Postscripts

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In Memoriam

Charles Meyer, who was a chaplain and administrator at St. David's Hospital, the author of engaging, intriguing mysteries starring a priest as the sleuth, a nationally recognized medical ethicist, a polemicist on the state of the church, an adjunct professor at Austin's Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, and a noted counselor, died on Monday, Nov. 13, in a head-on collision as he was driving his wife to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where they were headed so that she could receive treatment for leukemia. (Following the accident, Deborah Meyer is in intensive care at Brackenridge.) Even that lengthy list of Chuck's duties and accomplishments seems paltry, somehow, when you consider his achievements that can't be listed. "He was just somebody -- and I never say this -- who radiated goodness," says novelist Mary Willis Walker, who first met Chuck at one of his stress management classes for UT Informal Classes. "He's enough to give religion a good name. I always thought if I needed pastoral counseling, he would be the one I would go to." In addition to serving at various times on the boards of Hospice Austin (for which he was the founding chaplain), Leadership Austin, United Austin for the Elderly, El Buen Samaritano Clinic, People's Community Clinic, Planned Parenthood, and the American Cancer Society, he helped develop policy guidelines for the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation regarding withdrawal of life support. The titles of his books are an indication of the variety of topics he was able to bring his keen intellect to touch upon: A Good Death: Challenges, Choices and Care Options; The Saints of God Murders; Blessed Are the Merciless: A Lucas Holt Mystery; Twelve Smooth Stones: A Father Writes to His Daughter About Money, Sex, Spirituality, and Other Things That Really Matter; Dying Church, Living God: A Call to Begin Again; The Gospel According to Bubba; and God's Laughter and Other Heresies, among others. Chuck's speeches on dying will be remembered as much for what he had to say as for the uniquely hilarious ways he said it. Kathleen Niendorff, his agent for his last three books, says, "I will never forget -- you know, his first wife died of toxic shock syndrome really suddenly -- and when he married Debbie, somebody, I don't know who, tactfully tried to ask him about the seriousness of her illness, and I will never forget his non sequitur, which is reported to have been, 'We're all dying.' He was a gentleman," she says, "but he had a sharp, comic wit and ... the one thing about Chuck Meyer is that he told the truth even when we didn't particularly like the truth." Services will be held at 2pm on Tuesday, Nov. 21, at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church (8134 Mesa Dr.). The family requests that anyone wanting to make donations do so to Hospice Austin, Meals on Wheels, or St. David's Healthcare Foundation... Suzy Spencer, author of the recently published true crime book Wages of Sin, will be giving a talk tonight, Thursday, Nov. 16, at 7pm, at the monthly meeting of the Austin Writers' League that will be a salute to Meyer. Free and open to the public. Meeting takes place at First Unitarian Church, 4700 Grover Ave. Interested AWL members should attend at 6pm for a forum on the AWL bylaws vote... UT professor John Kalb will present his new book Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression, an account of his participation in the race to discover the earliest human fossils in the Afar Depression in the early Seventies, at Barnes & Noble Homestead (14101 N. Hwy. 183) on Saturday, Nov. 18, at 3pm.