My first order of business was to call my friend Tom in Marietta, because he had been close to Jean (closer than I was since Adam died). Tom, in fact, had been with me the May 1986 night when I had met Adam on High St. Tom and I had gone to a late movie at Ohio State University that evening, and went from bar to bar along High until closing time, and were walking to our respective apartments (I lived downtown, he lived in German Village at the time). Adam was walking behind us, plugged into something I had said, and replied to it. We ended up sitting on the front steps of an apartment building talking and debating until almost dawn.
Jean had been ill for some time, in and out of hospitals after a series of minor strokes. She never completely recovered from Adam's death, although she channeled her grief into advocacy for the mentally ill. Adam battled a plethora of mental-health issues for much of his adult life, and was such a regular at emergency rooms and urgent-care clinics that it was hard for many medical professionals to take him seriously.
But activism was already in Jean's blood. She worked phone banks and door-to-door canvasses endlessly for Democratic candidates on all levels, spearheaded literacy programs in Franklin County, and used her job at Job and Family Services to connect people to jobs all over Ohio.
I was sitting at the memorial service with Dave Wilkin, who was a longtime friend of Adam's and a classmate of Adam's younger sister Lisa. (Dave was the video photographer at my wedding, and lives in Grandview.) As the service got under way, both Dave and I glanced toward the rear doors of the Worship Center, wondering when Tom would arrive, taking it for granted that he would be late. (Thinking Tom will be late for something is like assuming Benedict XVI's successor will be Catholic.)
Rev. Mark Belletini, the senior minister at First UU, led the service along with Rabbi Lenny Sarko of Congregation Am Brit, a new Reform synagogue in Dublin. Sure enough, as people took the microphone to reminisce about Jean, I turned toward the back of the Worship Center and there was Tom. He was sitting down, but he looked like he was out of his breath. (It was just like my mother's memorial service in the church's Scatter Garden in the fall of 2008. Mark was just drawing breath to start the service when I glanced down W. Weisheimer Road and saw Tom's pickup truck screeching around the corner and driving like mad toward the church's parking lot. "Mark," I whispered, "hang on for just a second.")
After a reception in Fellowship Hall, I rode with Dave to Green Lawn Cemetery on the West Side. (I rode with Dave because Tom had too many of his personal belongings piled up onto the passenger seat of his pickup truck, which is 100% in character for him.) We arrived first, before any of the other mourners (including Jean's surviving children, Lisa and Seth, and their spouses). Instead of paying our respects at the graves of George H.W. Bush's grandfather, Eddie Rickenbacker, or James Rhodes, we drove around the cemetery trying to find Jean's grave. Dave drove while I craned my neck looking for tombstones with Stars of David or Hebrew epitaphs. Finally, a worker driving a steam shovel was able to tell us where, and he led us (including Tom, who had followed closely behind us in his tailgate-less white pickup) to the spot, where we were the first to arrive.
I was honored to be one of Jean's pallbearers, although I was pressed into service at the very last minute. The funeral director directed everyone as they slid Jean's coffin out of the hearse, and as he reached for the rail, Dick Dawson, our church's chaplain, made eye contact with me and gestured for me to come over and help. I have only been a pallbearer on one other occasion, when my dad died in 2000. At the time, I was just getting over a minor coronary event (essentially, a small heart attack), and my stepmother was worried that I was physically not up to doing it. I told her that I probably shouldn't, but I'd regret it the rest of my life if I didn't.
The burial service definitely has a way of shocking a mourner into understanding that their beloved has died. I had been at this very cemetery on a very hot June day in 1997, when we laid Adam to rest, so I knew to expect this particular practice, but it still has a very sobering effect. ("Sobering" was a word a friend of mine used to describe the rows and rows of white crosses on the Normandy beach when he visited Europe. I never understood how much that word covered until Monday.) Once the coffin was lowered into the ground, the rabbi instructed each of us to take a turn scattering a shovelful of dirt onto the lid. This was, he explained, a way of reminding everyone that death is very real. "I can't believe he/she is dead" is something we all hear at viewings, funerals, and burials. When you hold a shovel in your hand, and scatter it onto the lid of a box containing the remains of someone you know... you believe it after that, no question.
Dave, Tom, and I also made a stop at Adam's nearby grave, the first time I had visited it since he died. (I had made another attempt to find it years earlier, but had come to Green Lawn when there was no one at the office to tell me the location of the grave.) Adam is buried next to his brother Darrow, who died at age two.
After everyone had dispersed (Lisa and her husband were catching a flight back to New York, and Seth and his wife were staying in town overnight), Tom said, "You guys hungry?" After some debate, we agreed to go to the China Buffet on N. High St. (There was a bit of debate--as there always is with Tom. He was holding out for the MCL Cafeteria in Upper Arlington, but Dave and I pointed out that, being under 85 and not part of the blue-rinse crowd, we wouldn't be welcome there.)
That was still part of our way of honoring Jean. It brought three friends together who don't see one another all that often, and we feted ourselves for hours, as all of us had done with Adam, right in that very restaurant. I devoured several plates of food and God knows how many cups of Diet Pepsi, and we stayed until the hostess rolled us because it was time for the dinner hour to begin.
I was glad to be able to finally see Adam's grave, a simple headstone with his full name, the dates of his birth and death, and a simple Star of David. He died while Steph was pregnant with Susie, and I still feel the loss even now. I have his one posthumously published book, Seeking Love and Death: Poems, as well as a trade paperback of The Complete Poetry of John Milton which he gave me on my 32nd birthday in 1995.
Earlier in 1995, he gave me a journal, which he inscribed inside the front cover. On my many visits to him when I lived in Cincinnati, he often saw me sitting at the table or in a restaurant or bar booth with the diary open and a pen in my hand, and as a belated Christmas gift, he presented me with a notebook to be used once my current volume was finished. I have scanned the inscription inside the front cover, as well as the front cover, and am displaying it below:
During the final season of NYPD Blue, an episode called "The Vision Thing" ran. It was the most thought-provoking episode I had seen, especially the scene when world-weary and jaded detective Andy Sipowicz holds a locker-room conversation with the shade of his friend and partner Bobby Simone, who had died tragically of a heart infection (over five episodes!) at the start of the sixth season.
Above is a YouTube clip of the conversation between Andy and Bobby's spirit. As I watched that, I asked myself, Who would I want to return to me like that, if such a thing were possible? (I leave questions about the afterlife to people with far more leisure time than I have.) It didn't take me long to decide that it would be Adam. It would not be my father--the longer since he died, the more I realize what a bastard he truly was. Robert Lowry would be a close second, although I am sure he would have carried all his bitterness to the grave with him.
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