Dedication

Post Script:  In his heart, Greg Avila was poet, painter and sculptor

Greg Avila took the path less traveled to Arlington National Cemetery.  Avila, who died Sept. 11 at 52, was a recipient of the Bronze Star.  But no one knows about his time in Vietnam. He wouldn't talk about it.  Avila was, in his heart, a poet, painter and sculptor.  He founded "The Powhatan Review,'' a biannual literary arts magazine for Hampton Roads.  But he earned his living as a roofer and a heating and air-conditioning man because it paid the bills.  Avila mingled easily with college professors, writers and artists.  He could be engaging.  He had a dry sense of humor and never laughed at his own jokes. He also was dark and moody.  "Sometimes, he was very animated.  Sometimes, he would hang back. And sometimes, when he felt uncomfortable, he would sneak out the back door,'' said Andrea Marshall, who met Avila after he moved to Norfolk 11 years ago.  Whatever happened in Vietnam changed him, his older sister, Linda Burrows, said.

The melancholy was fortified in 1986, when his wife, Alysha, died of cancer.  "Even when he was having a good time, there was a sadness about him,'' said Terry Perrell, a local fiction writer and friend.  The poetry he wrote was dark and cynical.  His subject matter was inequality, hard work, lost love.  Avila was lean, with sinewy muscles.  He wore black and chain-smoked menthol cigarettes.  His apartment was barren, the things he owned well-worn, like his stacks of thrift store books and his broken down 1977 Pontiac.  In the past couple of years, he suffered from depression.  He couldn't work and had to borrow money from friends.  He moved in with his sister in Front Royal, working an entry level job in a Family Dollar distribution center.  Sept. 11, he borrowed her van, saying he had an errand to run.  They found him later in a Rite Aid pharmacy parking lot, slumped over the steering wheel.  His cause of death hasn't been determined.  Years ago, he told his brother he wanted to be buried at Arlington.  No way, his brother said.  That's the stuff of generals, and Audie Murphy types.  But he was accepted, on the strength of his Bronze Star.  Greg Avila, the citation said, stood up well in the face of adversity.