Tad’s mission (and I can use that word in good conscience here) was about so much more than just saving certain pretentious properties for a few more generations of socially ambitious Carolinians who could afford to replace octagonal slate roofing tiles that can cost, as we all know, up to $69 per. The houses whom he’d saved were suddenly extravagantly giving groundbreaking housewarming gifts back to him. Presents from Presences! Farewells. They meant, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

That’s just one story about him. But it’s the one that came to me. I know there are people in historic preservation who are only interested in the architecture, in the pediments, the lemon-oiled perfectible period detail. I fear I’ve met a few. I fear I myself have been wedged into more than a few mullioned window seats with Laura Ashley floral prints and peppermint-stripe piping on the cushions under my increasingly historical whatever (and there till after 2 a.m.). These experts consider the people who actually live (or lived) in these fine places as something like the furniture—you maybe need them there to make the house seem finished, but they’re incidental to the structure’s superior claims. With Tad, the living, the livingness of the place and what went on there and what might go on there next, that was the definition of his passion, boxwood by old rose, slate by slate, mantel to passing mantel.

Then Tad died. At noon, March 31, Patrick left a message on my machine; he said that during the night, Tad had typed in caps in his computer notebook, HERE GOES. Pat suggested maybe I should get to the hospital? “It’s started,” Tad told me in his quiet way. By the time I found the message and rushed in there, it was almost over, and I held one hand and Patrick was on the other, as at some birth. He was spared nothing, Tad, but he presided over it, “inhabited” his dying. Our boy half-hosted it as he’d done everything else. With one of his final breaths—by then far past language, which had been a great ally of his—he blew sort of a kiss.

Patrick Trevor—after contacting Tad’s parents (who were, for various reasons, unable to be with him at the end), Pat, after signing the coroner’s papers, after speaking to doctors and nurses and the many close friends who’d gathered—bent toward Tad’s computer. (It was still glowing in one corner of the unlit room.) At 1:04 a.m., Patrick withdrew the disk containing Tad’s final “Available for Restoration.” I had agreed to take over this newsletter, so Pat handed the disk to me.