Gerard Vanderleun’s obituary: on loss and memory
Here’s the link to Gerard’s obituary.
It’s not particularly long, considering how much he did in his life. And of course, like most obituaries, it doesn’t really convey the person himself in all his complexity and energy and vitality. Gerard’s blog was much better at doing that.
As for me, I have my memories of the entire person in what he liked to call “the world dimensional.” But memories are selective, and memories are a pallid substitute for the living, breathing person. As C. S. Lewis described in his book about mourning his wife, A Grief Observed, after the death of a loved one the person in the real world tends to be replaced by the person in the mind of the survivor, and the imagined person no longer has any separate agency or ability to act. There is just no getting around one’s grief over losing the actual person whom one can talk to, touch, smell, hear, be surprised by, laugh with, and share all the wonders of life on earth.
Last night, by chance when I was looking at some historic dress videos on YouTube, I came across one about Victorian mourning jewelry. Some of the jewelry was made of the hair of the deceased. I understand the impulse; at least I think I do. It comes from wanting to have some tangible and corporeal part of the loved person.
Many years ago, Gerard gave me a beautiful heart-shaped locket, and in it he put a tiny clipping of his hair. But perhaps five years later I noticed that the lock of his hair had fallen out and the locket was empty. I never replaced the hair with another clipping, although I could have done so. Why didn’t I? I don’t know; I just kept forgetting to do it, and anyway I had the real person to talk with and spend lengthy periods of time with and so why bother?
Do I wish I had it now? Perhaps I wish it a little bit. But it wouldn’t bring him back and maybe it’s just as well I don’t have that sort of relic. I did bring back a few things of his when I returned home from California. A couple of his hats – he liked to wear hats. A little decorative wooden box I once gave to him, which now contains odds and ends like his driver’s license. A Japanese print I purchased for him in an attempt to replace an older and more beautiful yet similar one that got burned when Paradise and his entire home was destroyed.
But looking at such things is bittersweet. And who really wants to get such gifts back, gifts given with love?
When I was a little girl, my grandmother told me a story. She said that her maternal grandparents had both died within a month of each other (in the 1870s), when her mother – my great-grandmother – was sixteen years old. My newly-orphaned great-grandmother wore mourning jewelry, as was the custom back then. One piece was a locket with a lily of the valley on it and a black background. I still have the locket, and it used to have the deceased couple’s photos in it but somewhere along the line one of the photos fell out (do you detect a pattern here?). My grandmother also showed me some of that hair jewelry, from the same era. It seemed very very strange to me at the time.
But after my grandmother died and then many years later my mother died, I couldn’t find the hair jewelry anywhere. Had my mother thrown it out? Probably. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Probably a good thing.
I think.
Here take my picture; though I bid farewell
Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell.
‘Tis like me now, but I dead, ’twill be more
When we are shadows both, than ’twas before…
–John Donne
My heart aches along with yours. Not as deeply, but aching nonetheless. God rest Gerard’s soul, and may He bring you peace that passes all understanding.
“long time love”
That’s very touching.
I admit I’m a little surprised by the Penthouse connection. Not so much the EFF and Well connections.
Physical bits and pieces retained after the loss of someone we love can be bittersweet, indeed. Their real value, though, is their ability to enliven the memory of the departed one we loved, and that, truly, is where Gerard lives while we remain here in this earthbound state. Thank you for linking to Gerard’s obit, and the small personal memories which you share, although I think you do so somewhat reluctantly, little peeks to what is hidden behind the apple, or Gerard’s hat.
KPFA, the EFF and Penthouse.
I am in awe!
I scour the military sections of antique stores for dog tags and ID cards and bracelets and photographs and related personal items. I have no real idea who these people are. All soldiers, all unknown, anonymous . . . all gone, and forgotten. I look at them and wonder.
Like William McBride:
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And fading to yellow in a brown, leather frame . . .
Grief is a feature of humanity, and if we did not feel grief (or joy or any other profound emotion) we would be less than human.
