Dear friends,
I woke this morning to some very sad news that I need to share with all of you. After more than two weeks in the hospital, Mark Testori died early this morning.
As recently as this past weekend, we were cautiously optimistic about Mark’s prognosis – doctors indicated that his body seemed to be healing. He had been taken to Yale-New Haven for a rare heart condition, which placed multiple parts of his body in jeopardy. While the heart treatments were successful, the many strains of the past two weeks proved to be more than he could handle. This is a huge and sudden loss for Mark’s immediate family, but also for our church family. Mark was a constant presence, someone we relied upon for everything from running our sound board on Sundays to setting up tables for the fellowship hour to fixing many of the major machines that make our church run. We shall miss him tremendously.
While Mark has been in the hospital, we have become all the more aware of how deeply we have relied upon Mark. As ministers, we realized one Sunday that we didn’t have water in the pulpit area – that was something Mark always provided. So too, we realized that the pulpit light hadn’t been turned on, something we scarcely remembered how to do – Mark always had it on and waiting for us on Sundays. In truth, there are a thousand little things just like that all around the church that Mark quietly (and yes, sometimes not so quietly!) took care of without any of us noticing. But we sure notice now.
On a personal note, I recall our first Thanksgiving in Old Lyme as a family some ten years ago. We weren’t traveling anywhere that year, and didn’t know many people at that point. And so I reached out to Mark to see if he would join us for Thanksgiving dinner. He accepted. Rachael cooked a great meal, and Mark brought the pie. He told stories the entire afternoon and evening. The kids loved him – this garrulous and cheerful man who seemed interested in their lives as well. At the end of the evening, we built a fire in one of the fireplaces. Then we poured a little bourbon in our glasses, and enjoyed the glow of the night. It was a great Thanksgiving, and we were all grateful for Mark’s company that year. It’s not that we felt lonely, exactly, but we felt less lonely for his being with us.
We shall all miss Mark’s good cheer. We shall miss his stories. We shall miss the rumble of his motorcycle. We shall miss the ringtone on his phone. (It was Bad to the Bone, and it always seemed to go off at full volume during staff meetings!) We shall miss his can-do spirit, and his presence behind that sound board on Sunday mornings. We shall miss his tinkering with the clock in the church bell tower, and the long narrations of each of his ventures into that tower. We shall miss the thousand and one tiny ways that he took care of the church, and all of us, in the tasks he accomplished daily. And we shall miss his willingness to turn the earth of the Memorial Garden once again whenever a member of our community passed away.
Now someone else will turn that earth, and Mark himself will rest in the garden that he so lovingly tended for 15 years as the sexton of the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme.
While we don’t yet know the details, we will have a service to celebrate Mark’s life, and to give thanks for all that he offered to our church.
Steve
