Noah Meckle opened a eulogy for his dad with this one liner from his father’s favorite movie, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”
“‘It's all part of the experience, honey.’ I heard that quote all the time growing up whenever I’d complain about anything,” Noah shared. “It’s just part of the experience, buddy.”
“I thought of this quote a lot when I was with him in the hospice home,” he said. “It was just part of the experience of living, right? Death.”
Immanuel Lutheran Church in Centralia struggled to accommodate hundreds who arrived Saturday afternoon to remember a father, husband, son, friend, cyclist, pastor and harm reduction leader in Cole Richard Meckle.
The Gather Church pastor was diagnosed with colorectal cancer metastatic to the liver May 31 and died July 27.
“I present to everyone the Cole Meckle experience. As anyone who has had the chance to meet my dad knows, he sure as hell was an experience,” Noah said to a simultaneously teary-eyed and giggling crowd.
In the eulogy for his father, Noah reminisced that for so much of his life he had been confused when friends and family told him that he reminded them of his father.
“He’s just so Cole, and I’m so Noah,” he said.
He recalled the first time that it all started to make sense when he and his dad were sitting on the couch discussing their shared passion for building things. As Noah told it, his dad was saying how much he loved that Noah built model robots.
"I love that you build model robots. So close to something I would do. I would build models, but not robots. And that's such a Noah thing to do. It's just like me in a Noah way.”
The way Noah described it, it was the Cole Meckle experience, the act of being his son and watching him serve his community — of being close to him as he cared for others — that made him so like his father.
For Noah, Gather Church Associate Pastor and family friend Patty Howard is the person who reminds him of Cole.
“In all ways that matter, Patty is very similar to my dad, and that's the beauty of an experience,” he said. “You can share with other people.”
It’s fitting, then, that Howard led the Saturday service for a man she described as her pastor, her boss, her brother in Christ and her friend. While Howard led the event, she was far from the only speaker. In her opening comments, she revealed that much of the event had in fact been pre-planned by Cole himself.
“It probably won't be a surprise to you that Cole left very detailed instructions about this day,” Howard said. “He planned it some time ago. He gave me the homily topic. He gave me the scriptures and how they should be read, and he gave me a list of people to invite. The list began with anyone and everyone.”
She said it was important to Cole for attendees to know they were wanted. At the same time, he added a list of people who he wanted to be sure attended, many of whom were closely connected to his life's work at Gather Church and, more specifically, to harm reduction.
He invited researchers from the University of Washington, the attorneys who aided in Gather’s recent lawsuit against Lewis County over harm reduction, the state health care authority and department of health, and Lewis County Public Health and Social Services.
The Saturday service celebrated and mourned the many different aspects of Cole as a person.
In the spirit of Cole’s service as the leader of Gather Church, he requested that some who he invited do more than just attend. He wanted them to speak.
Obliging the request, Tara Urs, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, spoke about her time working with Cole and the way it had come to change her perspective as an attorney.
Urs was part of the team that worked with Gather Church to challenge a Lewis County ordinance that restricted harm reduction — specifically, a mobile needle exchange service — in the area through a lawsuit in federal court. That case ended in a victory for the church after a federal judge ordered that the county must repeal the ordinance.
The main challenge to the case, she explained, was legal standing. The defense argued that because it was not Gather Church that was being harmed, but rather the people they were serving, they did not have standing to sue. The federal court disagreed.
She attributed their victory wholly to the deep connection Gather Church has with the people they serve.
“Gather Church was so closely connected, so deeply intertwined with the community, and so authentically connected to the peoples that the church was serving that harming those people was harming the church,” Urs said.
According to Urs, that case contributed to setting a legal precedent that individuals have a right to access harm reduction services. It also changed her mind as a lawyer.
“Watching Pastor Cole, in his litigation of his faith, I realized that having standing means standing up,” she said. “It means being so close to the people you love, so deeply intertwined with your community, that when they are harmed, you’re harmed, too.”
No other speaker more perfectly summed up the connection between Cole and his life's work with Gather Church than his wife, Kat Meckle, who took it upon herself to share the true origins of the local congregation and nonprofit stretching back to the earliest years of their relationship.
Kat recalled Cole’s early exposure to mission work during her own employment at the Seattle Gospel Mission after they met while studying at the now-closed Trinity College, then based in Everett.
She told of the many years together both learning about mission work and other ways to help those who needed the support. She spoke of hours of conversation spent talking about the church they would one day plant as they drove to classes at a ministry in Mount Vernon that served migrant workers. She shared the origins of Gather Church as a 12-person Bible study in the clubhouse of the Meckle family RV park and its first service in the same room at Immanuel Lutheran where Cole’s funeral was held.
Above all, she sought to both celebrate Cole and his many years of work and service at Gather Church, while also separating him from it. Gather Church, as she told it, is bigger than Cole and will live on even with Cole’s death.
“When people think of Gather Church, they think of Cole Meckle, and rightly so, but Gather Church and Cole Meckle are not synonymous,” Kat said. “Gather Church originated in the heart and mind of God … Cole was just the guy to carry out that vision for Lewis County, and I was along for the ride.”
She closed with a final promise. Gather Church will continue to operate as normal, just as it did under Cole’s direct leadership.
Many more spoke about Cole and their deep connections to him, which never stayed siloed in one aspect of life. Whether talking about his faith, his passion for cycling, Adam Sandler movies, Metallica or the Seattle Seahawks, the consensus Saturday was that Cole, above all else, knew how to love life and love others.
A friend to Cole since they were 5 years old and now a Gather Church elder, Todd Morris might have said it best.
“I'm gonna miss him more than I know how to say, but I know exactly how he wants me to spend the time I got left,” Morris said. “Trying to love people the way he loved all of us.”
Cole was born to Wil and Jane Meckle on April 6, 1970, in Valley City, North Dakota. The family, including Cole's older sister, Kim, moved to Rochester, Washington, when he was 3 weeks old. Cole attended all 12 years of school in Rochester, where he played football and baseball, graduating in 1988, according to his previously published obituary.
Read the full obituary at https://tinyurl.com/2pnv83sd.