It is said that ‘condolence’ is derived from the Latin, ‘condolere,’ which translates as “to suffer with.” My wife died in December, then soon after, Gerard; rough territory. But I am reminded that, while we regard ‘love’ as an emotion, it is more a state of being. People and events and feelings exist in time, have beginnings and endings; ‘being’ is outside of time, eternal. I haven’t noticed that the love has faded, and hope it’s the same with you. Thank you for your consideration of his many admirers.
“But looking at such things is bittersweet. And who really wants to get such gifts back, gifts given with love?”
OMG – yes! When I was younger and lived in Taiwan I bought several paintings (traditional paintings on scrolls intended to be hung on walls) that I gave to family over the years.
And, after the recipients passed away I received the scrolls back. It initially felt odd to be “regifted” a gift that I gave in the first place. But, with time I am glad that I got them back.
One scroll was a scene of two monkeys (gibbons really) that I thought my dad would like instead of the traditional flowers or landscapes. However, before I sent it to him I showed it to Chinese friends and explain that it was for my dad; they would either get a puzzled look on their faces or start laughing. The reason was that this painting of two gibbons was that the painting was about love! Gibbons mate for life and so in traditional Chinese culture they represent life-long romantic love; and the poem written on it was a love poem – really not something a Chinese would give to a father. But, I gave it to him anyway and, even with the back story, he loved it!
The other scroll was of flowers, which I gave to my grandmother. Ha! everyone, including my grandmother said: “yep, it looks like the type of painting someone would give to a grandmother.” She loved it to. It hung on the wall in her bedroom until the day she died.
After they died I got the scrolls back and it felt funny to get them back. However, today I am glad that I have both of them back. They are bittersweet memories; but, they have become sweeter over the years.
So, Neo, may your bittersweet memories of these gifts become sweeter over time too.
IrishOtter: do you know the Tom Waits song “A Soldier’s Things”, which seems to be set in a flea market? That last line really gets me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jc7Gf9-W2c
When someone I know well passes on, I ask myself what was special about that person. It’s a way of summarizing for me why I feel grief and miss them so. But it’s also a way forward. It reminds me why it was such a blessing to have had them in my life.
I never met Gerard but felt like I knew him from reading American Digest. He had a gift with words that I admired and envied. I quit commenting there about four years ago because my eyes have become so bad, but I still read there nearly every day. As long as American Digest is online, his memory will live on. And that’s a blessing.
RIP Gerard.
walt, deepest condolences on your loss.
Neo, thanks for the link to the obituary. I had looked for it, and didn’t find it.
Deepest condolences
Is it odd to say that you miss different people differently?
My brother was killed overseas in 1970. That was awful. But I recall one op which was getting spun up and I was trying to make sure we weren’t on the same aircraft (he was a C130 navigator). Then it was called off.
I imagine some of the things we might have done at the time. Some of what we did, some of the folks we did things with. Some fun, some serious. Like the time he invited me and a couple of Army buddies to the Air Force officers’ club for an all you could eat luncheon. They weren’t used to feeding Infantry. Lots of laughs.
I miss my mom as just a hole in my heart.
My father’s presence….
I recall someone who, I found later, was interested in my brother and I reproach myself for not knowing earlier and….trying to talk with her about it.
I’m not in a position to guess, neo, how your grief will manifest itself, but I hope there’s a lot of footage you can rerun for the enjoyment of it.
Gerald felt similarly alive through hix prose even though i never had the chance to meet him
These things take time to feel less intense.
When I was just a small child back in the 1970s, I would walk behind my dad in the garden and stretch my steps way out so they would land in his footprints.
In 2019, I helped my late father with some plastic that he would put down on plant rows to keep the weeds down. He had actually already laid it down and I merely helped to cover the sides with dirt to keep it from blowing away. That was the last time I helped dad in the garden.
I had not brought myself to take up that plastic row . This year, in 2023, it is time.
