Everything Fades to Gray
Jeff Pates
August 3, 2023
For the last 10 years, Jeff Pates was not only my friend and co-worker, he was my fashion advisor. One day during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were live-streaming our Bluff City Church services from his living room, he looked me up and down slowly with something of a bemused smile on his face. He asked, “Did you notice you’re wearing all gray today?”
Personally, I thought my matching skills were impeccable. Everything matched: Gray v-neck shirt, gray pants, gray socks, and even gray tennis shoes. My emo-adjacent style was on point. It was all on purpose.
“I think you need to introduce another color to your palette” he said, this time laughing at my monochromatic preferences. “Your personality is too colorful to hide it under all that gray.”
When I heard the news Tuesday morning that my friend had passed away, I just sobbed in my car. Just two weeks ago, we met for our monthly lunch at La Hacienda. We always begin with five minutes of work-talk, but then spend the next five minutes arguing about how this restaurant offers a richer variety of food than my preferred Pollo Loco. He wanted even my food choices to be more colorful. I perpetually disappointed him with my contentment with bland chicken and white cheese sauce and gray attire.
Whether it was his diversified palette, vast knowledge of local beers, his trendy shoes, or his genuine gentleness, my friend brought life, color and, most of all, love to all of us. He exemplified the fruit of the Spirit and the kind of holy love for neighbor that made me always feel safe and unjudged in his presence. Even when he was mocking my drab clothing.
My favorite place to be with Jeff was weddings. He has run sound, DJ’d, or played drums at many of the weddings I’ve officiated. I loved being his teammate and seeing him work the crowd. The ceremony belonged to the bride but the party belonged to Jeff. He seemed to come alive in environments where there was loud music, flashing lights, good beer, and the bright colors of bridal parties. But mostly he came alive when he was dancing with Abbye. I loved watching how much he enjoyed being with her in those moments. Dancing with her, he seemed to forget anyone else in the world existed. Everyone else in the world was gray and Abbye was the lone, bright flower.
This morning I learned that his taste in colorful things extended to flowers. Abbye said he always wanted to make sure the dinner table was decorated with flowers when they had people over. This fact gave me so much more insight into his soul. In an age of bland, gray hyper-masculinity, my friend loved beauty, delighted in vibrancy, and mostly wanted the people around him to feel like he saw them. Loved them. Welcomed them.
During the pandemic, Jeff, Blair Perry, and I met every two weeks - freezing our butts off to meet outside at coffee shops - just to see each other for our small group gathering. In sharing our souls, our joys, our bitterness, our struggles, our loves, our delights, and our regrets, we saw each other in a way that men don’t always get to see each other. We saw each other as vulnerable and fragile. And welcomed and loved each other as finite, imperfect humans.
My friend Jeff was human. He was imperfectly beautiful like the flowers he loved to place on his dinner table. And it turns out that his life was as fragile as those same flowers. His passing on Tuesday morning will leave a massive hole in our lives, in our hearts, and in our church.
My brain and heart are having trouble accepting this new reality. A heart that loves does not easily let go. I expect him at any moment to mock me for my clothing. Or just walk through the door. But something in my heart also knows that the sun hasn’t shined as brightly the last three days. The music hasn’t sounded as beautiful. The flowers don’t look as vibrant. And everything seems to be fading to gray.
I miss my friend. I know you miss him too. I’m glad I get to miss him with other people who loved him, too
T.o honor Jeff’s memory, here are a few things that we are doing so that maybe, sometime in the distant future, a little color can come back into this world: