His vehicles, his dogs, his stories, his writing were recalled. His students swiftly put together a little memorial service at one of Laramie’s parks. No exaggeration to say he was the soul of the writing program there. Strange, sure, but perfect.īrad was devotedly Southern, born in Mississippi, educated there and at the University of Alabama, but he spent the last 15 years working and teaching at the University of Wyoming.
There are precise imaginings of dogs’ thoughts, and what a poor human creature about to depart might picture in a last moment. There are graves, many graves, and the careful digging of graves. In our minds.”īrad wrote always with a deep, even extraordinary feeling for time and its permutations. “Shouldn’t we feel at peace around the dead? It seems to me like they prepare the way for us, in their brief presence with us, I mean. Selena, a figure in his first novel, The Heaven of Mercury, says, “I have always had a certain understandings of things.” She was speaking of her ease with the dead, the balm of remembered love.
To a remarkable degree Brad’s writing was always about death and dreams, visions, the world to come. But we have his work, his stories and novels, vivid in their troubling grace and strange assurances. The news was a horrid shock to his family, students and friends, and it’s still difficult to fathom that we will not see him again and take pleasure in his company. It was the morning of July 8, 16 days before his 65th birthday. Brad Watson died suddenly of a heart attack in the ranch house he and his wife Nell built on the beautiful prairie outside Laramie, Wyoming.
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