‘There Will Be Music Despite Everything’: A Tribute to Neil King Jr.

The author of "American Ramble" was a magnetic force who changed those around him

Neil King Jr. was an extraordinary human being who greeted a cancer diagnosis in 2017 by becoming a swirling vortex of life and wonder. His absence is now a painful void.

At age 58, he was knocked backward by a season of cancer treatments. But Neil emerged from that period more thirsty than ever to drink deeply of life, all the way to the dregs.  

To know Neil was to be pulled irresistibly into his orbit. He was a magnetic force, possessing a passionate enthusiasm, a beautiful and sophisticated pen, an ever inquisitive mind, a generous spirit, and a quirky, intriguing idea to walk the Acela corridor in the spring of 2021. On that 25-day jaunt from D.C. to New York City he became an apostle of awe, a traveling preacher of worship and wonder. He was literally transfigured for a time, like an Old Testament prophet or a heavenly visitor. In the process, anyone who knew him was changed. It was a miracle.

He taught me to laugh — joyfully more than defiantly but sometimes ruefully — in the face of adversity and to never take a day for granted. And he taught me the ‘speed of God’: three miles per hour.

Those lessons are fresh in my mind now, one week after Neil passed away at age 65, far too soon. The cancer returned just under a year ago. It slowed Neil over the course of the last year, and then suddenly in August, accelerated. Mercifully, he and his wife Shailagh — devoted and extraordinary in her own right — were still able to take a two-week trip to Greece in June before things took a turn.

I met Neil when he was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and I was covering the 2012 presidential campaign for The Huffington Post. I do not remember where or when we met, only that he was a friend from the beginning, to me as with so many others. We kept in touch in the years after, and then got lunch in 2018. He had cancer then, but apparently didn’t tell me about it, because when I e-mailed him in February of 2021, I asked him about a Facebook post in which he mentioned having cancer.

He told me that after a diagnosis of esophageal cancer over Labor Day weekend in 2017, he endured treatment and uncertainty through 2018 and 2019, and then suddenly, in February of 2020, his scans came back “amazingly, totally clean.”

“The taste of mortality I got has made everything a little sweeter, including how the reality that nothing endures can make you freer of mind and looser of limb,” he wrote to me then.

And he was preparing to go on a “Huck Finn/Thoreau style walk from Capitol Hill to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, departing a few days before Opening Day, in which I want to just muse, and have curious encounters, and unearth treasures from our past, and see where it takes me.”

That walk had been delayed a year by COVID. Then, when he did set out a year later in late March 2021, he sent an e-mail each morning to his family and friends, describing the previous day’s expedition. We received Neil’s missives at a time when we were more intensely aware of how fragile, and precious, were our blessings. Neil ushered us into a sacred space each morning over those few weeks.

The first few days of dispatches detailed encounters with strangers, beautiful and sometimes haunting stories that he designated as parables. One of these strangers — a man named Ted fetching his trash cans at the end of his driveway in the region where Baltimore’s northwest suburbs form a brackish overlap with farmland northeast of D.C. —  called Neil’s pilgrimage a “holy walk.” 

Here’s what Ted told Neil:

“Here is how I see it. You’ve been close to all that in Washington, the chaos at the Capitol, Covid, the whole police/Black Lives Matter thing. All that. We all are screaming, we are all reaching out, and your walk is to calm the storm, to center yourself to where you can be anchored in a frequency that will bring everybody into one harmonious vibration. Right now, everybody's out of  sync, in the wrong frequency. When you tune in a radio, you get the  music, or you get the static. So hopefully, your walk will tune you. When you hit the tuning fork, it will give the right vibration that yields healing. That's the bottom line. As you heal, somebody else is going to get in tune and pick up on your vibe, and heal. Your frequency can get us all in sync. You know, this is the Passover, this is the resurrection, this is the renewing. And so, you're going on this walk, Brother, and it’s a holy walk, a walk of worship.”

These words, this idea, stuck with Neil. Years later he was still talking about it. 

“I think one of the reasons that I've formed the kind of bonds with the people that I did along this walk was because I was — during this stretch of time — uncommonly receptive and uncommonly open to them. And because of that I think they responded to me in kind,” Neil said in one interview. “You create the reality that you walk into when you walk into a room. You change that room by walking into it: in the way that you come in. The frame of mind that you have walking into it creates a lot of the atmosphere of that room and how people are going to receive you.”

Later in his walk, Neil took us on a profound exploration of our country’s past, specific place by place, introducing us to all sorts of colorful characters stewarding the past in very particular and specific towns and historical sites. 

