This is what I said about Jim at his funeral:
When studying to be a rabbi, I learned a tradition that says one should begin every public discourse with a jest. So here?s Jim?s and my very favorite shared joke ? at least, the one that?s suitable for mixed company:
A man who had studied much in the schools of wisdom finally died in the fullness of time and found himself at the Gates of Eternity.
An angel of light approached him and said, “Go no further, O mortal, until you have proven to me your worthiness to enter into Paradise!”
But the man answered, “Just a minute now. First of all, can you prove to me this is a real Heaven, and not just the wild fantasy of my disordered mind undergoing death?”
Before the angel could reply, a voice from inside the gates shouted:
“Let him in – he’s one of us!”
The ironic thing about my best friend dying is that he’s the only one with whom I want to discuss it.
This is my first visit to Griefland, and I’m still finding my way around. But “Sputnik” would see the black crushing horror part of it AS WELL AS the intensely spiritual aspect. And know that the one does not preclude the other.
Jim and I were psychic twins for life, even though our 1980s-era experiments at roommate-hood proved that we would viciously murder each other in our sleep if we ever tried living together again. We were that much alike, and when you love someone that deeply it gives them leave to annoy you mightily. And annoy each other we did, though never intentionally.
But what really annoys me is that Jim finally won the game we’d been playing ever since we met in 1978. You see, he now knows something I don’t.
For Sputnik and I, the Alpha Male game was measured not by how big our toys were but by how big our brains and hearts were — and how well we used them. Our serious quest for the Sourceless Source meant we couldn’t afford to mess around with anything less — and even though we freely acknowledged that our quest was ultimately unachievable, we wanted it to be real.
An anthropologist’s skepticism, saint’s reverence and anarchist’s sense of humor, coupled with his amazing memory, made Jim fingertip-familiar with numberless and little-known facts, theories, theologies, philosophies, ontologies, epistemologies, epiphanies, chemical interactions and their results, and strange doings of mutual friends and secretly-famous personalities. As Jim’s psychic twin, I can tell you that this paved the way for inevitable and mutual quasi-macho posturing.
Now, one of the great joys of sharing unshared information is making the other fellow say, “Wow! Where’d you hear that?” During our quarter-century together, I could probably count on one hand the times that actually happened instead of the usual “Right. And have you thought about this or that correlation?”
This unspoken but obvious competition kept us both on the Path, which — for the two of us — was the exact same path with the exact same curves at roughly the same time, exquisitely tailored to our individual hands, accompanied by headshaking laughter at our unswerving devotion to something so obviously arbitrary and wordlessly meaningful as our different religious traditions ? his Christian, mine Jewish. But Jim was always a practical guy, living both in the moment as well as in its multiple interpretations, cheerfully accepting the Mystery even as he poked at its manifestations.
Well, that Mystery is cleared up for one of us. And now that Jim’s life is a closed book, I’m really beginning to see how much we actually were a part of each other — and how much a part we all are of everyone we know, especially if we let each other all the way inside.
None of us will never “get over” Jim’s death, because we will never get over Jim’s life. We can’t help it, because we ultimately live in each other. And while it may take a long time for the pain of Jim’s death to lessen, if it ever does, it won?t take nearly as long for us to understand that he is, and always will be, still with us.
Happy trails, my friend. I hope I’ll see you later.