One Year

As the one year anniversary of Jon's death approached, I found myself feeling dismissive of the occasion, because it seemed to imply that the 365th day without Jon is somehow more significant than the 100th or the 247th. Yet I am constantly looking for ways to honor and remember Jon, and an anniversary presents itself as a hard-to-ignore prompt to do that. But how?  

Last week, I was doing some reorganizing in my (home) office and came across a newspaper that I had found in one of the few boxes of Jon's things that I have been able to go through.  I reopened the Ipswich Chronicle dated July 10, 1997 to page 6, where there is an editorial that Jon wrote with his reflections on the sudden and unexpected loss of his schoolmate, Josh Nove.  His opening paragraph spoke so clearly to me:  

As petty and belittling as words are in this situation, a time of remembering a fallen contemporary, there're all we've got.  There is not too much more we can offer another in consolation than the meaning of combined words, hoping they somehow can articulate what the lost person embodied upon living amongst us.  

Well said, as usual, Jon.  So, at this one year marker, I will offer some words, since that's all I have.

Reflecting back on the last year, I of course remember a great deal of sad times.  We buried Jon's ashes. We didn't get to celebrate his 40th birthday.  We lived through all the holidays for the first time without Jon. Even more sadness lived for me in the everyday moments - finding a coffee shop that I knew Jon would have loved, imagining his commentary on a current issue, or swimming in the ocean and realizing that he will never do that again.  While I look back with a lot of sadness, I can also see that some healing took place too. I don't think that any of us will ever truly understand or accept how Jon's life ended, but over time the focus has started to shift to his life versus his death. And that's how it should be.

I would suggest that one of the best ways to honor someone's life is to learn from it...to essentially make that life eternal by carrying on the marks it made.  With this in mind, I have been thinking about what Jon's life taught me, and while I could write volumes, I offer just a few here that stand out the most: 

Live simply.  Less than 2 weeks after Jon died, we had to clean out his apartment.  Everything he left behind in this world fit into the back of a few pickup trucks. If you ever had the difficult task of buying Jon a present, you know that he did not value "stuff". It wasn't because he didn't have the means to accumulate more things, but rather he had the wisdom to know that accumulating more stuff doesn't buy you anything except more stuff. He knew that true value was in the things you can't buy.  Now that he's gone, I see that the best gift I ever gave him was my time.  I wish I had given him more.  

Keep on learning.  Another way I think we can honor Jon is to take inspiration from that insatiable quest for knowledge he had. Most of us will not be able to learn at the pace or level that he did, but I think we can all draw inspiration from the passion with which he constantly tried to learn new things and challenge himself in extraordinary ways (like teaching himself Russian!).  Over the coming year, I will read a book that I would not normally read (perhaps from the hundreds of his that sit in boxes in my basement), and challenge myself to do something that is way outside of my comfort zone...in Jon's honor.

Cherish people.  Finally, and sadly, I think we mostly learned this from Jon's death, but he taught us a whole set of lessons about the importance of recognizing other people's pain, of loving people even when they are hard to love, and as the minister at his memorial service emphasized, the value of staying connected to others. I know this more than ever now.

Thank you, Jon, for teaching me these things, among so many others. I pray every day that you know, wherever you are, how much meaning your life had.  As I use this mere set of words to try to express that, I realized that there is one more thing we have:  actions.  I will continue to honor you by putting into action the things you taught me in all your brilliance, and know there are many others that will do the same.