“Yeah, how can those even EXIST?!” said Tom Owley, with a tone of hushed reverence that caught me off guard, even if it shouldn’t have.
Tom wasn’t a classical music geek per se, but he was a music (and art, and history, and literature, and science, and philosophy…) nut in general, and his statement told me in an instant that he fully grasped what I meant when I’d mentioned, in passing, Beethoven’s last string quartets. Most hardcore fans of those pieces wonder the same thing, and after talking about them for a moment, I knew Tom felt the same way, on both the level of “How did he write these while he was deaf,” and “How could anyone write something that so transcends our mortal selves?”
Then again, here was a guy whose light reading as he lay dying in a hospital bed this month was Rimbaud.
He also was someone who never wore his immense intellect on his sleeve – it was more his undershirt. His visible attire was much more fun. But the biggest first, and second, and twelfth impression you’d get from Tom was warmth (followed by humor). It came from a place of deep caring.
It’s why a brilliant mind in the world of autism changed careers and got the hell out – years of having little to offer by way of concrete and helpful interventions to ease the agony of families dealing with it was wearing him down. So the world of autism treatment and research lost a great psychiatrist.
And yesterday, the rest of the world lost a great guy. At 53. From pulmonary fibrosis.
When he told Karen and me last year that he had it, we knew nothing about it. His low-key nonchalance was in direct opposition to the words. That was another thing about Tom. Whenever he talked, it began with a smile, and his voice usually sounded like he was about to laugh.
This was deadly serious, nothing to laugh at, a terminal condition that would likely do him in in a year or so, the only way out being a double lung transplant.
Tom was similar that night to how he would be the last time we saw him, a few weeks ago. We had seen him a few times since he gave us the bad news last year, but the last several times we’d tried to get together, Tom had to cancel because he wasn’t doing so well. After taking a sharp downturn about a month ago, Tom ended up in a hospital being evaluated for new lungs. The process was going well, and he seemed to be only a few days away from a transplant.
He was fatigued, but his usual self. Joking, and upbeat. And when he said he was ultimately OK with whatever happened, it was pretty amazing. I told him, “Yeah, we’re not.”
And boy, I’m anything but OK with it now.
Things really went south soon after our visit. The transplant was on hold until he recovered enough to receive new lungs. His body fought. And it lost.
Tom wasn’t religious, and had no interest in organized religion for himself. But he also considered atheism to be a bit arrogant, and didn’t refer to himself by that term. “How do we know?” was what he asked me.
And Tom was great at asking questions, and maybe even better at listening to answers. When our son Jake was dealing with some adolescent issues, he asked if he could call Tom for advice. Tom elicited trust, and offered back plain-spoken yet self-effacing wisdom. He didn’t have kids himself, but you would never know it when you saw him interacting with them, whether they were little, or adults. He loved our now 25-year-old Jakey boy (as Tom sometimes still called him), and it flowed both ways. Jake brought Tom a small button with a message of inspiration on it when we saw him at the hospital. It was obvious how much it touched Tom.
So this morning, by coincidence, I had one of those late Beethoven quartets Tom had marveled at in my player on the train downtown. As soon as it started, my memory flashed back to Tom’s lightning-bolt of expressive insight. I ended up silently sobbing, tears running down my face. What did it was Beethoven’s musical offering of thanks for recovery from an illness he thought would kill him. I remembered Tom’s words from that final visit, that he was OK with whatever happened. And what happened was he didn’t recover. But when we were last with him, Tom was giving thanks for the life he had.
And I’ll always be thankful for having him in our lives for as long as we did.
Oh yeah, and as for Tom’s belief that we shouldn’t be so sure of ourselves when it comes to the things we don’t know, beliefs, a hereafter…
The music that followed Beethoven on my player this morning was an old broadcast of Bach, sung by a favorite soprano of mine, Arleen Auger. When it ended, the announcer said that they’d played it in honor of Auger, who had died young.
At 53.
Dammit Tom, you made your point. And I can hear you laughing.