Jon baker:
I find that every death is different. I’ve lost a lot of people I loved, but this is the worst so far.
Strange, the things we hold sacred. The calendar on the kitchen wall still shows the year and month in which my parents moved out of the house they had lived in for sixty-one years. Almost eight years ago now. And five years after their deaths.
The same photos are on the fridge–the photos they saw when they came in from running errands or from working in the yard or talking to the neighbor. If I think on it, I can see them coming in, feel the winter chill on their coats, hear the grocery bags hit the kitchen counter, hear my mother talking to my father as she opens the refrigerator door. Such routine domestic things, things that will never happen again in that way in this life. “These so, these irretrievable.”
And I’ve kept the landline and their old phone number–the number they had for all the years we were growing up, the number that meant home during my travels. Because I was the child who left home. Nobody calls now, and nobody is there to answer. Somehow the silence seems fitting. Maybe I’ll let it go, but not yet, not yet.
I had no idea Gerard was involved with far-left KPFA-FM radio, an institution here in Berkeley. Not in Pacifica; the obituary writer was confused in that the parent company of KPFA and several other lefty public radio stations is Pacifica Radio. And no idea he was involved in EFF, co-founded by Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, or The Well, an early online community also with strong connections to the Grateful Dead. Was he a Deadhead?
“I’ve lost a lot of people I loved, but this is the worst so far.”
Thank you Neo…I feel the weight of that…
I pray this ultimately proves true for you:
“The lowly he sets on high, and those who mourn are lifted to safety.”
Neo,
He was your ” significant other”, so that adds a lot of weight.
I have never lost a significant other to death, so I do not know that feeling, exactly.
My first, and really only, true romantic love married a mutual friend. I got one of those ” dear Jon” letters while in army AIT.
For years, just going back to the college town where we were a couple, hurt so much. I had to go every month for National Guard duty.
And no idea he was involved in EFF, co-founded by Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, or The Well, an early online community also with strong connections to the Grateful Dead. Was he a Deadhead?
Marisa:
I leave the final adjudication to neo, but as an active participant on the Well and a Deadhead, I doubt Gerard was a Deadhead, though I imagine he may have boogied a time or two to the Dead back in the day.
Make no mistake. Gerard was thoroughly wired into the Bay Area/Whole Earth counterculture. Which confuses me some when I read his post 9-11 audience.
I’m sorry for your loss, but I also think it’s admirable that you so openly write about what you are experiencing. I say keep those tangible reminders of him.
When my first cat died about two years ago, I felt horribly sad that I hadn’t kept some of her fur. The last time I brushed her, I threw all the fur out the window for the birds to use. I was afraid that I’d forget exactly what her fur looked and felt like. A couple of days after her death I found a tuft of fur on my bedroom floor. I cried because I was so happy and sad at the same time. I still have it. I got some grief literature from the place that did the cremation. They said it’s very common to keep pets’ footprints, fur/hair, or a horseshoe if it’s a horse.
When my maternal grandmother died, my mother liked to often wear a necklace that she passed on to her. It made her feel like her mother was still close to her. For most people, doing something like that it helps us feel like the person is still with us. I think most of us genuinely fear that we’ll forget the person, as well, and really want something to assure us that we won’t.
Also… you might already know this from having lost people before or it might not be applicable, but I’ll mention it just in case… it is actually quite normal and okay if you sometimes find yourself unable to home in on any specific or vivid memory of the person. Things can kind of blur when you’re in the depths of grief, and your memory will straighten itself out eventually. I learned that when I got the info on grieving a pet, and it was a huge relief because I was experiencing that phenomenon myself.
To Lay Me Down
To lay me down once more, to lay me down
With my head in sparkling clover
Let the world go by, all lost in dreaming
To lay me down one last time, to lay me down
To be with you once more, to be with you
With our bodies close together
Let the world go by, like clouds a-streaming
To lay me down one last time, to lay me down
To lay me down, to lay me down
To lay me down one last time, to lay me down
To lie with you once more, to lie with you
With our dreams entwined together
To wake beside you, my love still sleeping
To tell sweet lies one last time and say goodnight
–Grateful Dead, “To Lay Me Down”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwijI2ROM
I’m so very sorry for your loss, Neo, and doubly appreciate your keeping us
connected to Gerard knowing and recognizing your reticence in things private.
