Mark was my husband David’s best friend, and I adored him—though it took a year or so after a very funny first impression of Mark for this love and adoration on my part to actually take hold! When I first met Mark nearly 15 years ago, David and I were living in a damp, drafty little cottage on Oak Street in St. Helena, in the Napa Valley. Enter Mark Metherell… and David Burchi with him. I had heard so much about “Metherell”—David talked constantly about how brainy and kick-ass he was, and how he was a surfer and a poet and loved literature—to me he sounded like some kind of minor god, and I couldn’t wait to meet the guy. So when he and Dave Burchi showed up for a visit one weekend I was anticipating a civilized weekend of quaffing wine and talking about Dostoyevsky with the legendary Metherell and Burchi… Well: while David and I finished up our workday, Mark and Burchi had hit the local watering hole called the Pastime, and they had hit it hard.  By the time David and I got home from work, Mark and Burchi were well on their way, and Mark threw up in my bathroom for two days straight. I was annoyed to say the least. I’m ashamed to say that at some point during that weekend (maybe right around the time I was cleaning vomit out of the shower) I told David that his friends were idiots. Mark and I were not off to a good start, and let’s not even get started on Burchi!

Fast forward a few years to my first real memory of getting to know Mark and realizing that he was not in fact an idiot, but a great human being. David and I had had our oldest son Schuyler, and Mark had come to Northern California to visit us just before New Year’s 1995. I remember that it was about a week after Mark Foo had died surfing Mavericks, and we drove to Half Moon Bay to get a glimpse of the spot and pay our respects. We stood on the bluff overlooking Mavericks; the breaking waves sounded like thunder. It was sunny but cold. I don’t remember what we talked about that day, but I remember that Mark carried Schuyler in the backpack, and we stood there on the bluffs in quiet conversation for quite some time. That weekend, I discovered a bit of the Mark Metherell that I had been hoping meet. He was soft-spoken but straightforward, kind and funny with our baby son, and fully in possession of that unique-to-Mark quality that I have come to love: depth of character AND goofiness, happily, simultaneously coexisting.

Over the years I got to know Mark even better—he had become a Navy SEAL, and was always off doing really cool, dangerous-sounding things that he couldn’t tell us about or he would have to kill us. Our visits with him were sometimes few and far between, but he and David always picked up right where they had left off. And then enter Sarah: David and I didn’t get to meet her until we came to Laguna for their wedding weekend, but Mark had told us about her, and she sounded every bit as amazing as he was…and when I got to know her, I found out that she was, and is. Two incredibly smart, talented, daring world travelers had found each other and fallen in love...It has always seemed to me like Mark and Sarah’s life and adventures together were like something out of a movie. And one of my favorite memories of Mark is the way, almost at a loss for words and with his characteristic humility, he described Sarah to my husband just before we met her at the rehearsal dinner: “Dude, you have just got to meet her. I don’t even know what to say. She is just SO HOT I have no idea what she’s even doing with me!!” He shrugged and shook his head, as if to say, I don’t understand this, and just don’t blow my cover! And, as anyone who knows Mark and Sarah will attest, his passion for Sarah never wavered. Mark was so, so in love with her.

I treasure my first impression of Mark, vomit and all, because it makes me laugh. It contrasts so sharply with the more recent memories I have of a man who became a close, dear friend over the past 15 years. And anyone who knows Mark knows that what made him so amazing was that he was a study in contrasts, a paradox. You can’t sum him up by pointing to just one of his many fine qualities, because it’s really the beautiful tension between his seemingly opposite qualities that made Mark who he was. 

He was a man’s man who (I have heard!) could be blunt and bracing, but I knew him to be gentle and tactful. He was a man of action who didn’t like to sit around and waste time, but he always seemed to have time to talk to my children and take them spearfishing and surfing. He was a man of God whose uncompromising faith informed every aspect of his life, but he was refreshingly un-churchy, un-stuffy, and free of clichéd answers and religious jargon. Mark was fiercely intelligent and well-read, a lover of stories of great battles and heroes; but he was also capable of telling the funniest, most profane story you can imagine, with perfect comedic timing and a twinkle in his eye. Another contrast I find so funny: I used to tease Mark about the fact that he feared and hated public speaking and being the center of attention, but jumping out of an airplane? No problem!

I could go on and on: I knew Mark to be a skilled soldier but also a devoted, diaper-changing dad. He was warrior but also a poet. He was a child of privilege, born to a loving family, with every conceivable advantage in life, but was one of the most humble, unassuming people I’ve ever known.

If I could say one more thing to Mark, it would be “Thank you.” Thank for being the friend to my husband that you were. Thank you for being “Uncle Mark” to my sons. Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for being a loving husband to my friend Sarah and an absolutely smitten father to Cora. Thank you for your service to our country and to the cause of freedom. And if I were pressed to sum up Mark in one phrase, I would say that he was a prince in flannel shirts and flip-flops.

Since Mark loved books, and was a citizen of the world and a man of faith, I want to close with a quote from the poet-priest John Donne. Most everyone has heard his famous statement that “No man is an island”—but this is a slightly less familiar part of that quote that I think speaks particularly well to Mark’s life:

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators: some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation; and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again….”