We announce the passing of
Alan Murray Krumm
In Vancouver ~ Nov. 9, 2013
After 62 years of wandering the deep, muddy trails and the cruel low slopes of this life, there was a lump of something in the blood to the brain, a sometimes fitful sleep, and few days growing calmer and more pale until he slipped away.
“Bloodied but unbowed,” he would have said, because the classic, familiar phrases were a comfort at the last to his battered, scattered mind.
Around him, they all proclaimed that “He could have been a captain!” and he was a warrior of sorts, but a lowly, broken-backed foot soldier all the way, friend to every deserter and derelict that crossed his path. He had the aquiline brow and the smooth speech of the free-man aristocrat, but he gathered chains around him somehow as he trudged his long way forward, until finally the iron links strangled him, and he fell full face forward hard onto the unforgiving earth. And as he rested there, his last few frail days, breathing hard and fast, blind-eyed and numb, it seemed as if a miracle occurred, and invisibly he made peace with his demons and his angels, his disease and his descendants.
Then he departed quietly
And we were left to wonder
And remember...