….and children in sunshine bright.
An old mate of some 50 years standing passed away the weekend before last.
Jim Keenan had been quite ill for a while but was well on the road to recovery when, age 66, a heart attack took him unexpectedly …and way too early.
He had just finalised travel for a trip over to Europe to see his new grand-daughter next month and we expected to meet up with them all. I had been ‘apping him the same day discussing his trip.
His loss didn’t quite hit me until a few days afterwards, but when I woke up last Friday I had a terrible feeling of emptiness and dis-attachment, like a small wooden boat set adrift bobbing along on the tide going nowhere, just empty ……all at sea
That evening, my wife returned from work and out of the blue, suggested we should cross the road and pick something up from our very local snack bar and have a couple of beers while we waited. “To avoid me having to cook on a very hot day”, she said. She knows me better than I know myself.
We joined up with a pal of mine sitting at a table outside. He was doing the same thing as us.
My wife fell into conversation with him speaking Frisian the local language round here. I understand it pretty well but its a hard to get an old english tongue around it.
We hadn’t seen him for quite a while and we’re both already aware he was in line for major transplant surgery and as my wife works in the local hospital, she was naturally interested in how he was doing.
While this was going on, I was just enjoying the sunshine and a cold beer and reflecting on a day when Jim was here with me doing the same thing a few short years ago. I was also listening to the conversation unfolding across the table…and it soon became clear that it was not an ordinary conversation.
It was a rather beautiful yet poignant conversation they were having, about how he described the time he had to break the subject of his illness to his young family.
I was thinking “How you do that, how do you have that conversation with very young children”?
He started by telling them that he was sick and that this illness could not be cured because his heart was failing and could not be repaired.
He did not say as much, but I can quite imagine that his family must shown him they were deeply concerned about their father, so he went on to explain that there was a possibility he could get help by the removal of his own heart, and replacing it with that of another man, somebody who had already died.
I have no way of knowing, and I am not going to ask him, but I am sure that must have helped the children a little.
A day or two later his six year old son approached him and said Dad what if you get a heart from an angry man, are you going to turn into an angry man?
The child further went on to explain how emotions like happiness and anger came from the heart, and this is why he was asking the question, he was very concerned about it.
My wife and I could see this had a major impact on the father, who went on to explain that it was much more likely that he would get the heart from a happy man because there are far more happy people in the world and not so many angry people.
Another couple of days went by and the same son approached the dad with the observation that this operation meant that another man’s family would then be losing their happy father
Now there’s not very much that the father could say to that for it is simply the truth. Although he knew it was not a very satisfactory answer, he could only say that the family had already lost a happy father and his family would have saved a happy one for them.
It was about this point that I joined in on the conversation. From a language point of view, I wanted to check back that I had indeed understood these points correctly.
I had.
That morning I had woken up to the strange feeling that I was a little wooden boat drifting out to sea. Its owner was my recently departed friend, Jim. He was a man of the sea he was a fisherman and navigator a weatherman and engineer a sailor and a bloody great bloke and we knew each other for nearly half a century. And then out of nowhere came a little 6 year old boy that I had never met, who leaned over to grab the end of one of the ropes I was trailing in the water and tied me quite firmly back up to the dock
I needed that to happen.
So that I could sit down and write this humble memorial to the memory of James Garner Keenan.
Sail in Peace Jim
Another great site by the Dangerous Globe
