These are the remarks that I delivered at Josh's memorial gathering at the New York Harvard Club on March 9th, 2012.
Harold Garrett-Goodyear
It’s been a week, or almost a week, since Josh died; and during that week, images and stories, sent in individual e-mails, told in conversation, or included in the blog Phil so generously—and wisely—created for Josh’s friends, have both fed our sorrow and measured the great loss we suffered. Odd, isn’t it, that the words and images which describe the extent of our loss also enable us to fortify ourselves against the loss and strengthen us to bear sorrow: each story gives another reason for grief, but each becomes a memory barricading us against the awareness of his absence.
What these stories and images underscore is how multifaceted, how complex, and how impossible to describe simply and directly was this friend of ours. The stories I hear or read, the stories I told myself as I prepared for today, bring some heart ease; but they also drive home the impossibility of my goal, to pay just tribute to this man who was so large a part of my life, for so very long—although today, even half a century seems a painfully short duration for our friendship. He deserved a longer life, and I want more time to finish our conversations.
Josh, to be sure, disliked conventional categories, and he was impatient with conventional explanations of people’s actions, and certainly impatient with the easy judgments so many of us make about the people around us. He seldom relied on obvious categories, he rarely relied on obvious explanations, and I am pretty sure he would experience delight, that I find myself so frustrated when I attempt to capture and present what his death, or more critically, his life, meant and means to me. My hunch is that Josh would be enormously pleased that so many of his friends were together, to enjoy each other, but also bemused that we worked so hard to find words for what words cannot accomplish.
Reflecting on the many stories and memories in which Josh is a central actor, I find it hard to exaggerate the breadth and depth of friendship Josh forged over a lifetime, hard to miss the complexity and glory of the network of friends he wove together over the years. Our stories and images remind us how extraordinarily broad were Josh’s tastes and interests, in food, in books, in ideas, and in people. But—and there a lot of “buts” when we talk about Josh—but they also remind us how many images of Josh compete now to pin him down, to explain him, or really, to explain why we liked him so much, and why we are so miserably sad that he lives no longer. Our mere presence here testifies to what Josh accomplished, increasing a web of friends so wonderfully diverse. Yet I can’t get around the knowledge that I am relying on these stories as a substitute for his presence, hoping they will distract me from the irreversible fact of his death.
I knew the imminence of his death, yet when the news came, I found the decorum of grief in this modern age ridiculously sober, absurdly “nice.” I wanted to pummel the heavens, I wanted to cry out my fury that Josh had, after suffering the indignities of wasted body and waning appetite—the waning of so great an appetite for food and for life—finally abandoned the friends he had so long cared for and enriched. I didn’t, of course, make a spectacle of my grief. Surely his death warranted something spectacular; but neither Josh nor I took the heavens all that seriously, and dramatic gestures seemed silly and pointless.
So I am still struggling how to accept the end of a 50 year friendship, even to find useful words to describe this friendship that began in college, continued and deepened when he introduced me to Joan in 1964 and then remained a principal witness to the courtship and marriage that launched Joan and me on a splendid journey that would, from 1977, include our daughter Cordelia, who, to my infinite gratitude, today grieves with me Josh’s death. He was still there, friend and witness, when Joan died in 1992. Our friendship included some pretty rough moments, but it was a friendship that remained oh so rewarding and enjoyable and delightful, even at the end when conversation had become so laborious for Josh, when we could no longer, moreover, have a conversation over food, so often the accompaniment to serious or not so serious talk for him. I can, of course, remind myself how incredibly fortunate I and we are, to have had his company at all, to have the friendships and bonds this gathering demonstrates. In our own living and loving, we can celebrate the rich and full life he created for himself and us.
But let’s also remind ourselves that, natural as Josh’s generosity and creativity, not least in making and keeping friends, his enjoyment of life was not always easy or straightforward. In celebrating the qualities that made us love Josh, that make his death so cataclysmic an event for many of us, we risk obscuring how hard he sometimes had to work, to enjoy the life now ended. We risk, that is, forgetting or minimizing the bouts of loneliness and depression, occasionally close to paralysis of spirit and will, that Josh from time to time suffered, and we will underestimate the effort he made to create a network of people who could play or work or simply be together, a web of love and caring he created for himself, but also us, a web that is his most generous legacy to us here. Josh’s friendship was not easy or somehow “natural”; it cost him struggle and required a large expenditure of spirit, and we should hail the achievement, as well as celebrate his outcome of his struggle and expenditure.
Let’s be clear: no one could, on most occasions, see more clearly or perceptively the person he embraced as friend, no one had sharper faculties for finding the point of connection, the quality that enabled a relationship and fostered growth and creativity and fruitful connection. But Josh could also be insufferable in his teasing, and I found myself on occasion enraged by his presumption in thinking he knew better than I how I might best lead my life. There were times, several times, when I furiously rejected his attempts to impose on me his agenda, his needs, his wishes not at all so sure as was he that he knew what was good for me.
