Christophe Foultier lived in a suburb of Paris, but a love of Pearl Jam and rock music in general led him and his wife to travel the West Coast.
They toured venues from San Francisco to Seattle.
Along the way, they stopped at Whaleshead Beach north of Brookings, Ore. The couple immediately fell in love with the area, so much that Foultier told his wife, Caroline Jolivet, he’d want to be buried there.
In August 2016, she granted his wish.
Foultier was one of 89 people shot and killed at the Bataclan on Nov. 13, 2015, by IS terrorists. On that night, 130 people were killed throughout the city.
Foultier was watching the Eagles of Death Metal perform when he died.
It took three days for police to identify Jolivet’s husband, The New York Times reported in Foultier’s obituary. When it came time to make the funeral arrangements, Jolivet remembered what he’d said back in Brookings, Ore., six years earlier.
“I know if I died, I would be back to the ground in Oregon,” Foultier told her.
In a feature for The Curry Coastal Pilot, writer Randy Robbins details the phone call Jolivet made to arrange her husband’s burial. Travis Sandusky, who owns the Redwood Memorial Chapel, initially thought she was a telemarketer when he answered the phone.
He thought it strange that somebody would travel thousands of miles to bury her husband in far-flung Brookings, Ore.
It wasn’t until Sandusky searched Foultier’s name that he discovered the French musician’s connection to the Oregon coast.
Jolivet returned to spread her husband’s ashes on the beach where they stopped on their West Coast tour. Foultier’s urn, decorated with an illustration of a bass guitar, was buried by Redwood Memorial Chapel.
As a final tribute to her husband, Jolivet penned the lyrics to an eight-minute song, “Red Black Bird,” performed on Foultier’s bass by one of his bandmates, Rudy Fagnaud.
Some day, Jolivet told the Coastal Pilot, she’ll return to the Oregon coast and visit her husband. They remain linked, even after his passing, by a tattoo on Jolivet’s arm that mirrors an illustration Foultier had on his:
A red and black bird.
