(Reminder to myself: I originally planned to call this "Funerals, Yuks, and Medical Fuckups," rolling in multiple experiences from this past week, but just the first part is getting chokingly long so I'm going to split it into at least two entries.)
I started off my workweek with two funerals in three days. That's not even counting Jimmy Carter's on the fourth day, when a strange mix of some open/some closed things had to be navigated. I'd never met the first of them to pass, and hadn't seen the second in probably close to 30 years, but both were moving experiences and likely are signs of how my social calendar is going to be going for the rest of my life.
Bridget was mother to a friend of ours- a young (five years younger than our daughter) hard working woman who just got married and bought, with her new husband, her first-ever house. She was very close to her mom, who was only a year older than I am when she passed, and at first we thought we had missed her funeral. Last week, though, Brittany posted that the wake and funeral would be this past Monday, at a Baptist church in the City of Lackawanna.
That is not a Native American name original to this area. It comes from northern Pennsylvania, home of the Lackawanna Steel Company that built one of the world's largest manufacturing plants in- really becoming- that small city, after that part of the adjoining Town of West Seneca renamed itself in the plant's honor and became a city in the early 1900s. For most of the 20th century, the city was best known for its Catholicism as well as the coke coming from that plant- a local priest named Father Baker raised funds to build the only Basilica recognized as a National Shrine in all of New York-
The Basilica still stands, but the steel plant, after changing the company name to Bethlehem Steel in the 1920s, closed not long after I first moved here in the 80s, laying off thousands and beginning this whole area's long decline into the Rust Belt that it is just now recovering from. I rarely have reason to go to or through it, so it comes as a culture shock to see its deep decline, with some facilities and streets still trading on the Baker and Victory Catholic traditions but just as many weed shops and halal markets and, particularly as we headed down Steelawanna Avenue to the church, one empty lot after another.
I can't remember ever having been in a church in the historically Black tradition. Definitely had never attended a wake or a funeral in one. This is not your Aunt Sally's visitation at the funeral home or Uncle Shecky's shiva in the basement of the temple. You enter a procession to the open casket, take your seat, and there's little division between wake and funeral as the preacher leads, the choir sings and a cadre of nurses in full 1960s white-cap-white-stockinged gear all stand by to pass the Kleenexes.
We were partly there in case there was any trouble within the fam. Our friend had let us know, in her mother's declining months, that her father was basically absent from her care and even just being there for her. She posted some words that were as harsh about him as others were loving about her mom. Yet there he was, at the head of the procession, an honored guest in the front pew (though not directly next to our friend) and in the officiant's recognitions of her life. There would be no fights breaking out on this day, and if Brittany is telling it straight, there's no worry about dad getting into it with her in an afterlife.
That focus of this funeral was why we left a little early. So much talk about how much more important it was that Bridget had reached her final destination rather than all the good life she had lived here. I respect those who believe that, but not everybody in that sanctuary did. Such a difference when my path took me to a synagogue and a closed casket two days and 90-ish miles away.
----
Jeff was a longago friend who remained or became friends with others I still keep in touch with. I knew him throughout my first ten years of practice, in a firm in Rochester which was part of my life when I got married, bought our first two homes, and had our child. All of the other lawyers there were close to me in varying ways, but closest in age was their only associate when I was hired and became the second. Howard was kind, down to earth and probably "got" me more than anyone there. He steered me to the primary physician I hadn't had since childhood and to the dentist I still see 40 years later. He ushered at our wedding and attended Emily's christening. He literally "showed me the books" of how law practice really works that they never taught us or tested on the bar exam, looking up deeds and judgments in musty old bound volumes. Over time, though, he became more the lawyer and person our senior partner was, and by the time I left, my issues about the firm culture were such that he couldn't convince Paul to make adjustments of it on my account. Since I had asked for the business divorce, I did not come out of it well. They got almost all of the clients I'd been doing work for, the business community contacts, and even the friends I'd made through them. (I did get to keep the dentist, at least.) Jeff was one of those.
In the now more than 30 years since I left, I've been in their offices maybe a half dozen times on business for my own clients. One of them happened to be
30 years to the day after I first walked in their door as a just-hired, not-yet-admitted greenhorn. The first sign that the culture had gone even more sideways after my departure was having to sign in and wear a visitor badge.
I'd asked that day if Howard was in, because as far as I could remember I hadn't seen or talked to him in the entire two decades since I left. He wasn't there, they said. I've always felt something of a sense of loss of that friendship, all these years after both they and I have gone on with our practices and lives with seemingly good ends for all. Maybe it would be through remembering a once mutual friend that would restore that connection with him.
