Carrol Vertrees: Sadness comes watching friends slip into darkness

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Carrol Vertrees

Updated: January 23, 2012 4:12AM

Our friend Vic is gone. The best man at our wedding. A true scholar. He was my friend from the first minute we met on our little campus decades ago.

The last time we saw him he was able to reminisce with clarity and joy, but that was before that deadly thief in the night invaded his bright mind, bringing darkness and confusion.

Leaving us at 90 was no surprise, but the sadness of his last several years, struggling with Alzheimer’s, was a bitter ending to a notable career.

He was chancellor of I.U. Kokomo for years and led to its development from an extension to a thriving regional campus. His work there touched thousands — he helped create an educational gem. He made a difference.

Later this month he will be honored at a memorial service in Kokomo. It is fitting that in his final graduation, he will go with honors. He was an honors graduate from our little college. I was just honored to be a graduate.

How do we handle this blow that strikes without reason and dulls the minds and memories of people we love? Most of us can imagine the grief it brings, but some of us can only wonder how friends cope with it, a sadness that dulls our hopes and leaves us struggling for answers.

Our mutual friend Max, another graduate of the little college that changed our lives, has some perspective on this. He is closely acquainted with grief and with words of eloquence that give us hope.

I often said, with exaggeration, of course, that Max has more degrees than a thermometer, including one from our Indiana Central campus (now the University of Indianapolis), and a couple from I.U. He breezed through the Yale Divinity School, where he went searching “for peace for a troubled mind.”

His mind is like an endless memory tape that is still running with accuracy.

He lives in Vermont, in a Comprehensive Care Retirement Home. He says he is the least important person there, but of course he is being modest. He spent the last several years of his career as dean of men at Centre College — “the greatest years of my career.”

He pushes Alzheimer’s fellows in their wheelchairs around and one used to correct him on some facts, before fading “back into the darkness.” That moved him.

Max turns to poets and authors in deep periods of sadness. He agrees that we have lost an old friend, that we are too old to make new ones with a common past. He adds that “We can only hope there is another chance to say hello. Men have always dreamed of such.”

Then he calls on the poet Pindar: “Their boon is a life forever freed from toil ... with the favored of the gods they live a life where there are no more tears.” And so, Max says, we must dream on. He is right.

Educators have called Vic a humanitarian for his work at Kokomo, where he reached out to people who wanted to learn. As Thoreau said: “It’s not what you look at, but what you see.” What our friend Vic saw was a vibrant college campus that says “Welcome,” and he set out to make it happen.

Yes, he was a humanitarian, but we will call him a friend. We must keep on dreaming, and remembering. Friendships can touch our hearts and minds until we leave. If we are lucky, we may touch others along the way, and maybe there will be another chance to say hello.