Dear Jason:
I am having a very difficult time getting into the fullness of Christmas spirit this year, still very sad that this will be your first Christmas without us. I’m sitting on the couch right now, smiling so widely as I think about hanging out here on Christmas night in 2017. I was going through my divorce and knew it would be a rough one, and you took great care to make sure that we would have fun that evening—eating my mother’s leftovers, lots of desserts, singing songs, and indulging me in my holiday tradition, a viewing of Meet Me in St. Louis. Although not a Christmas movie in a classic sense, I always admired the Christmas story line in the film and Judy Garland’s performance of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas as the pinnacle of Judy at her loveliest. I weep whenever I take in that performance, thinking about how tragically she died and how bitterly the sting of addiction and unhealed trauma affected her. You held me that night as I cried; it never bothered you that I cry so much. Then (since it was your first time watching the film) you grew shocked as, shortly after the song ended, you saw young Tootie take a baseball bat and destroy the snowmen out of her own rage about the family move. “Wellll,” you said in your tenor of commentary, “That certainly changes the meaning of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas for me!”
This memory is everything I love about our friendship—deep laughs, deep tears, and the intimacy of shared experience. I wish we could have had even more of these moments, or that I could have more fully savored the ones we did share. Because of your struggles, somewhere deep inside, I feared that we would lose you young, and yet the reality is that more years is not a guarantee for any of us. When I was scrolling through Facebook on the day we cleaned out your apartment, I came across a meme with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut: “Enjoy the little things in life because one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.”
So many little things that I would love to experience again—comparing our rough days back at YSU over dinner at Christman Dining Hall, road trips in my car singing at the tops of our lungs, time spent dancing mindfully—especially receiving your beautiful teaching at your 2018 facilitator training using a bagpipe version of Amazing Grace to get us more viscerally attuned to our breath. Our last formal Dancing Mindfulness experience together included bringing you to Mill Creek Park where I taught a class at the end of August, then I drove you around the west side of Youngstown to show you my sites—the house I grew up in as a kid, my high school, the first place that sold me cigarettes underage. As much time as we spent in a car together before, something inside told me to show you those places, and you wittily called our drive the “Dancing Mindfulness Founder’s Day Tour.” We sang the Sunset Boulevard soundtrack all the way back to Warren, particularly relishing in “As If We’ve Never Said Goodbye.” You bought me better Valentine’s gifts than any straight male I ever actually dated, gifts that usually involved sparkle, glitter, or flowers. Gifts that evidenced how well you knew me. Waking up to your awesome messages and Bitmojis when I was on the road training, encouraging me to keep taking care of myself while working my brand of magic, as you named it. You often called me “tender trainer” in these messages and that is one of the loveliest compliments I ever received. The two of us exchanging boy talk, which usually consisted of you making many points about how I was shortchanging myself. The two of us dancing to Jesus on the Mainline at the Krisha Das kirtan/concert just after your 40th birthday. When we sat down for the final meditation, you kissed your hands and then kissed my feet, as this is a common sign of respect one shows their teachers in India. I cried at the meaning of the gesture and cried even more deeply when you said, “I just wanted to touch Maharajji’s foot.”
Maharajji… the term of endearment for our beloved Neem Karoli Baba; the great Indian saint who left the body in 1973, the teacher of Ram Dass, was the subject of many conversations between us. As kids who grew up largely tortured by Christianity yet still fascinated by all aspects of spirituality, the teachings of Ram Dass and Maharajji were balm for both of our souls. We reveled at what it meant to walk each other home, long seeing each other as guardian angels brought into each others’ lives. We marveled at the simplicity of Neem Karoli Baba’s teachings, namely that if you want to see God, love people. When I helped to clean out your apartment a few days ago, chills overcame me when I saw a card on your fridge; I sent it to you this summer while you were incarcerated. I forgot that I wrote this Maharajji teaching on the inside: “Love is the most powerful medicine. Meditate like Christ. He lost himself in love.”
Jason, this is who you really were and still are in your eternal state. You are a sweet, precious wave who returned to the ocean of eternal love. You understood that this love is who Jesus really is, and the miracle of in the Incarnation that we celebrate this Christmas season is that God shows up in human form. Not just in Jesus, in all of us. I am so sorry that the shame gremlins you could never quite shake kept you from knowing the fullness of this truth in your lifetime, as desperately as you sought this truth. When you told me this Fall that after all of these years you still experienced such great shame about being a gay man, I wanted to just wrap you up in Maharajji’s blanket and tell you how perfect and beautiful you are, exactly as God made you. I did my best to convey that with my voice and hope that in your eternal state, you now realize the truth. I see you and Maharajji hanging out together in Kainchi, chanting to Ram and sharing the love of God with everyone who comes to see you. Ram Dass is now there with you, I’m sure. After I visited Kainchi earlier this year, I so desperately wanted to take you to India with me some day and am sorry we will never have a chance to visit there together in this lifetime. Yet I smile when I see you there with Maharajji and our beloved Ram Dass now.
Because you are universal, unchanging, and timeless my sweet friend, I also hear you singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas with Judy Garland in stunning harmony, reaching me like a lullaby in these very difficult days. I promise you, Jason, that I will carry out your wish of making more music. I cherish the beautiful compliment I received when you said, “I’m glad you didn’t go to music school. They would have squashed out the natural organicity of your voice.” Maestro, I was and am truly honored that you regard my spirit so highly, and vow that I will never let anyone squash out this natural me that you loved so much. I promise that I will cherish these little moments of friendship, grace, and wonder in my life even more and never let my working drive override them again. I know you worried about my tendency to overwork and you, more than perhaps anyone, knew how hard it’s been for me to balance my public life and my private, inner world. You love/d Jamie, Dr. Jamie, and Pragya with equal force and in doing so you’ve laid a path for how I can better love all of me too. The other night when I talked to you in prayer, you told me to keep listening to Journey Blind, my song that you loved so much and that we had the chance to perform together.
And speaking of music and moments… that night in the church when we rehearsed Journey Blind in preparation for your show in February 2018; for me that memory rings on as the fusion of art, friendship and love. I’m so glad we were able to receive that on video (yay for Facebook Live and me being a champion networker). I adored that experience even more than us singing it at the show for it is the very essence of being in process, the glory of art as experience. May I create more moments like this with people in my life as long as I remain in this body. For if I were to die tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter how many books I wrote, how many courses I taught, how big my company got, or how many people knew my name… these moments, these Journey Blind rehearsals on a cold Wednesday night at a church in Warren, OH is what I would cherish the most. Thank you my sweet Jason, beloved member of my family of choice, for helping me to finally and fully realize it.
With love forever,
Jamie