But it was his discovery of a Mennonite school in Lancaster County, Pa., on April 7, 2021 — day nine — that sticks with me the most.

I came up the road to a Mennonite schoolhouse and saw bikes leaning against the fence and then behind the schoolhouse I saw a girl in a bright floral ankle length dress with her hair pulled up in a bun and a white lace bonnet over that. On her left hand she wore a leather baseball mitt. I heard the thwack of a bat and saw a softball arcing and the girl backing up and watched her catch perfectly a hard-hit flyball into left field. She took the ball from her glove and hurled it back.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, or my luck.

Neil watched the co-ed game for 15 minutes or so, and then met the kids’ teacher, who asked Neil to speak to his students about his walk. Then a student suggested that the class sing a song for Neil. So they all filed into the gym.

I couldn’t believe anything I had just witnessed in the past 20 minutes. Not the softball, not the mighty sluggers in the floral dresses, not our discussion in the outfield, and above all not that these 30 kids were now going to sing two hymns for me. And they were doing it not out of the slightest obligation or duty or because Mr. Weaver had said so. They were doing it for joy, and to thank me for having come their way.  

I am a grown man, so I shouldn’t admit these things. But I cried when they sang for me. Those voices, those harmonies—the girls on one side, the boys on the other, the sun pouring in the windows above their  heads—it was all miraculously beautiful. At the end of the second hymn, I was literally speechless. I choked out my thanks to the kids and they all waved and filed back upside.  

Neil was struck by a passage of Scripture quoted by the teacher: “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

At some point in that first week or so, I connected Neil with Bridget Wagner Matzie, the literary agent who sold both my books and is a trusted friend. Before the 25-day walk was over, Bridget had sold Neil’s proposal for a book about his walk to Mariner Books. The three of us became good friends, meeting to talk and share our lives together on Capitol Hill.

And over the last few years, I met Neil every few months to walk around Capitol Hill. We talked about our respective books, which were on the same timeline and came out a month apart from one another in the spring of 2023. We talked about our lives: our doubts, our interests, our challenges and frustrations. It felt like I’d gained an older brother. 

Neil’s book American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal, is a revelation. Ken Burns, the famous documentary filmmaker, called it “a near perfect book, an exquisitely seen and felt memoir of an American journey.” If you have not read it, do yourself a favor and go order it now.

I was constantly awed by Neil’s tenacity in promoting his book. He went everywhere to talk about it, speaking at an untold number of bookstores and clubs and libraries, both big and small. He networked and charmed his way into an in-depth feature about him and his book on CBS Sunday Morning with correspondent Martha Teichner. He was relentless.

I was trained — by the religion of my youth and my upbringing — to live for eternity. Unfortunately, all too often this meant not living for today. It curdled into avoiding — and even despising — the conundrums and delights and maladies of everyday life. Our worship was to set ourselves apart and remain separated from the corrupted creation.

So Neil’s friendship and his book came along at a time when I was grappling quite intensely — through my own book— with the consequences and legacy of this formation in me and many others. To see someone find such joy in living and in the created world was a revelation.

He was an adventurer who looked for what he called “the seams in life” that one could slip through to go exploring, seeking, experiencing. He’d dropped out of college to travel around the world with little more than a few changes of clothes. He refused to jump on the hamster wheel of productivity and efficiency and status quo expectations.

In August, a week or so after he received the grim news that the cancer had spread to his spine and brain, he texted me a poem titled “A Brief for The Defense” by Jack Gilbert.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

When I got the news that Neil had died, it was still a shock, even though I’d seen him in the hospital a few weeks prior and knew he was not doing well. I didn’t tell my wife or kids right away. Instead, I waited until everyone was gathered everyone around the dinner table. After everyone had eaten, as kids were getting ready to head back to their homework, I read them the e-mail announcing plans for his wake and funeral, and then proceeded to read from the first e-mail dispatch of his walk. I couldn’t hold back the tears.

Sunday night, a few hundred people packed Neil’s favorite bar a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol and spilled onto the sidewalk to toast him. The next morning we packed a church to mourn him.

“Receive his soul, and present him to God, to God the Most High,” we sang with tears in our eyes at the mass’ conclusion.

There is a song by the band Psychic Temple, Lightning, which captures for me a little bit of the feeling of what it was like to know Neil.

Lightning, without rain

Shock to the dark

Seven miles away

Lightning, inside of us

Ash to ashes, dust to dust.

I miss you Neil. I love you like a brother. See you around the bend. Thank you for everything you taught me.