pouring in from around the world. I wasn’t back soon enough.
After his memorial service Jan. 18 in the Chapel, someone recounted a story of Ben rebuffing their use of the idiom, “spend some time.” Ben liked to correct people’s grammar, but in the midst of his illness, Ben was correcting an understanding.
“Time is not a commodity,” Ben said. “It cannot be spent, it can only be shared.”
Ben shared 65 years of life with the world, understanding that full well.
Upon returning from his memorial, when asked about my weekend and how I was holding up, I got a kick out of shocking people—now prepared and using their serious voice for a somber discussion—by responding, “it was great!” Ben knew that our everyday discomfort with death and the notion of grief—our stammering, our mechanical apologies—does not often consist of sadness over a person’s personal loss of life, but is simply a projection of our own insecurities, our own ignorance of the meaning of mortality.
In fact, Ben insisted that no one speak at all at his memorial service. We were not to ponder any meaning through religion, or to mourn through sad words. We were to sit and to listen to two handpicked recordings of Strauss compositions, and that was all.
I am deeply saddened by the loss of my friend Ben because, selfishly, I’ll miss him. But that’s it; there is nothing else inherently sad, unnerving or tragic about it. The hundreds of people who knew and loved Ben came together to celebrate his life, and will continue to do so. I’ve been listening to more classical music lately. And as I did on that Saturday in the Chapel, I’ve been doing a lot less talking, a lot more listening and a lot of thinking about my friend Ben.
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