Still, for the most part, he got “it” right, about people, friends, and friendship;; and on two occasions I want to remember now, he got it famously and wonderfully right. One, to which I earlier alluded, was his decision to introduce me and Joan; and I want to borrow his own words about Joan, and that decision, which says as much about Josh as about her—and identifies some of the qualities I so admired and loved in Josh, as in Joan:
“As I was driving up here this morning, I wondered what it was that I saw in Joan that prompted me to introduce her to Harold 29 years ago. I am not yet sure, but I think it was her ability to concentrate herself entirely on a single thing. For instance, we used to cook a lot, and while I would be flailing about trying to do many things at once, Joan would be only tasting the sauce, as though in a restaurant. I think I saw something like that in Harold, although at the time I thought he was just fussy.”
I won’t explore Josh’s remark about my fussiness, except to cite it as an example of his readiness, even at Joan’s memorial, to gently nudge me away from habits and behavior he thought limiting. But Josh, despite the contrast he drew with his own flailing about, was very much like Joan, not only in their appreciation of good food and willingness to invest much attention and energy into preparing it, but in the capacity to be present in the moment, to fully savor the delights of the present, without fretting a lot about the future and what pains it might bring. And he brought that focused attention to each of his friends, prizing in each of them what was to be prized, without invidious comparisons or rankings, finding the point of connection unique to each relationship, and enjoying so fully what was to be enjoyed without anxiety over what he “should” like or dislike.
And the other moment, I can best explain by a story, the story of my penultimate conversation with him, on the Sunday before he died. He acknowledged the pain, even horror of his weakened body; he was unblinking, as he noted the inexorable progress of his illness. But he wanted also to talk about the beauty he had experienced, and continued to find, in his awareness of the remarkable community at which he found himself the center, and his wish that it would survive—and he talked about the beauty he found in the intimacy he and Valerie had achieved, an intimacy of trust and unqualified reciprocity that he explained through the imagery of egg shells.
Now, let me say that in the wake of that conversation, I have thought a lot about the imagery he used, and I am acutely aware that, between his weakness and my own dismay over that weakness, I did not press him when I missed part of what he was saying, especially when, even as I tried to understand the significance of the imagery, I was distracted from his narrative and explanation. I can’t be sure whether he indeed meant egg shells, or eggs with intact shells, or eggs emptied of content, like those with which Joan, Cori and I decorated our Christmas trees. But his principal point, I am pretty sure, was that most, maybe all, couples, including and maybe most especially loving couples, are both connected and separated by egg shells, egg shells whose integrity each is trying to preserve; the bonds of love may be strong, but full union remains elusive, as a couple dances, or negotiates, around what can be so easily smashed or lost. They lead to difficulty and awkwardness on occasion, these points of fragility, delicacy and danger that the eggshells represent in the relationship, but few relationships are free of precisely such points where care is necessary, and anxiety likely. Josh laboriously but determinedly laid out this image of relationships, in order to tell me that he had found, in the hard weeks of diminishing strength he had just endured, that he and Valerie no longer had to think about egg shells. He had found with her what had previously eluded him, despite his sometimes furious search, for so many years, to find utter openness to another, and a sense of completeness and full integrity with that other. For all his gifts in creating and nurturing deep and powerful friendships, for all the intensity and rewards of his past relationships, only in the last weeks of his life did he enjoy the full intimacy and closeness and unqualified trust that released him from all constraints on love and unity with another.
A few days after that conversation, Josh married Valerie; and a few days later, Josh died. It seems terribly sad, that he discovered something sought throughout his life, only then to lose life itself. But in my final and very brief conversation with him, not many hours before he died, I was convinced that he saw himself as having brought off a successful coup, eluding his illness and arriving at the home he had worked so hard to make. I know that I may now be guilty of what Josh usually avoided, of romanticizing and sentimentalizing life and relationships; but I am absolutely sure that joy in his union with Valerie triumphed, howbeit for a fleeting moment, over pain and the knowledge of oblivion as death approached.
20 years ago this very spring, Josh walked and talked with me on Mount Tom, away from the preparations for Joan’s memorial service, and we tried to make some sense out of her death. We didn’t succeed, of course; but his company helped make the inexplicable and absurd more bearable. Now, once again, I want desperately such company, to help ease me and Cori through another loss that sears the heart and numbs the mind—and I meet only absence. But if Josh’s death is inescapable and irreversible, so also, our friendship, his death cannot erase. The person I am now is a person his so gracious , and wise, and generous, and irritating, and vexing companionship did much to shape. We shall celebrate his life now ended and our own still in progress, with good food and fine wine, with some laughter and many tears, with lively conversation and pained silence, with teasing words and words of comfort; and eventually, our lives will return to something akin to normal and ordinary, and our grief will become, not smaller, but more bearable, more easily managed.
But damn it, Josh will not be there, this time to accompany me towards acceptance and renewed engagement in life. I must grieve this loss, this loss that feels so monstrous, without the comfort and nurturance of his friendship, and gratitude for the friendship now ended must substitute for the warmth of his company. Josh’s capacious heart is stopped, his fertile mind silenced. It’s a small but very real comfort to me, to say in the company of his friends that he lived his life well, and that his company gave us cause and guidance to live our own lives well and fully. It’s a small, but very real comfort also, that I say this in a room so full of people who will share with me the overwhelming sadness that we must now live our lives without his company.
Harold Garrett-Goodyear
March 9, 2012
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