New York City - One of Spalding Gray's last performances was a benefit for Clear Path International. Spalding and his family traveled to Vermont to spend Thanksgiving with their family in Stowe, and afterwards traveled to Dorset to perform "It's a Slippery Slope" at the Dorset Playhouse.

We were honored to have him here as his body of work accomplished so much in educating people to the recent history of conflict, and the very real human suffering due to that conflict, in Southeast Asia.

Spalding's public memorial service was April 12, 2004 at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater. One of the many speakers was John Perry Barlow. His eulogy, as delivered, is below.

Thank you to Mr. Barlow for allowing it to be printed here.
You can read more about Spalding's memorial service here.

Spalding Gray Eulogy as given by John Perry Barlow
The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center
New York City, NY

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

When I first heard that Spalding had disappeared, I knew. But there is an expert part of my nature, the denial part, that immediately began ginning up an alternative explanation.

I imagined him actually attempting a swim to Cambodia. I saw him swan-diving from the rail of the Staten Island Ferry, rounding Sandy Hook by dawn, and turning south for Cape Horn. What a great monologue this is going to make, I thought. Or not. Spalding inhabited a magical reality where such feats might actually be possible.

In my less magical reality, it was easier to see him beneath all that black water. He’d been under a darkness as cold and opaque for some time. I’ve had my low moments, and I’d seen plenty of his over the years, but I have never been in the presence of a depression so leaden, nor a monomania so circular as what wrapped itself around the soul of Spalding Gray in September of 2001. From the time it got him until the time he dove, his life was a purgatory of uselessness, barren of joy and meaning. Love, incoming or out-going, became something he could think, but not feel. I don’t blame him for what he did. He hung tough with it longer than I could have.

Given the pall of his 2 last years, coupled with his more theatrical previous miseries, it’s easy to forget how happy Spalding was for most of the 90’s. He embraced the wholesome life with weird ease. He became a devoted family man who loved Forrest, and Theo, and Kathie, and Marisa even more than he loved suffering. From the moment he stepped up to fatherhood, back in ’93, he was a passionate, if unorthodox, dad. And he was delighted to be one until all his delight was surgically removed in a hospital on the Upper East Side. In September of 2001.

In addition to his strange fitness as a father, Spalding was a man of many ironies. Of these, I think the greatest was his selfless generosity of spirit, improbable in a professional narcissist. He gave us himself, as he was, flawed and naked before our judgment. In doing so, he extended a healing permission to us. Being utterly disclosed before strangers creates a zone of general amnesty that loosens the shackles of everyone’s quiet desperations. It is a blow against the pursuit of loneliness.

With this gift, Spalding changed people’s lives, profoundly and often. This has been made very clear to me in the last few months. When Spalding disappeared, I posted something to my weblog about it. An extraordinary bloom of sweet commentary has arisen in response. As of this morning, there had been 572 tributes to Spalding posted to my blog. Another 728 e-mails have been sent to me personally. Five megabytes of strange beauty.

These memoria are long, eloquent, and achingly honest. I wish I had time to quote from them here. They are filled with tales of suicide attempted, depression and madness endured, and joy fully experienced. Nearly every one contains a perfect moment or two. They demonstrate the spreading contagion of his candor and his raconteur's genius for investing ordinary details with more universal magic.

He was certainly not afraid to talk to strangers, so I'm not quite surprised by how many of these folks relate deeply personal encounters with Spalding. That his own quirky voice and viewpoint is woven so discernibly into theirs seems proof that the soul is not so easily contained by its original bottle of flesh. Though widely distributed, there may be more of Spalding in the world now than there was when he was still walking around muttering to himself.

These people, and we here today, are his witnesses. We are collective evidence that Spalding planted something beautiful, if a little goofy, among us. It is a holy thing. It will continue to blossom even without his being here to tend it. Death doesn't have Spalding Gray. We do.

John Perry Barlow is a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Since May of 1998, he has been a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, following a term as a Fellow with the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.