I have never been one to get choked up at funerals before, but then I had never been to a memorial service for Howie Berg, a beloved Aspen local who died just days ago in a Denver hospital.

I never knew Howie Berg, and I never knew till I got to the service at the Elks Lodge in downtown Aspen that he was the husband of Kat Berg, a delightful woman who works at the Aspen Music Festival & School with my fiancee. But I felt like I knew Howie Berg somehow, and not from the pictures at the podium or the stories from his older brothers about breaking his collarbone or tying him to a tree. I knew Howie Berg because he is still in the DNA of the town, and nowhere was that more apparent than when the Vietnam veterans marched down Main Street in Aspen this summer to re-dedicate the Veterans Memorial on Courthouse Plaza.

He had just died in a Denver hospital from congenital problems made no better by exposure to Ancient Orange in Vietnam. It seemed almost every speaker that day spoke about Howie Berg, and the portrait that emerged was as bittersweet as it always must for Vietnam vets, who came home long before “Support Our Troops” became a patriotic slogan.

For Howie Berg that day, the sweet from his comrades and friends far outweighed the bitter, and it was the same at the Elks. Part of it was that he was a Marine, and a noncombatant like myself is just beginning to understand what that means. A Marine honor guard came down from Denver, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything quite so moving and so sad as when the soldiers unfolded the American flag, held it in front of them as “Taps” was played, and then carefully, lovingly, folded it back and handed it to Kat Berg.

The whole process was slow, reverential, and unforgettable, especially the farewell salutes the Marines gave to Howie Berg. One of the honor guard then handed the flag to his wife–to his widow–and said something from his knees that I couldn’t hear from where I sat. Then the Marine straightened up and gave that awful-wonderful salute again, even more slowly this time.

In the end, the tribute at the Elks was the kind of celebration that any man could be proud of, the kind that said without equivocation that this man mattered, that our town and the world was a better place for his being here. Howie Berg leaves his wife, his son, his brothers, his family, his comrades, and more friends than you could count. He left Aspen far too soon, of course, but he also left after finding the kind of immortality that can exist only in the human heart.

Would that they could all say so much about the rest of us.