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When closure is elusive: Fletcher Currin buried 15 years after his death

 
Stewart Fletcher Currin
Stewart Fletcher Currin
Published Sept. 2, 2015

OLIVIA, N.C.

A worker struggles to lift the steel vault, then position it over a hole in the lawn behind a country church. • Three of us watch as he lowers the remains of Stewart Fletcher Currin, my closest childhood friend, into the ground. • My girlfriend takes my elbow. "Now you have closure," she says. • I am not sure what closure means, or if it exists. • The laborer shovels the dirt back over the hole, then packs it down with the head of a sledgehammer. Far away in the trees, a lot of birds are doing whatever the birds do, talking about it. • The worker sets a bouquet of sunflowers on top of the hole and places a placard in front. • Fletcher Currin, 1955 - 1999.

The minister reads a New Testament lesson from the book of John. Jesus is describing himself as the way, the truth and the life.

I'm still staring at my notes.

A cousin of Fletcher's has asked me to deliver the eulogy. Getting that job is an honor, one I hope I can live up to.

For six years I was the Tampa Bay Times' obituary writer. For each person I wrote about, I tried to focus on the life, not the death.

This is different. I knew only a fraction of the thousand or so people I wrote about and none of them intimately.

Knowing someone makes that person harder to write about. The pool of potentially useful information for creating the picture is infinitesimally larger. But the size of the frame into which that picture must fit is the same.

There is another critical difference. Those obits nearly always featured someone who had died within the past couple of weeks. Fletcher died nearly 16 years ago, homeless and paranoid.

To focus only on his life, even the many delightful traits he showed before the schizophrenia worsened, would guarantee failure. All these mourners, most of them related to Fletcher, know what happened. Most had read the story in the March issue of the Times' Floridian about my search for him.

A second story, which ran in June, is the reason we are here. A DNA analysis had matched Fletcher with the remains of a drifter who had died in St. Petersburg in 1999.

Those results — which solved his disappearance and the identity of the body simultaneously — had come courtesy of Fletcher himself, via a letter he sent me in 1996. The Pinellas-Pasco County Medical Examiner's Office had gotten the DNA from the envelope's seal.

The truly bizarre circumstance of this service is connected to Fletcher's disappearance. Which is connected to his mental illness. So I cannot dwell exclusively on "the life."

Yet I can pay homage to Fletcher's brilliant mind, his biting wit, and at least give a shout-out to the hundred thousand other things that made him unlike any other person who has ever lived.

Family members have come from all over North Carolina, filling the pews of Olivia Presbyterian Church, a small sanctuary that smells of real wood.

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Some of these cousins have not seen him in 40 years. But he is family. He had been lost, and then he had been found. Even in death, there is a prodigal dimension to this homecoming.

My breath feels tight. For the umpteenth time, I make sure I have a handkerchief ready to wipe away sweat.

I draw one more line on my note cards, connecting two paragraphs around one I had crossed out.

The minister has finished reading and is looking at me. He whispers into his microphone:

Andy.

There have been so many passages to this story.

Fletcher is in St. Petersburg, where he grew up.

Fletcher is in Wilson, N.C., staying with his cousin Harriet …

Then back to St. Petersburg again — and now the details start to darken.

The last year of his life, he was living in a mission for the homeless, entertaining me with stories about loading trucks out of the basement with grain headed for charities.

The burlap sacks had been chewed into by rats.

"You should write a story for the paper," he said. " 'What the rats don't eat, we give to the poor!' "

Even destitute and not really functioning, Fletcher was funny. He was close to stepping off the edge of the earth. We just did not know it …

There are more jokes and stories, and some great ones will be shared over the course of the weekend. For now, in the pulpit in front of the church, I'm not going there. I am looking at a cousin in shirt-sleeves who is looking at me with his arms folded.

I am glancing at the eyebrows of younger women in Sunday dresses and older women with amazing hair. My girlfriend leans forward in her pew. The pastor tilts back as if enjoying a cigar.

The nerves I had experienced are not gone but changed. It's like walking a tightrope across a canyon. But I'm halfway across. I think I'm going to get through this.

I tell them about the sweep of events that led to this conclusion. About the retired Tampa police detective who helped establish that Fletcher was missing. Then a crucial moment in the medical examiner's office, looking at photos of a dead man — known only as 99-1145 — and feeling a shock of recognition.

I hold up the letter from Fletcher that broke the case open and show them its unbroken seal. That I had torn open the envelope at one end — certainly not any carefully thought-out choice in 1996 — allowed the DNA analyst to get a full profile.

I tell them about a stylist at Supercuts who believes in predestination. The letter, according to her, was "a path thing … that was written long ago."

I don't know if I believe that. But it's possible, and it's hopeful, and on this day, we are struggling for threads of hope, so I'll take it.

My brother died in 2000, and I have long since adjusted.

Fletcher died more than a year before that, and it feels fresh. I should not be confused, but I am. It is as if he has stepped through some wormhole in time, putting all of us back in 1999 and himself in 2015.

A friend at the service, Paul Rowe, goes to the front with his guitar. The family asked him to sing the song Turn! Turn! Turn!, adapted from verses in the book of Ecclesiastes.

A concert baritone who has performed on several continents, he is perfect for this.

To every thing, turn turn turn

There is a season, turn turn turn …

I think of the shovel in the laborer's hands, turning dirt over the steel vault containing Fletcher.

By the end of the song, the vault is settling gently into the earth.

We go outside for a brief graveside service and stand near the sunflowers that mark Fletcher's grave.

It is still hot out, bright out. People squint when they shake hands. Everyone is a little stunned and exhausted. I may not see these people again, but we have a bond.

There is something about putting people below ground, about attaching a certain solemnity, that gives comfort. It might be fashionable to scatter the ashes in the bay, have a party and be done with it. But there is a reason we have done it more or less this way since prehistory.

The tombstones cut a low plane to the trees, dividing what is above from what is below. Presumably, Fletcher will stay here forever, a few feet from his mother and father.

Seeing this tells me Fletcher's journey has ended. This might not be closure, but it is a step in that direction.

Contact Andrew Meacham at ameacham@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2248. Follow @torch437.