MIKE STEELE, July 3, 2004               On behalf of Commissioner Lydia Quarles, the Administrative Judges from the Mississippi Worker’s Compensation Commission who are here, and Mike’s colleagues in the compensation bar, I wanted to say something so that his wife and family, and mainly his children, will know how respected Mike was in his profession, because he truly was.  For those of us who knew him mainly through his work, the loss of Mike Steele takes away the one person among us all who made our little world of lawyers and law practice unique, serious, challenging and fun, always fun.  We want Nell, Gunter and the rest of the family to know that among his colleagues in the Bar, Mike Steele can never be replaced or even closely imitated, and that our hearts are broken, too.               There was simply nobody like Mike.  At our worker’s compensation seminars, Mike was always the best, wittiest and most-sought-after speaker because he always combined dogged advocacy for the side of the little guy for whom he was the constant champion with a singular vision of the absurd and ironic.  Who can forget Mike’s overhead-projector presentations where he’d display ancient drawings from Milton’s Paradise Lost or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to portray the plight of the lowly worker claiming benefits, and then pencil in a drawing of Andy Taggart or Kirk Fordice sitting beside the Mayor of Lilliput or Satan himself whipping the worker?  I once asked him to submit an article on doctor shopping to the section newsletter, and what I got was a poem in perfect iambic pentameter based on John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.  For those who took the time to read and understand what Mike was really saying, it was perfect.  Like always, when Mike said something in that way he had of expressing himself, there really wasn’t anything else worth saying about the issue.               What Mike was, really, was a poet, an artist, and a highly refined intellectual, living among the people up here in Attala County.  We became fast friends years and years ago because he started quoting poetry over the phone to me and I said, “So, what’s Dover Beach got to do with whether my guy is permanently and totally disabled?”  And Mike said, “If you really know about Matthew Arnold … everything.”  I learned later that he and my wife shared the same mentor, the late professor Bill Durratt from Belhaven College, and because I was also an English major, we understood each other in a way that comes so rarely in law practice that you never take it for granted.  Because Mike was never motivated by money or competition for the sake of competition, and because Mike always looked for something ennobling in all of us, he could tell me with a sly and knowing look, “With the poor people of this world, I cast my lot,” and I would know in an instant he meant it and was giving me a way to look at what I chose to do for a living that would always inspire me to do my best.  I think Mike had that effect on everyone, and we wanted his family and mainly his children to know—although I’m sure they know better than the rest of us—how honestly rare and inspiring were the gifts he gave so freely to everyone he met.               For those of us who knew him through his work as a lawyer, his family should know that our profession cannot follow John Donne’s advice about forbidding mourning when it comes to Mike Steele.  We are much diminished by his loss, to the extent that I wonder whether the practice of compensation law will ever be as fun and as rewarding as it has been when we had Mike Steele among us.  He was that rarest of lawyers:  one who did what he did with absolute integrity and total commitment to doing the right thing or not doing it at all.  None of us who knew him as a lawyer and friend have ever met anyone remotely like him, and all of us owe him a debt which we can never repay.