A Courageous Death: A Tribute to Tos Fackenthall MACP ’10

A tribute by Andrew Bauman, MACP ’10

“Tos, passed away last night at 8 pm,” my wife texted this sentence this morning at 7:41 a.m. I had just piled my last kiddo into the car to drop him off at school. I sat there momentarily stunned, my body waiting to catch up with my clouded mind. I was with him on Tuesday night; I hadn’t seen many folks from the Seattle School community in over a decade, and most there to honor him I didn’t even know. Tos had invited his community to his own “living memorial.” He had been diagnosed with lung cancer six weeks earlier when he let us all know on March 28th via a Facebook post. “I have stage 4 lung cancer, already spread to my spine and likely elsewhere. I have a PET scan tomorrow that will show the true extent…” He went on to write, “The last 6 weeks (since his diagnosis) have changed me forever, for the good. As someone who has struggled to let in love, I have no option now.”

I met Tos, 17 years ago during our first year at the Seattle School. Tos had quit his tech job to pursue his passion for art and his love for people. We connected over our mutual love for poetry and artistic expression. We frequented poetry slams and talked about all the wild new stuff we were learning, and he loved my puppy. Tos became a stalwart in the Seattle music scene. He spent the next 15 years filming musical artists in Seattle and in the Pacific Northwest and supporting all forms of artists, as well as authors and therapists like myself, who were just getting started in their industry with low-cost headshots and videos. He loved beauty and was drawn to it wherever he found it, and that was evident on Tuesday evening.

Two hundred or so folks piled into the Fremont Abbey, and an anxious hum covered the room. About 15 minutes after 6 pm, the room collectively turned toward the front door as Tos, sacredly limped into the room and slowly headed to the open couch facing the stage. With his oxygen tank on his left, his two dogs and a couple of close friends and family members holding him upright, it was as if we were witnessing a present-day Via Dolorosa, a path to guide us all into a new “Way of Suffering” that felt like a holy invitation to make peace with our mortality.

Tos had asked us to bring music, poetry, and art in his honor so that he could bathe in beauty as his final farewell, so we followed his request. What happened next was some of the most vulnerable and holy space I had ever sat in. My goosebumps had their own goosebumps as song after song was gifted to us, as cry after cry and wail after wail; the moment had more gravity in our hearts. As my wife, Christy, articulated beautifully, “Our bodies shook in grief, vocal cords praise and cursed in the most beautiful music. And Tos’ sweet moans, his grief sounds, were like a conductor guiding us. And he orchestrated his final symphony.” I didn’t realize then that a miracle was happening inside my body, that Tos was teaching us all how to die with courage and integrity. To look straight at death in the face and say yes is to make peace with our greatest fear. Tos, taught me that death doesn’t have to have power over me; he taught me the power of community, ritual, and the significance of beauty in the face of tragedy. Thank you, friend. In honor of you, I wrote a poem. I consider it one of the privileges of my life to face you and share this with you before your death on Tuesday before your passing. I love you, buddy.

To my Friend Tos

Death is a strange mentor.

First, my son.

Then my sister.

Then my dad.

Damn, I hate you, death, my cursed guide.

And now you take, my friend.

You teach me, though I don’t want to be taught, you don’t have my consent, Tos, I don’t want to be your student.

But again and again, you call me to the edge of my beauty, by reflecting to me your own. As you stare down the shadow of your death, you teach me about the goodness of new life.

How dare you?!

How dare you be so bold to invite me into the places I desperately want to escape? So many times, I just want to be a coward.

Death, surely, is the most peculiar of teachers. Tos, you are now my Professor, and I am your reluctant apprentice. I curse the air and grasp for you not to conform to your end. Yet you kindly show me how to surrender my need to control you. You are my educator of the wise expiration.

Tos, you, and I connected via our passion for art and for the harrowing disruption of words. So, I thought of no other way to honor you than to send you into your next artistic venture with more words… in closing,

“You, my friend, are light in the darkness, though it’s no secret that depression stole from you while you were here… yet when I envision you in the hereafter, I see you being an infamous pirate who pillages joy from the heavens sailing a gnarly ship known as “the thief of sadness” breaking all the cosmic rules to bring magic back to us all that are still here, waiting for our turn.

Captain Tos,  will continue to haunt us, whispering truths that will burn our ears; he will say, “Peace is greater than our inner wars, he will remind us that, self-love is more potent than self-violence, that music is everywhere when we have the eyes to hear it and yes, Tos you, will taunt us from beyond that your hair is still way better ours.”

We love you, good, wise man. I wish you didn’t have to go, that you didn’t have to lead us.

Thank you for how you have loved me and my family. I will miss you.

From your friend Andrew.”