In MemoriAm - Forrest

The Quality of Attention

You develop a rhythm on a long walk, a cadence of breath and footfall that becomes its own sort of conversation. After Forrest and Polly moved to Woodstock in 2022, the riverbank path became the regular venue for my friendship with him. It was a steady, perambulatory exchange set against the murmur of the river and the dappled morning light filtering through the oaks and kudzu. Our closeness was already a given, a sturdy structure built over years of annual family vacations and the shared sweat of remodeling my first home with his patient guidance. But the consistency of these walks strengthened that bond, giving it a private, dedicated space to breathe. On a certain balmy morning last summer, however, that familiar rhythm broke. I could feel it in his silence, in the slight hesitation before he crested a small rise in the path. There was something he was carrying, and when we stopped for a moment where the trail opened to the water, he finally unburdened himself. He looked not at me, but at the current, as if the question were an object he needed to carefully place between us. “You wouldn’t be offended,” he began, the words coming out in a tentative rush, “if I wanted to join your movie club, would you? Would that be alright?” In the grand scheme of a life, it was a small inquiry, but it landed with the quiet weight of a confirmation. It was another step on a path he had been walking his entire life, a request that was, I see now, the most natural expression of the man he had always worked to become.

To know Forrest was to understand that he saw his own character as a kind of garden, a plot of land inherited from his past that required constant, gentle tending. He was one of the kindest and most patient men I have ever known, but he never saw these qualities as his birthright. They were, to him, a conscious and daily practice, a careful cultivation of the man he hoped to be. This project was rooted in a childhood that he would recount on our walks in quiet, unpittied fragments. He spoke of his mother, a woman locked in a cage of her own perfectionism, for whom no task was ever done well enough. Complications at his birth had been the end of her childbearing, a fact she would deploy with surgical precision as a constant reminder of the daughter she never had. To be raised in the shadow of a ghost is to learn to doubt your own substance. From this, Forrest made a lifelong choice for empathy. His father’s career in the Air Force had made their life a study in transience, a series of new schools and fleeting friendships that taught him a universal friendliness but left him, he admitted, with a lingering difficulty in forging deep emotional bonds. His life, then, was a quiet, determined rebellion against this inheritance: a commitment to patience, to unconditional love, and to the hard work of true connection.

His presence in my neighborhood was the result of a much more sudden and brutal rebellion waged by his own body. Until 2021, he and Polly were living out the life they had built on an old family homestead in rural Jackson, its ancient pecan trees and weathered outbuildings promising a retirement filled with the satisfying labor of his hands. Theirs was a love story of profound and sentimental devotion. Polly, paralyzed by polio as an infant, possessed a joy so radiant it seemed to generate its own light, and Forrest spent his life orbiting her, a quiet custodian of her happiness. He was the one who spoiled her, who arranged each detail of their home to delight her, who made the world accessible. Their plan was simple and understood: he would care for her, always. The sudden diagnosis of Stage IV prostate cancer was not merely a medical crisis; it was a cosmological one. They sold the farm and, in a surprising turn, found a perfect final refuge just minutes from us. It was a beautiful dollhouse of a home, full of fancy finishes, warm wood countertops, and rounded, Hobbit-like doors. It was a house that seemed to know them, a cozy sanctuary that perfectly matched Forrest’s own Hobbit nature of prizing family, food, and a well-tended garden above all else. In this new, circumscribed world, he began his final project: he would learn to be a patient. He would do it for Polly, with all the methodical tenderness he had once reserved for her.

It was in this new context that our walks began, a prescription for exercise that quickly metastasized into a kind of secular confessional. The ritual provided a steady container for the deep friendship we already shared, a private space where the barrier to closeness he’d carried from childhood had long since been dismantled by years of shared work and life. He told me about his middle school years in Japan, and how, at eleven years old, he had mistakenly boarded an express train that rocketed him through an unfamiliar countryside. Alone, terrified, and unable to speak a word of Japanese, he found the train attendant. He recounted the scene with a quiet wonder: the man’s calm demeanor, the series of gestures and patient smiles, the silent, human agreement that saw a lost American boy safely onto the right train home. He never told his parents. The story felt like a parable for his life: a quiet, resourceful courage when faced with the unknown, a trust in the kindness of strangers.

