August 22, 1999
The scene of my friend John's wedding to Cecilia at the Mariott Hotel near the Philadelphia airport.
The college crowd is there. Pete, Don, Elaine, Reg. The Night Oak crowd. Don has always idolized my friend Pete since college. Followed him around like a lap dog. Kind of endearing really. This infatuation extended to all things related to Pete, even to Pete's wife Elaine. Nothing serious. I watch Don dancing with Elaine. I joke to Pete "the more things change, the more things stay the same." Pete laughs. Then Pete shows me how he now shoots up with insulin, as a result of his recent diagnosis with type 1 diabetes.
The same gang was at my wedding two years earlier. John was my best man.
John's entire family attends the wedding. There is his grandfather Joe from Joliet. He eats the fried jellyfish-- a Cantonese delicacy--thinking they are onions. John and I chuckle with Cecilia, John's wife he met in Hong Kong. Clearly, this is not the kind of thing Joe would eat if he knew what he was actually eating. John is an editor at the Wall Street Journal. Cecilia obtained an MBA from Wharton and is going to work at March First, the new juggernaut firm of internet consulting.
Then John's father makes a toast, in part celebratory, but also a none too subtle lamentation about the lack of the presence of God at the ceremony. Of course neither Cecilia nor her family are Christian. After the ceremony, John's father complements me on how my smile always lights up the room.
John describes his zinfandel wine and invites me to try. My minuscule knowledge of wine equates zinfandel with the Pink Zinfandel variety at grocery store gallons. John assures me that Red Zinfandel is most pleasing. It certainly was.
September 23, 2003
The scene of Pete's funeral, Howard Hall, Notre Dame Indiana.
John, Don, me.
Pete was the President of this dorm in 1987. Don was the dorm mailman. The same room where Pete held hall meetings now has an honorary mass for him. I speak a dirge about Pete being the leader.
I may have been the last person to contact Pete. His email to me was sent a few hours before he apparently slipped into a diabetic coma.
Don brings Zinfandel to the reception.
John no longer writes for the Wall Street journal. Falling under the spell of his wife's business drive, he has obtained and MBA and worked at Rohm Haas and now Wachovia bank. This of course was before their stock crashed.
August 28, 2010
The scene of John's funeral, Omaha, Nebraska.
Cecilia and me.
She now lives in Hong Kong. March First is long since bankrupt. Bank of American, her second employer also imploded. Joe died in 2004. Elaine has remarried and has a child through a surrogate mother.
John's father complements me on my smile during these difficult times.
At the reception, John's father laments his son's death and links the death to the distance John moved literally and figuratively from his Omaha roots. And of course, the lack of God. The family blames the death on a car accident. There were no such accidents listed in any search of police records. The body showed no evidence of trauma.
In the months preceding the death, I had hired an investigator to find John. I communicated with his family and events were set in motion to have John move back to Omaha following his divorce and extended unemployment. Besides Cecilia and his family, I may have been the last to communicate with John prior to his death.
John's father's comments hit a nerve. My generation--John's generation, may be among the last with one foot still in the old world, and one in the new. Our formative years were spent seeped in Gothic religious traditions which were strangely out of place in the world of our adult experience. John did travel both literally and figuratively from his roots. He even wrote an op ed piece for the Wall Street Journal which prompted a hostile response from the mayor of Omaha. The piece may have subtly suggested Omaha was somewhat backward. To a man who grew up there, then traveled the world and was living in New York City at the time he wrote the piece, it is not surprising that perspective may have manifested.
Cecilia and I were the only people at the funeral who had any connection to John in the last ten years. Truly he had come home. Back to his childhood friends who had no understanding about what happened to him during the interim 30 years. But it was not the distance from Omaha which took the life from him. It was the disappointments with his career and marriage. And he may have found that he could not start over from where he started.
It was difficult to take. Cecilia and I avoided the issue at the time at a wine bar in Omaha drinking Zinfandel.
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