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IN LOVING MEMORY OF
James Allen
Veitl
April 26, 1936 – August 15, 2021
James "Jim" Veitl, 85 of Spearfish died Sunday, August 15, 2021 at his daughter's home in Hot Springs.
No services are planned at this time.
I'm writing this while I'm still alive to save the bother for someone else later.
My attitude while I'm living is similar to that expressed by Diane Ackerman's short poem "Lady Faustus":
I rage to know
What beings like me, stymied by death and leached by wonder,
Hug those campfires night allows,
Aching to know the fate of us all,
Wallflowers in a waltz of stars.
Or maybe Witt Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening":
O' plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist,
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
If you recognize my name, then we have known one another down the years. So, I want your name as one of those who has enriched my life. Beginning with those of you, I've known more than fifty years to those among you I've known for twenty-five to thirty-five years. Dave Miller, Harold Storsve, Alan Crago, Joel Evans, Bob Haux, Grazyna Kempista, Wanda and Marshal Sudrala (with Krista and Mandy), Raul Ponce de Leon, Mac McLaughlin, Don and Janet Siebert, Spencer Pence, Walt Buchholz, Marland Linafelter, Perry Washenberger.
So, thanks for all the good conversation. The humor and ideas over coffee. The fishing trips. The summer and winter meals around those campfires. Hiking around the hills. An occasional trip to the Black Hills Playhouse. Thanks for your good company.
Now I a four-fold vision see.
A four-fold vision is given to me.
"Tis four-fold in my supreme delight
And three-fold in soft Beulah's night
And two-fold always. May mind us keep
From single vision and Newton's sleep
-William Blake
Perhaps the finest story I've read about what happens after we die was related to a linguist studying an African community language. The people told him that they thought that when a person died, the part of them that made them, would rise slowly like the smoke of a late evening cooking fire to raise into a place of memory where they lingered to watch over the community. Then as time passed and there is no one on earth to remember their name, they then continue on to disappear into the dome of the sky forgotten even to eternity.
The poet Robert Frost in his poem "The Death of the Hired Man" wrote that home is a place that when you go there, they have to let you in. Or, home is a place you somehow haven't deserved. In the real world it worked out differently. I got old and older so my daughter, Melinda and son-in-law Stan, took me in. Frost wrote in his poem "Birches – Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better". The kids have proven it to be true. They could not have done better.
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