Carl and Joe

(Written during a flight a few days ago)

I am astounded at the generosity of a friend who passed away last week. I can’t stop thinking about the most-of-three-days I spent chatting with him less than a month ago.

Joe was the second husband of my wife’s sister, a guy who came into her life after her children had been mostly raised. For each of them, the pairing was not so much about building a future but rather about settling into a life together after many of the lessons have been learned. And as far as Mary and I could tell, their settling in was natural, effortless, meant to be.

They had too few of those ‘here were are together and life is good’ years before the cancer made itself known. They should – if a normative can be applied to something as capricious as a person’s fate – they should have had those golden years that all seek but none are promised. But life is what happens, so Mary is in Florida as I type this, trying to help her sister cope.

The world without Joe is a lesser place, I can assure you. This was a man whose stepdaughter found in him, finally, a true ‘daddy.’ Whose son’s passing was mourned by a father who was born to the title. Whose love for his wife bordered on adoration.

This was a man whose approach to knowledge of his own impending mortality was to blog about it, so that the people he cared about and who cared about him could be reassured and comforted by the chronicle of his battle, without whining or self-pity.

Selfishly, Joe and I were brothers-in-law who made the annual Jonardi gatherings enjoyable for each other. Or so it was for me and I like to think, for him as well. I’ve always been uncomfortable at these yearly extravaganzas at which I felt an interloper but with Joe there, I had a friend, a brother in the strange world of family history that wasn’t mine and references I didn’t understand.

And toward the end, rather than cocoon or rage against his condition, he shared, honestly and without a hint of bitterness, his story that could only have one ending. His humor and decency and amazing knowledge and insight when I was last with him made me think about others who have displayed grace in the face of their own demise.  Gilda Radner’s It’s Always Something, Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture (and Robert Schultz’s, for that matter) come to mind.

It was with all this playing on my psyche that I picked up two books by Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, and his last book, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium. I read the first to sort of calibrate myself to his style, although it turned out not to have been necessary. It was a good book, but the style of writing was quite different from the later (last) one.

Sagan, knowing that his nine lives were sorely depleted and that his time was nigh, elected to have a conversation with us about the ideas that mattered to him and that he felt should matter to all of us. I am reading ‘Billions’ now and so far, it’s a glorious book, a wonderful journey through the mind of a man who devoted much of his professional life to understanding difficult concepts and then explaining them to the rest of us.

I hope to provide you with a book report some time soon. But even if not, please consider reading this book. Three chapters in, I’m already better off for having done so.

Both Carl and Joe chose to leave behind evidence of their love for this world and the people in it. And today, at 36,000 feet over (Montana?), I raise my orange juice in salute to them.