Last line of the last song

                                                    In Hana, late 1990s. Lisa Kristofferson photo

When the Rolling Stone story showed up on my phone Sunday afternoon, it felt like the last line of the last song of a magnificent playlist.

Kris Kristofferson was dead at 88.

The luminous obituary of the “American Renaissance man” was hardly unexpected. 

More than a decade earlier, in “Feeling Mortal” Kris wrote of 

“That old man there in the mirror
And my shaky self-esteem
Here today and gone tomorrow
That's the way it's got to be
With an empty blue horizon
For as far as I can see.”

That empty blue horizon could have been the view from the home on a hill in Hana where he lived for decades with his wife Lisa, raising a bunch of kids. 

At the end of 50 miles of two-lane road clinging to cliffs above rocky Pacific beaches, passing lush jungles and postcard-perfect waterfalls, Hana is Maui's Brigadoon. An achingly gorgeous hamlet in Paradise, a place that stops time.

Kris loved it there, he once told me, because it reminded him of Brownsville, Texas, where he was born, before embarking on an military-brat childhood, moving from place to place.

He felt comfortable surrounded by people with brown skin, he said, honored by little kids who called him “uncle.”

                                                         Tucson, 2023. Lisa Kristofferson photo

The last time I saw him, here in Tucson in early 2023, I asked how he was feeling.

“Old,” he answered. 

One word. That said it all.

That's how poetry works.

Kris was a poet. Among other things.

The guy who wrote, “He's a walkin' contradiction, partly fact and partly fiction,” was mostly fact. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer, a Rhodes Scholar, an Army captain helicopter pilot turned peace activist, and, just for good measure, a movie idol.

I began interviewing him about his film career in the '90s when the young Maui Film Festival played “Lone Star” in Castle Theater. It was a departure from the mostly hero roles he had played before, which had led up to the colossal box office flop “Heaven's Gate.”

In “Lone Star,” director John Sayles cast him against type as the corrupt sheriff of a Texas border town. Kris and his buddy Willie moseyed in late, and sat in the back of the audience for the screening.

John Sayles “kinda jump-started my career,” was the way Kris described “Lone Star” to me at the time.

Later, in the early 2000s when I interviewed him about a film titled “A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries” in which he played a fictionalized version of “From Here to Eternity” author James Jones, I asked how he approached the art of acting. 

Songwriting was where he lived. Singing his songs – alone on stages in packed halls around the world well into his 80s – was where he played. But he was no slouch in the movie business, either. More than 120 acting credits last time I checked the Internet Movie Data Base. They stretch from Martin Scorsese's “Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore” and his 1976 Golden Globe for “A Star Is Born” with Barbara Streisand, through assorted heroes, villains, lovers, lawmen, outlaws, mentors, presidents, scoundrels and lovable granddads – many destined to become iconic merely because they were played by him – in the half century since.

He had been a boxer, not an actor, when he was a young man. So where did this acting talent come from?

It was just a matter of being honest, he told me. Trying to, at least.

It didn't hurt to have good genes. 

                                Performing at the Hana Taro Fest, 2016. Rick Chatenever photo

Kris bought his property in Maui in 1970. My family arrived 20 years later, when I signed on to cover entertainment for The Maui News. One of the perks of the beat was covering Kris. Not all the time – maybe a couple of times a year when he did a concert in Hana or at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center or when one of his movies screened in Castle Theater.

Photos of us backstage together span a couple of decades.

It pissed off our music reviewer, but Kris's wife Lisa had decided I would be his Boswell, for local stories, at least.

During the years I knew him, Kris' memory began to fade.

As opposed to tabloid speculation about losing his mind, Kris blamed it on all the hits he had taken early, in his boxing career. Later it was diagnosed as Lyme disease.

One year, I emailed Lisa to say I was coming to Hana that weekend for the Taro Festival and hoped to see them there. Lisa wrote back, asking me to stop by their place first. Turns out, she had an ulterior motive. She needed someone to accompany him from the drop-off point in the parking lot to the stage on the ball field, a few hundred yards away.