His decision to enter the movie club, then, was an act of profound trust. Our club was a biweekly affair; we would watch the films on our own time and gather online for a discussion. Knowing his history with abstract analysis, I watched with a quiet interest to see how he would navigate this new territory. He would tackle our often-baffling selections with the earnest focus that defined him, and then bring his thoughts to our video calls. During our annual Halloween marathon, he dutifully watched the lurid, hyper-stylized psychedelia of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. He admitted in our discussion that the story was silly, but he’d found his vantage. “The way they built those sets,” he offered, “all the strange angles and that incredible color… it was something to see.” He was searching for the craft, for the human hand in the hallucinatory chaos. He was even more direct after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. He sat through its cold, cosmic silence on a giant screen in my basement, and in our next meeting, with a gentle, humorous finality, he said, “I watched that out of deep respect for Blake. And that will be the last time I watch it.”

He found his firmest footing, unexpectedly, in the bleak, medieval landscape of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. While I attempted to espouse its opaque spiritual allegories, Forrest, the reader of history, saw something else. He was struck by the brutal realism of the Tatar raids. He bypassed the film’s metaphysics and instead began to speak of the violent introduction of Christianity into the pagan cultures of early Europe, connecting the film's narrative to a broader, human story of conquest and forced conversion. He had done what he always did: he had found the history, the recognizable humanity, beneath the abstraction. He was not just watching our films; he was translating them into his own language.

The walks were the first thing the cancer took from us, and the loss was palpable. I noticed it before he would admit it, a new labor in his breathing on the hills, a recovery that began to stretch from seconds into minutes. His frustration was not with his fate, but with his body’s betrayal, as if it were a student that refused to learn. We switched to flatter terrain, but the decline was a relentless, gravitational pull. Yet, he clung to the movie club. It became a last tether to a world of ideas, a biweekly appointment with curiosity even as his physical world shrank to the confines of his Hobbit-door home. The diagnosis finally came that the cancer had invaded his bone marrow. The transfusions were a fleeting miracle, a brief, blush-colored return to the world of the living that would fade within days. Our conversations, once expansive, now turned inward, toward the terrifying logistics of dying.

When he transitioned to hospice, I suggested we resume our walks, this time with the quiet hum of his wheelchair bearings as our new rhythm. He was tired, but his eyes still took in the world. “I’m in uncharted territory,” he’d say, his voice thin. “I just don’t know what to expect.” I would tell him what little I understood, that it would probably be like falling into a deeper and deeper sleep. Soon, he was too weak to leave the house, and I would just sit with him, the silence now as companionable as our conversations had once been.

His final week was a blur of medicalized ritual and profound tenderness. Polly was magnificent, a fierce and gentle guardian of his comfort, her voice a constant murmur of reassurance. I took care of the house, a silent stage manager for the final act. Forrest slept, mostly, but would rouse for visitors, summoning a startling lucidity as a final gift of his presence. His last night was a brutal vigil against the body’s stubborn refusal to let go. In the morning, after the nurses came and the morphine was increased, a calm finally descended. We convinced Polly to take a bath, a moment of respite from her long watch. I sat with him in the quiet room, the only sound the rhythmic churning of the oxygen machine. When his son, Dulane, came in, I saw on his face that the atmosphere had changed. We stood by Forrest’s side. The faint, thrumming pulse in his neck grew fainter, and then was gone. From the bathroom, I heard Polly’s voice, impossibly calm. “He’s gone, isn’t he? I knew he was going to go while I took a bath. He would have wanted me to be relaxed.”

A few days earlier, searching for a key, I had looked through his oak roll-top desk, a piece he had built with his own hands. It was a landscape of his life: knick-knacks, photographs, and handwritten notes. In one drawer, I found a stack of papers. It was every email I had ever sent out for movie club. He had printed each one. In his careful, steady hand, in the margins and between the lines, he had taken meticulous notes. They were the quiet ledger of his curiosity. But looking at them, I saw they were something more. This was the same patient attention he had given to sanding a piece of wood for his daughter’s bed, the same methodical care he gave to his garden, the same gentle diligence with which he tended to his own character. His notes weren’t a grand, final gesture. They were a quiet continuation of a life spent paying attention. He left behind a simple, final lesson, written in the margins of art he was just learning to understand: that the greatest measure of a life is the quality of its attention, and that the work of becoming yourself is never truly finished.