Oliver Trust Fund

As many of you already know, Oliver Schroer died last Thursday July 3. He was living in hospital, but going out to the studio every day to work on his last album. That morning, he knew he wasn't going on any excursions, at least not of the normal kind. Had the doctor call Michele George, who was going to take him to the studio, and ask her to come to the hospital instead. When she arrived, he had just slipped away a few moments before.

An email has gone round encouraging us all to donate to the Oliver Schroer Scholarship Trust Fund, a fund to sponsor young string players who, like him, are pushing the boundaries. I met and played some of the young people who have apprenticed with him and, given their example, I can tell you that this is a chance to make a very wise investment in the future of music. These kids are just like Oli: brilliant, modest, open, generous. His legacy goes far deeper than music. He's taught us all so much, just by example, about how to live one's life.

Please consider donating. You'll find a link on the front page of his website www.oliverschroer.com... also a delightful animation of him dancing at his Last Concert on His Tour of This Planet, just under a month before he died. The picture above was taken at the concert as well.

You can check out my previous posts for his thoughts on dying here and here.

More Thoughts from Oliver

More thoughts on death from my eloquent friend Oliver Schroer, who has untreatable leukemia.

Dying is a funny subject. Very slippery when you try to get in there. I mean, I am dying now, am I not? But for me, dying represents more like that moment in the play where the actor clutches his throat and falls to the ground in a dramatic display, possible two or three times. That moment of passage which caused Nathaniel Webster to utter as his last words (paraphrased): “I die. I am dying. Both are used.” Right now it feels as though I am living, and rather intensely at that. So we could say that we are all dying, because in fact we are. We are all heading there. But that becomes very abstract, and believe me, it is not less abstract for me right now than for any of you. So that kind of leaves me back at square one in terms of my grasping of what is happening on a daily basis.

Sometimes I think of dying as taking a trip, a trip far away to a place from which I cannot come back. We all know people who do that…. move to Tasmania (great place, by the way…) The point is, we wish these people well on their journey, but we don’t get all choked up and overwrought about it. We remember them fondly, and they live on in our memories through stories and the legacy they have left. We toast them in absentia, and hope they are doing well in their new digs. Well, my whole journey feels a bit like that. I am going to this place we will all go, and my travel plans are just a bit more immediate than yours. (Though life is strange, and I still might not be the first to go. Just be careful crossing those streets and driving those cars, folks.) I think a lot in terms of metaphors to help me understand things. I have been informed by the stationmaster that my train is coming in immanently, and that I should be ready to get on board when it does. But until that train comes, I am still doing what I am doing fully and completely.

I am still trying to decide if he misspelled "imminent", which means "any minute now", or deliberately used "immanent", which can mean "performed entirely with the mind".