So I got to be roadie for a day, entrusted with carrying the great man's guitar case. It felt heavy with all the places it had been, all the good work it had accomplished.

The last time I saw Kris in concert in Castle Theater, I was backstage standing behind Lisa as she guided the lyrics up the screen to the teleprompter at Kris' feet. After the show, backstage, Mick Fleetwood was among the luminaries congratulating him on the performance.

It was sheer courage, Mick told me, for him to be out there on stage like that, so alone, so vulnerable.

So powerful.

                                        In the living room, Hana, 2016. Lisa Kristofferson photo

During the Obama years, Kris was invited to perform in the White House in a concert presented on PBS. There he was on the TV screen, with Barack and Michelle swaying along to “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose…”

A few weeks later I ran into Lisa in the Foodland in our Upcountry neighborhood. It was a long way from remote Hana. She and Kris were there to watch one of their kids in a wrestling meet in a nearby high school.

Kris was out in the car in the parking lot, she told me. He'd love to see you, she insisted – just remind him who you are.

Out in the parking lot I approached the passenger side of their big old Chevy SUV, and saw the familiar face through the windshield. Seeing me approach, he lowered the window.

We exchanged pleasantries for a while before I mentioned seeing him on the PBS White House concert.

He nodded, admitting that he was honored that the president and first lady “had stayed for the whole thing.”

                                    Backstage on the bus, Tucson, 2019. Lisa Kristofferson photo

In 2009, after directing Kris in a movie, actor-filmmaker Ethan Hawke wrote a lengthy profile of him, “The Last Outlaw Poet,” in Rolling Stone. In it Hawke claimed that the source of Kris' greatness wasn't how high he had soared, but how low he had fallen … and then got up to fly again. And again.

I saw his power elsewhere as well. In the humility known only to a select few, who have surpassed superlatives only to find their true selves on the other side of greatness.

His heroism was the real kind. Not created on a green screen, but forged from faults and fears and finding what it took to stare them down.

And then there was his talent. Deceptively simple, yet every word perfect, hitting the bull's eye of the heart, the lyrics growing deeper the more you listen.

Since his death on Saturday, everyone I know, it seems, has a personal story about how Kris touched their life. 

A poster from Kris' 2007 concert in Castle Theater has a prominent place among the memorabilia covering the walls of my workroom. It's inscribed in magic marker, “Thanks, Rick, Peace, Kris Kristofferson.” I'm sure Lisa put him up to signing and sending it.

It's been there for a long time now, a talisman of sorts that became, over the years, a source of spiritual comfort. He was like a personal god of creativity for me, an inspiration not to be afraid to take risks, to try to make things no one had made before.

Other items surrounding the poster – a fading photo from the Dalai Lama's Maui visit, posters from film projects I worked on with Tom Vendetti and Bob Stone– have Buddhist undertones. I always painted Kris with that brush, too.

Once I told Lisa that I thought of Kris as my own personal Bodhisattva.

She later admitted that she and Kris had to look the term up to know what to thank me for.

                                         Backstage at Castle Theater, 2018. Lisa Kristofferson photo

His own spirituality – like his music – was less exotic, cleaner, straight to the heart.

For me it's summed up in “Amazing Grace,” performed surrounded by Willie and Emmylou and Rosanne and Alison and Hank Jr. and Reba and Rodney and a stage full of other superstars in a 2016 Nashville tribute concert titled The Life and Songs of Kris Kristofferson.

It has taken some of us a long, long time to learn, to know in our bones, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me … 

Kris knew. It seems like he always knew. And he was humble and grateful for knowing it.

He was born blessed with Amazing Grace.

He had enough of the stuff to share it with the rest of us, for as long as he was around.

 "God Almighty here I am
Am I where I ought to be
I've begun to soon descend
Like the sun into the sea
And I thank my lucky stars
From here to eternity
For the artist that you are
And the man you made of me"