Thank you for today’s gift.
Dear Neo:
Thank you so much for posting his obituary. I am also grateful for your time and talent in keeping us all connected and yet still somehow having to move forward.
Question: Are you the Ms. Kaufman mentioned in his obituary?
We are all grateful for your caring gifts.
Anne:
Yes, I am.
I want to say lots of things, but really my thoughts are very stimulated by the ideas of grief and mourning, and how they differ so much from person to person, and from deceased to deceased, according to your relationship to them.
Again, your writing is on topic, and flies straight like an arrow. I guess what I want to say is that I am enriched by this post and the comments.
Neo, I am so sorry for your loss of Gerard and I had no idea of the intersection of the two of you, a couple of my favorite internet people, not a clue. You both have made a lot of sense to me because we are from similar eras, in fact I was born the same year, 1945, as Gerard and each year more of my dear old friends are moving on to their next adventure and it sure makes me feel a bit more mortal. Thank you for allowing us to see one more side of your beautiful life and each of us in our own way can try to share a bit of your grief and loss.
Blessings for you Neo and for Gerard’s family as time moves on forward.
I miss the ‘ol boy already. I’m a recent subscriber, and I’ve been reading for several years now. I won’t even file against his estate for a pro-rata refund.
Out of all his pieces, I think I understand- having an adult estranged daughter myself- why he chose that last piece, on his deceased WW2 uncle, to be a final piece
I think it said please remember me; maybe in the future, you’ll look me up and understand of me better. It was an ode to his daughter and his love for her.
Those who have never been in his shoes (and mine) would better understand the selection.
au revoir, I’ll miss you.
Having absorbed Gerard’s brief biography in the obituary, I now understand how very profound his political “change” was, and why you and he had so much in common in this regard.
Kate, thank you for your kind comment last night. Btw, kindness also is a state of being.
Thanks to everyone for your condolences. Gerard’s death leaves a big hole in my life.
Went to Michelle’s Mirror blog to see if she commented on Jill’s latest outfit–but found this tribute on Gerard.
(And yes, feeling a tad ashamed of my middle school girl behavior. But I do think Gerard would be the first to acknowledge we are all oh so human.)
http://www.michellesmirror.com/2023/01/gerard.html
Jacob Beckenstein, a respected Israeli physicist, has said that information in the universe can neither be created or destroyed. He and Hawking did a lot of work on black holes.
Of course, the human personality is information, and this law or theory makes it quite fascinating to imagine what actually is happening when someone passes away. Is that information somehow distributed as entropy (hidden information) throughout the universe?
Maybe as we grow old and change phase—die—we shall be able to reconnect with this hidden entropic information?
If I could give you a hug, Neo…
My father passed on unexpectedly, when I was 14.
He used to have a necklace with one of those charms with an image of Catholic saints or devotions. His is the Sacred Heart of Jesus: he wore it even though I never saw him attend a church for anything, not even for Good Friday or Easter Sunday. (I didn’t understand why he was the only merchant to work on a Good Friday for years, until my half-brother told me there was an implied camaraderie he had with some merchants who were Jews in my old hometown – and then, I found out through a DNA test that I have a tiny bit of Jewish ancestry. But I digress…)
Anyway, my Mom kept the necklace and wore it for years until she gave it to me some time ago. I don’t dare wear it, so I keep it inside my safe. But lately, my Mom has been asking about that necklace. She’s now 89. I suspect she has dementia, yet she keeps thinking about my father – and that necklace. She just showed me one of her Catholic Saint necklaces broke (not a rosary), so I have to take it to a jeweler for repairs… and my father’s old necklace for cleaning. I think I’ll give it back to her after that.
