Mark Walton Staples

You slipped away, unnoticed.

On February 14, 2025 I found out that my friend, Mark Staples, had passed away on July 13th the previous year from complications during back surgery.  A couple of people that I don't know found out this information and posted it to Mark's Facebook page, although they, too, had discovered his death many months after the fact.   

Mark and I had a rocky friendship of almost 40 years.  Especially in later years we were incommunicado more than we were in touch.  As the years went on, his personality began to change.  Acute anxiety, some depression, and the accompanying anger below the surface shaped who he became in the early 90s onward.  Although he remained well-spirited, he steeped himself in nostalgia - for the 80s and even for the seemingly-idyllic 1950s - a time period he, himself, never lived in.

 Mark had always had a polarizing personality and tended to say the awkward or inappropriate thing in any given situation.  But then, there were years I wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, either.  As time went on, however, Mark doubled-down on what I viewed in him as flaws and qualities that alienated him from others.  He neglected his health to extreme degrees and it became harder and harder to be around him. 

 I met Mark at College of Charleston in 1985.  We were both from Greenville, and unbeknownst to either of us, had a mutual friend in my best friend, who instructed him to seek me out.  I wasn't difficult to spot, roaming the C of C campus in my tattered army jacket and with my weird haircut. We bonded over a love of alternative music, which in those initial moments meant the B-52's, The Jesus and Mary Chain, R.E.M., and The Smiths.  We laughed constantly, cultivated our sarcasm, took frequent road trips in his Volkswagen, and enjoyed the hell out of the 80s.  

Our Golden Age of friendship extended into the early 90s, when a shared apartment contained Arthur (who died less than 3 months after Mark), Vickie  (1967-2023), me, and (in later of those years) my boyfriend at the time, Wyatt.  Somehow we all crammed into a small 2-bedroom place at the downtown-adjacent Summit Place Apartments in Greenville, less than a mile from Mark’s childhood home (where his mother still lived at the time).  I can’t remember ever turning on the television during those years; that’s how fun and busy our lives were.  We went to see live music somewhere just about every weekend, went dancing at the Stone Castle and Characters (only on Alternative Night), worked our nothing jobs, and in 1991 gathered together virtually every single weekday for dinner at the erstwhile Monterrey restaurant on Laurens Road.  We road-tripped to Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Atlanta, Athens, all the while quipping, laughing, enjoying those soundtracks to our lives: The Go-Go's, Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order, The S*x Pistols, mixed tapes containing everything in between, and always The Smiths, of which we knew every moaned nuance of Morrissey's delivery, and which Mark would campily emulate - especially the hilarious falsetto parts.  He'd have me in stitches.     

Mark and I definitely had our extreme ups and downs in our friendship.  He couldn’t stand silence and would fill that space with betrayals of confidences, meaning he’d spill whatever private knowledge he was holding: yours, mine, theirs, ours.  It was his thing. He would have made a really sh*tty spy.  I observed him often at the parties I'd take him along to, throwing out obscure song lyrics into a crowd of people, crickets chirping in the background.  I knew he was fishing for like minds, but it never really seemed to pay off.  No one understood what he was talking about and the lyrics generally just confused people and ground conversation to a halt.  This happened time and again.  He wasn't the best at learning from his mistakes.  Maybe he didn't think it was a mistake.  Maybe it wasn't.    

His behavior became increasingly erratic from the mid-90s on.  After a lengthy period of no contact, we reconnected in 2018 – he in S.C. and me living out of state.  The first few conversations were so great, catching up.  He posted that he'd "...got my best friend back!"  Ultimately, the whole endeavor lasted two weeks.  After only a week my life was a tsunami of frustration and chaos from all his bizarre behavior, presumptions, assumptions, strange comments, and his unchecked emotional state.  I worked really hard to  deal with him in an exceedingly calm manner, tried to balance his obsessiveness and boundary-busting, tried to reel him in toward reasonableness.  Halfway through the two-week period he went on some medication.  It made him calmer, but more dogmatic in his signature self-centeredness.  He became staunchly unapologetic for all his wrongdoings and lack of personal respect for me and others.  We agreed that the contact was not good for either of us and parted as friends, or as much of the term as its definition can hold when faced with these levels of mental illness.  I understood, and didn't blame him.  Not really. 

Mark was unique.  He was my friend.  He is.  And I’m angry and irritated that NO OFFICIAL PUBLIC RECORD exists to mark his passing.  Translation: What’s left of Mark’s family (a sister who permanently excommunicated him in the late 80s, the first time he came out, and his older brother, an annoying alpha male who only ever seems to have considered Mark to be a sometime-financial burden and all-the-time embarrassment and affront to his picket-fence, creatively-bankrupt, race-car-driving, “Walk-it-off, Snowflake” mentality) – neither of these siblings could be bothered to print an obituary, notify any of Mark’s contacts, or answer multiple letters I’ve written to their home, business, and social media accounts asking for any information.

  In fact, I believe the room Mark rented in Easley in the home of an elderly woman was very likely plundered by her son and his wife; the vast music collection sold off, phone (containing contacts) stolen, photographs and family mementos trashed.  Taking the cheapest route, Mark was likely cremated (paid for by his brother), and his ashes were probably ordered disposed of.

There are a few people on this earth who deserve to be treated like this. 

MARK WASN’T ONE OF THEM.

Mark was a complex person, doing the best he could in each moment, juggling the things many of us contend with: a highly sub-par childhood, parental failure, mean humans, brain chemicals, and all the challenges that come with trying to make a living - and a life - on Planet Earth.  I celebrate him in my heart, what he was, how he tried.  And I wanted to shout this out to the digital rooftops, and so it is. 

Be well, my friend.  You are not forgotten.

Love,

Kat