On the fifth of June Patrick Keim retired to a small room in his apartment that he used as a studio on the west side of Athens, Georgia. The floor and a large table were covered with scraps of images, a pair of large scissors, glue, electrical tape, dentures, a pile of old medical journals, butcher knives, and various small objects. He cleared an open space on the floor. He stood upright and gauged how it would appear when he fell. This was something he couldn't help. Patrick was always an artist. The wall directly behind him was bare. He stuck the pistol into his mouth, made a kissing sound and shot himself. In this he was successful. The bullet penetrated through the brain and out the top of the skull. He fell, however, just off from the open piece of flooring, obscuring various images with his torso and hips; the blood pooling in the slight dip in the floor. Still, the result was unexpected and very reminiscent of his early work. His body was found two days later, making it irrelevant that he had showered and shaved minutes before his departure. That Patrick would leave like this I had known for years. It was reflected in the construction of his work, particularly in the adhesives that he used. The rubber bands popped and the glue would come unstuck. There was a built-in decay in his work that crept just beneath the surface. When I met Patrick he was standing next to an installation of his splattered with blood. He shook my hand with his own heavily bandaged hand. It was a gracious act in front of all the broken glass. One of the last communications I had with Patrick was a postcard sent to my farm in Alabama. It was a photograph of the North Sea, showing a dark sky and cold, foaming waves with no shore in sight. He had added an image of a bandaged face bobbing in the waves like a buoy which was then outlined in a rectangle standing upright like an obelisk. At the top of the rectangle was another empty portal or door saved for me. He was unselfish. Looking at the postcard his coming death is as clear and cold as the water rolling in. I'm sure Patrick imagined the bandages in the image not as staunching the blood but as a frozen eruption of his brains moving into the world as an iceberg that would vanish into the ocean. A few years after his death Patrick appeared near my farm. A dozer operator scraping a lake out of a swamp uncovered a seven foot long pine coffin. He was so unnerved he quickly buried it back in the dam. Patrick, like the Hunter Gracchus, is now touring the world in a sea craft, going wherever the North Sea touches the world beneath the world. I didn't have to ask why he surfaced there. He came to see me.