Must-read tribute to Richard Millen at Lee Jay Berman's new Eye on Conflict. Lee Jay traces the lineage of mediation in Southern California, with Millen at the top. Whether you knew Richard or not, he says, if you're a mediator, you were taught by him.
It doesn't begin to capture Richard's colorful life, impish spirit, and fierce dedication to the practice of mediation "the way it ought to be." It doesn't say how many times Richard would meet with new mediators to mentor them and share the joy and sorrows of the field that had so much potential yet, he believed, failed so persistently to live up to it. I never told Richard that he was the father I adopted for the loss of my own, first to Parkinson's and then back to the sea he loved, ashes to ocean.
I understand from Richard's devoted friend, mediator Lee Jay Berman that Richard's family is having a private internment on Friday at Mt. Sinai but that he and mediator Laurel Kaufer will be planning a tribute soon, an event to honor Richard's life.
I don't think there's a mediator in town who didn't know and love Richard. Not, you'll excuse the presumption, a "real" mediator at any rate. Richard, for all his storied "soulfulness" did not suffer fools gladly or at all. Nor did he cotton to separate caucus, position-based, distributive, single-issue, monetized shuttle mediation. He considered most of us lawyers benighted fools and strove mightily to treat us with compassion rather than holding us in contempt. That old cavalry soldier was never one to roast marshmallows over an open fire - he'd rather roast a few executives, attorneys, and "settlement conference" mediators instead.
The last time I saw Richard - not that long ago - he was sitting by my side at a meeting of the State Bar's Standing Committee on ADR muttering angrily about the way we were all wasting our time on legal issues, debating for God's sake, when we'd been given the keys to the kingdom already, keys we'd so carelessly left at home tarnishing in junk drawers.
I don't know what else to say. I hope people who knew and loved Richard will come here to share stories and say good-by and we love you without sentimentalizing him because he would have hated that. I would think Richard would have raged raged against the dying of the light except for the fact that he was pretty fed up with the lot of us toward the end there. So I'll end with a poem that doesn't cotton to people just up and vanishing. By one of the great contemporary poets of the English language, W.S. Merwin.
With each journey it gets
worse
what kind of learning is that
when that is what we are born for
and harder and harder to find
what is hanging on
to what
all day it has been raining
and I have been writing letters
the pearl curtains
stroking the headlands
under immense dark clouds
the valley sighing with rain
everyone home and quiet
what will become of all these
things that I see
that are here and are me
and I am none of them
what will become
of the bench and the teapot
the pencils and the kerosene lamps
all the books all the writing
the green of the leaves
what becomes of the house
and the island
and the sound of your footstep
who knows it is here
who says it will stay
who says I will know it
who said it would be all right
