Last weekend members of Mark Hutton’s family gathered from across the continent and even the Atlantic to commemorate the Charlotte businessman, father of three, husband for 32 years, and my uncle. Mark had passed away the weekend before after a fierce two-year battle with cancer, his wife at his side in the split-level this couple had bought from her parents in the early Y2K years. He was not quite 60.
Mark grew up in a string of Southern cities to which his father Charlie Hutton had brought the family in pursuit of a career at Rose’s department store. In the 1970s the Huttons settled for good in North Carolina, purchasing a house on the outskirts of the rural Vance County town of Henderson. Mark was handsome in the way of Carolina men, a full six feet with a shock of light-brown hair and piercing eyes, ice-blue. In school at Vance High, Mark excelled at competitive athletics, a gift he would never lose in a lifetime of golfing at the most storied courses in North Carolina. He attended UNC-Chapel Hill as a business major and loved the university almost as if it were a relation.
My first memory of Mark surfaces in my mental archive around the year 1995. My parents, my infant brother, and I were visiting Mark’s first home in Charlotte. It’s fuzzy, as ancient childhood recollections tend to be, but I vividly remember when my aunt Carolyn, Mark’s wife, had reached the limits of her patience with Mark’s indecisive TV-watching. “Stop flipping channels!” she said in exasperation. I remember that he settled on the Golf network.
Mark had an uproarious sense of humor. He’d tell stories from his rich life and the hilarity would mount. His mind was sharp as a blade but his sensitivity to others never lost its acuity. He understood the struggles of others with implicit compassion. And his commitment to family was as deep and solid as the root of an elder tree buried in bedrock.
I cried harder than anyone at the funeral. Losing this extraordinary man at only 59 must count as a sick injustice. But many of us were astonished by the resilience of Mark’s family, though Mark, the family man, would not have been. He’s survived by his son Luke, a translator of Japanese books and a graduate of Chapel Hill; his son Matt, a generous-hearted young man with an impeccable memory for statistics; and his bright and lively daughter Rachel, a fast-rising businesswoman. And he is survived, too, by his beautiful and endlessly generous wife, my Aunt Carolyn. Carolyn bore the ordeal of cancer and bereavement with stunning fortitude, a pillar of strength to the entire family. At the funeral reception she was once again the graceful hostess, the conveyor of one final gift from her exceptional husband.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
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