She insists my father’s necklace is going to be mine after she’s gone. I’d rather make sure she takes it with her when she goes. I know, “You can’t take it with you.” But her attachment to my father is still strong, thirty-five years after he left.
Is there going to be a memorial service? Just asking…
And just like that….we’ll all continue on, as we must, but I know every now and again I’m going to feel like something is missing. It never ceases to amaze me how the internet makes you feel so connected to someone you’ve never met but admire greatly.
@ Shamus > “It never ceases to amaze me how the internet makes you feel so connected to someone you’ve never met but admire greatly.”
I also feel that way about my favorite authors, composers, and performers.
So many of them, especially movie stars (and not just the big names), have passed away; most of them were the same age or older than I, of course.
I don’t keep up with modern films, so I don’t have many favorites that are younger than I — and a lot of what I watch is animated anyway!
My hometown & college friends are also slipping out of mortality more frequently these days, and although I don’t see their obituaries in the national news, our “circles” pass the word around.
Bloggers are kind of a middle category: it’s not as much of a personal loss as our real-world friends and family (except, of course, for Neo & a few others who knew Gerard “in the flesh”), but neither is it a public loss shared with most of the world (outside of the pundits from the major media publications, anyway).
And yet — we will nonetheless “feel like something is missing” because something IS missing, like a jigsaw puzzle with a lost piece.
We spend our lives gathering puzzle pieces and creating a picture of all the people we know, and then the pieces start disappearing.
All of us will leave life before our entire puzzle is gone (I hope!), but we will also be the piece that goes missing from other people’s puzzles.
I’m glad that Gerard and Neo and the Salon are part of my jigsaw picture.
I remember Remus, of The Woodpile Report. I used to visit his site regularly.
I was so thrilled when he referenced one of my posts on my own blog. I got a HUGE boost in visitors that day.
Such a small connection, but one that built ties to his person. I still run across bloggers who, several years after his death, have not taken his link off their blogroll. For me, Gerard was such a connection. His writing touched my heart.
Thanks for this gift, Neo, with sympathy for your loss.
Neo, I never met Gerard, but my first wife had an honors English class with him, probably as a high-school junior. She said that on the first day of class Gerard announced “Greetings, all you avant-garde annelids!”, to which Robin promptly responded “Oh, you mean way-out worms?”. And the intellectual combat was on.
I was told this story over 50 years ago and never forgot Gerard’s interesting name.
Alan Clute:
Funny story. Thanks.
A man of parts, to put it mildly. No words can be entirely adequate, but you have all the respect and sympathy I can possibly convey. Coincidentally, at a gathering of amateur astronomers I attended yesterday evening, a rather famous “pro-am” read from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”
I’m very sorry for your loss Neo, but how wonderful it must have been to know and love a man with such depth to him.
Over the years I’ve read your blog more than Gerard’s, but I’ve linked to occasional stories of his because his writing was so elegiac, as with the story he wrote for his brother, I had a fortress once in Paradise.
I have no such big hole in my life as yet, but even though I’m almost two decades younger than Gerard, small bites have begun to be taken out in the last few years, starting with my friend Cathy in a car accident in the Sierra Nevadas and capped – so far – by the death of another friend who died too young (54) in September of 2021, which finally pushed me to write about all of them in The Actuary Cometh, which I’ll leave with this excerpt:
Tom Hunter:
Thanks.
Unfortunately, the clock seems to tick even faster as we get older. I’ve lost more and more people I loved. But Gerard is a whole nother level of loss, a deep and abiding love as well as someone who could make me smile and laugh, and very regularly did.
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@ Linda S Fox… I remember Remus, of The Woodpile Report.
Me too. You’ll be glad to know that somebody took the time, while he was still alive, to build an archive of his website, since Remus had it up front, with his usual sharp humour, that:
The archive is here, perfectly capturing it all.
I read that American Digest will keep going for another two years, so I’d like to think that one of his readers is busy doing exactly the same thing with it.