Mark Heard

Remembered by Others

From private email to the author by Susan Isaacs
(used by permission) ``[A] music-critic friend recommended Dry Bones Dance, but I thought it was country music, and I don't like country. Seven or eight months later, I went to a store to try Second Hand. I listened to Sattelite Sky on the headphones. I was floored. "Another Day In Limbo". I must have listened to it four or five times, crying and air-drumming, before the clerk came over and told me that Jesus would have me make a decision to buy or not. I called my friend who'd recommended DBD, to tell him what a revelation I had had. He told me Mark died that summer. I was devastated.

``Mark Heard was sort of the Hamlet of Christian contemporary music. He was brave enough to look squarely at the pain and sorrow in the world, and question God and himself. He grieved over that pain, felt too deeply, "worried too much." But he never stopped hoping, loving or believing. Mark Heard died of a heart attack. But as a friend corrected, no, he died of a broken heart. Rather like Jesus. I hope I never become too cosmopolitan and ... blasé ... to feel the pain of a sinful world; nor too Christianese not to care.

``The passing of Princess Diana reminded me of that same sorrow that Mark felt. I wanted to find some appropriate lyrics and post them on a Diana website. "Long Way Down". Or "Everything is All Right".''

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Last updated: 07 September 1999

Miles O'Neal <roadkills.r.us@XYZZY.gmail.com> [remove the "XYZZY." to make things work!] c/o RNN / 1705 Oak Forest Dr / Round Rock, TX / 78681-1514