I was very blessed to have Jake as my friend. I know that Jake touched people all over the world with his open friendliness, his love of adventure and his inquisitive nature, not to mention his ability to fall in love at least twice a day so I know that I am not alone in my shock and grief. Jake was one of the most complicated and contradictory people I have ever met. He was a grand master at loving life while at the same time he could never reconcile his own expectations for himself with what he perceived as his perpetual failures. He was unfailingly honest and direct. He never worried about the consequences of his honesty and this applied equally to authorities, his family and his friends as well as total strangers. It wasn’t always pleasant to be on the receiving end of his honest opinion but I valued it very highly in a world where many people find it so difficult to reveal themselves authentically. While Jake could be blunt, he could also be charming with his impeccable manners and sincerity; but more than anything he was surely one of the kindest and most generous people on earth.
Jake and I met just after the death of my youngest son and though Jake was going through a very difficult time himself, he took it on as his mission to cheer me up. One day it might be a silly cat video and the next day the link to a song that was spot on for what I was feeling. We have spoken almost every day for over four years now, sharing more laughter than sorrow but sharing that,too. Jake and I bonded equally through our senses of humor and the sense of safety we felt with each other. In December Jake came to spend 10 days with me and my family. I took him all over the northern part of the state from Big Sur to Humbolt to visit the redwood forests. In our travels, people were very curious as to our relationship as we were obviously quite close. Being more than twice his age but both of us acting like a couple of 10 year olds ditching school, I’m sure it was confusing. We have an ongoing joke in which Jake annoyingly asks me to marry him at least 10 times during any given conversation so half the time when people asked I would say, “I’m his American grandmother” just as he was blurting out, “She’s finally going to marry me!”. This obviously made things worse rather than better in terms of satisfying curiosity. Finally one day the answer to our dilemma surfaced when Jake pulled out his comically overstuffed wallet to pay for something and everything came cascading out on the counter. I offered to organize it for him and this became a daily ritual. He was flirting with yet another cute waitress when I was organizing the mess of vitamin packets, wads of small bills and completely useless cards and she asked what our relationship was. Without missing a beat he said, “She used to be my life coach but now she’s my carer.”
Jake was very, very happy in the redwoods. He was always the happiest when he was traveling or hiking but I don’t think I have ever seen him as at peace as he was in the redwood forest. Once we found a cave in the roots of a huge tree; we crawled inside to wait out the rain-- two tiny people looking out at a great silent forest of trees that were thousands of years old. I knew that his old unhappiness had been building in him again and I asked him if this peace he felt right here, right now, could not be enough? He said that he thought it could, and I truly believed that Jake would return home with a renewed sense of possibility; that he could begin to fashion a life for himself that fit who he truly was.
I do not know words for the loss of all Jake was. People often told me that eventually the happy memories of my son would replace my grief. This is not so. The truth is that when a person you have loved with all your heart dies, your heart reminds you every day what the true breadth of that love really was. The dimensions of your love become the dimensions of your loss. Some days the absence feels unbearable. But other days you find a kind of peaceful grace in knowing that you were one of the lucky ones. You were loved by this very unique and irreplaceable person, and you gave your love in return.
Jake was beloved by his father, by his mother, by his sister. He was beloved by his best friend for life, Dan. I loved him as completely as I have ever loved anyone. So many, many people will grieve this loss whether they connected briefly on Jake’s travels or were among the many friends that share the memories of his childhood. I still cannot believe that Jake is gone. This larger than life, goofy, intelligent, talented, self-deprecating, sentimental, childlike but oddly ageless, impulsive, hilarious and always surprising young man cannot be gone.
When we were in the redwoods we went to see one of the most famous trees, the Dyerville Giant, a tree that was taller than the Statue of Liberty when it stood, with a circumference of more than 50 feet. When it fell, it actually registered on the Richter scale as an earthquake. It was almost dark as Jake and I walked beside the massive body of the tree and the feeling of that great life was still palpable as we ran our hands along the bark. The tree fell over 20 years ago and I remember thinking that the death of a life so large is also immense. Jake’s life was short. But it had an incredible weight. He filled his 29 years to the brim. There is no scale that can begin to measure the impact of his death.
We will ache in our missing. We will feel overwhelming loneliness for this fine person that we loved so much. We will miss his religion of jasmine pearl tea, the cat baby talk, the wonderful tales and witty observations, the pranks and escapades, the bad singing and heartfelt tears, the cigars and curries, his fascination with weirdness in all forms, the hikes and discussions about everything from politics to Murikama to fungi. We will miss his charm and his outrageousness. This list could go on forever.
But we can honor Jake every single day by acknowledging the beauty in the madness, by finding something hilarious to laugh at, by being that something hilarious ourselves, by being fearless even when we are most afraid, by loving animals and accents and good and bad music and by questioning everything. We can honor Jake with both tears and laughter. Jake was a wonderful human being that struggled so hard to ever see that beauty in himself. He bore the weight of his own self judgment as long as he could, but all the while he was making many, many people’s lives happier. His big old heart kept escaping like a happy puppy from the mind’s darkness and bounding out in front of him to everything and everyone it loved. We can honor Jake by trying our best to embody the wisdom his tragically short life illuminates: to acknowledge the beauty inside us and in all we meet, to love each other with both abandon and integrity.