----
Howard knew the just-deceased Jeff through their original work in criminal defense and other legal services for the lesser among us. We would go out to lunch downtown a few times every couple of months and socialized a bit outside the office. When I first heard about his medical issues about a year ago, through a friend of mine from later years who was also close to Jeff, I distinctly remembered him helping me move from my first Rochester apartment to the condo I would later buy with Eleanor. All these years later, I could remember that Jeff's car was a green Honda hatchback with a Washington state license plate on the back. (He'd gone to law school at Gonzaga.) Why I remembered that, of all things, I still can't say.
Even after I started going back there more often for my own work, I rarely if ever ran into him, and if I did, it was him or me running someplace and it amounted to just a quick hello. About a year ago, I heard through that mutual friend that Jeff had gone through some terrible medical troubles. He'd always had back problems, and a surgery to fix them in 2023 had turned into eight different procedures. For a time, Jeff was in a medically induced coma. As of a few months ago in 2024, though, I heard through that friend that Jeff was doing better- moved to a long-term rehab facility at Rochester's Jewish Home. More than once, I thought about getting in touch and paying a visit, but it never happened.
Then last month, another friend of both his and mine wound up in another section of the same facility. Steve is a couple of years older than I am but started law school a bit later. He was behind me on the Rochester firm's track when he was hired in my second year of practice and became a partner a few years after I did. He wound up leaving a few years after I did, likely for similar reasons, and has always kept in touch with me as a friend and colleague. In December, he let me know that he had broken his leg in a winter fall on ice. Major surgery followed, successfully, and he's been in rehab in the main section of the Jewish Home ever since.
Because of that same snow-and-icy weather and the intervening holidays, I didn't have as many trips out to Rochester after hearing about this, but that same nagging thought came that I should now visit both of them. Steve, as well, had wanted to arrange the Jewish Home staff to get him into his wheelchair and across their road to the longer-term facility Jeff was in. They waited for a clear day on the roads to do it, but Sunday morning was when Jeff suddenly breathed his last and neither Steve nor I ever made it to see him that one last time.
In the Jewish tradition, funeral arrangements happen fast, and finding this out Monday morning meant there would be a service and burial a mere two days later at his synagogue down the road from where I'd first visited Eleanor almost 40 years before. I rearranged my schedule to be there, offered to give Steve a ride but he was not quite up to that kind of travel, and found just two people in the lobby who I recognized- the friend who'd first told me of Jeff's struggles and the town supervisor who knew him well from law and politics. I took a seat in the back and listened to a story of a life well lived with little about the afterlife to come.
One thing I'd never been quite aware of is that Jeff was as much and more of a music lover as we are. He was self-taught on guitar and other strings and kept playing in his rehab room even into his final days. The service began with a video of Jeff himself paying "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." The officiant ended the service with references to that song and one other from Jeff's extensive repertoire. Of course it had to be John Prine's "Angel from Montgomery," the third time in just a few days
that song had entered my consciousness.In between, two friends delivered eulogies of the man who just passed. One I'd never met- another Rochester lawyer who was Jeff's best friend all the way back to an Irondequoit elementary school. Jeff made his bones there by being sent out of the second-floor classroom to retrieve a paper airplane he'd flown out the window- and promptly fired it right back IN that window from the school grounds. Then a woman came up, not speaking off the cuff but reading from a printed page. I hadn't recognized her, nor did I catch her brief explanation- just that she and her husband were longtime friends of Jeff and his wife and she gave a moving tribute to his legal career and his off-hour passions. I'd been looking for Howard in the assembled multitude and was sure I'd recognize him, but he was nowhere to be seen.
When my workday ended, I messaged Steve to see if
he wanted me to pay a visit. Once he was done with PT, he said he'd love that, so I headed that way. After getting the obligatory visitor pass, I headed up to his room, and we (which is to say he, almost entirely) talked for well over an hour. He'd watched the livestream of the funeral from his room, and he, better than I, knew who that second speaker was and why she was reading from prepared remarks:
It was Leslie, Howard's wife from the whole time I knew them both. I had not recognized her or heard her one mention of Howard by name at the beginning of her time. Steve had caught it, and also knew the reason Howard wasn't there: he'd come down with COVID. I'm hopeful that was precautionary rather than a sign of serious illness as it once was (and hopefully won't be again once the crazy people take over), but I took it as a sign to let any attempts at that connection go, at least for now. Because this shouldn't be about me and him and our falling out all those years ago. Jeff's memory and accomplishments need to be the focus.
----
More brushes with DEATH have followed. Yesterday morning came word that one of our mother's dearest friends from decades of church had just passed, just weeks after getting a final Christmas with her kids and grandkids. The Buffalo music community just lost another of its longtime stalwarts after a long illness; I didn't know Tim, but am close friends with some who were close to him and that's enough.
That's also enough DEATH for one post. Back soon with stories of more fun experiences and of less fun interactions with the wonderful world of bureaucratic medicine.
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