The more commonplace circumstance is for a wife to bury her husband, and I stood by as that happened this morning. But in a perfect world, that happens when both have reached a ripe old age.. not when the husband was about to turn 59 in a few months.

Infinitely more so when the funeral bell is ringing insistently above our heads at the Orthodox church, pastor and Psaltis cantor singing the service in the ancient tones of Byzantine chant, swinging a canister of frankincense over the coffin and the grieving survivors– and the parents are sitting in the front row with the surviving wife and son, the mother wondering aloud through her anguish why it isn’t her instead of her son in that casket, pleading with him to wait for her at the gates of heaven; the father letting the tears fall freely and remaining mostly silent and in wordless conversation with his maker.

Not a month ago Van was here at the house, caulking as much of our shower stall as he could reach (leaving the rest for a tall guy like me to finish the job– which I still haven’t done), talking about introducing me to his Reiki therapist, offering to take me along to a Qi Gong class with his brother. And in turn, I was offering (again) to take him over to the VA hospital for his scheduled treatment if his mother were ever otherwise indisposed. He’d been fighting the lung cancer for about a year by then, and other than the complete loss of hair looked very much like he was going to beat this thing: joking around as per his usual hale self, easy to be around, optimistic in the face of what could be coming. And did, finally, on the 10th at about 9:45pm.

Van and his wife Judy were in Ohio at the time. None of the family could understand what possessed Van to get on a plane in his condition. Only later did we discover that the disease had begun to spread again, this time with little to get in its way. One eye had gotten lazy without the muscular support to keep it under the control of his brain. He must have known his time was coming very soon, and he wanted to say goodbye to Michael, his adopted son attending Ohio State.

As near as I can determine the timeline, they got off the plane in Dayton either Sunday night or Monday morning, but the next thing we knew he was in a Dayton hospital on a ventilator. And from all accounts, suffering. We got the news that he’d left us at around 10pm our time.

All my mother could say at the wake was “Not fair.. it’s not fair.” Van had the charisma to own any room he walked into, and to make you feel comfortable while he was in there owning it.. but never displayed any of the arrogance of awareness of owning the room. Some might say that becoming an actor at the late age he did was a little peculiar, but he never minded that, and it came naturally to him; he was as easy playing Louie (or was it Eddie?) in Lost In Yonkers as he was playing Linus in You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown (a role for which I understand he had to learn to sing). His friends came from all backgrounds and ethnicities, and he moved easily between them and the Greek community in which he was raised.

For his brother and sisters, he was the go-to guy who got things sorted, and he willingly took that yoke on his shoulders for the rest of the family too. When a deck needed building for our above-ground pool, it was Van who planned it and helped my dad build it. When our family needed another car, it was at his suggestion that it be a Saturn. When he no longer had a need for that old Kay guitar on which he had learned to play Walk Don’t Run, he knew of a musically-inclined cousin who could maybe get a little more mileage out of it. And I played it– badly– till the glue no longer held the fretboard to the body of the guitar.

At the cemetery, as the 21-gun salute went off in the distance and the bugler blew Taps in honor of his Viet Nam service, and as the seaman handed Judy the flag that had been draped over the coffin, saying “On behalf of a grateful country..”, I had a vision pre-empt everything that was going on in front of me. The pre-cancer Van, face shining, looking up in profile as he beheld the place we came from and to which we will all eventually return. I guess I heard the voice of C S Lewis speaking up in my subconscious, through his imagined senior tempter Screwtape, pondering what I believe Van felt in his last moments of life and first beyond it:

“All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?”

As I write I am recording his last voice mail message to me into my computer from my cell phone. In the next day or two I will be collecting those messages he left on his sister’s and his mother’s answering machines and recording those too for transfer to a CD, so that we can preserve the sound of his jocular, kind baritone for the next generation.

He saw me play out precisely once.. and while he had the misfortune to witness perhaps the worst performance I ever gave, he had nothing but encouraging words for me and the band. I take comfort that he’ll be present in some form the next time Old Man Noises take the stage, and I know he’ll approve.

And I think I’m going to feel him hugging me and giving me a peck on the cheek.. something he was never ever ashamed to do for family and friends alike. He taught me. He taught us all.

I wish I were better at applying his lessons. In time, maybe I will be.

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