Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Jim and his brother Justin

---reproduced with permission from Gautam's blog-----------------------------------
Memories of Jim

It's now 1:30 a.m. on January 21, 2008. I received two phone calls from my buddy Gary. I missed both of them. Maybe it was fortunate. The voicemail said that Jim McLean had passed this weekend during the snowboarding accident in Colorado. I saw that Jim's brother Justin had also left a message so I called him back. I actually started to get just a slight bit of emotion coming through my voice. I told him that I would be available at any time to help the family and to pass on the information to his residents and programs. I came upstairs and replayed Gary's voicemail on speakerphone. Monica began sobbing loudly. I comforted her and then walked away so that I could talk Gary and clear my head. Gary sounded a little lost in his voice. It seemed he had all this emotion and intention but no clear outlet with which to produce something. We spoke in tones and inflections as if nothing had happened. But the content was clearly corrupted by the news we had just taken in. Gary had taken care of calling all of Jim’s co-residents etc. At this point he was trying to figure out how to pay tribute to Jim McLean as an outlet. I figured I would try to do the same.