Jim Reilly Finally Passes Through

They’re not pearly gates at the celestial portal.  And sorry, Bob Dylan,  there is no heaven’s door to be knock, knock, knockin’ on.  There’s just the thinnest, clearest membrane, and on Monday the sun stopped while Jim Reilly finally slipped through.

Jim was the first man I met who walked away from it – success, I mean.  President of his Law School class, soon working for a good firm and living the kind of life we’d see on TV when I was a kid.  Nice house, wife and two kids, lots of friends.  And he walked away from it.  For me, it was like I was in a long line to finally buy a ticket for the trip of a lifetime and seeing someone in line in front of me turn around, put their money back into their pocket, smile at me, and walk out.  I realize that one hand is in my pocket feeling the smooth surface of my money, feeling it like a blind man would feel Braille bumps, trying to decipher whether the trip might not be worth it, wondering why he did that.  I watch him to try to figure out why he did that.

My most vivid memory of Jim Reilly is a puddle on a winter day.  He had offered me a ride back home after our the little weekly meeting, when Jim and George Hanaffee and Joe Rodriguez  met early in the morning to pray for awhile, to share their concerns with each other and with God.  Jim pulled up in front of my house and I reached for the door handle when he reached over and held me back, like a mother would hold her kids back when she was going to have to stop the car real quick, his right hand reaching across my chest, then recoiling to shift the car into reverse.  As I looked to see what he was doing, he explained that there was a puddle there from the melting snowbank, and he wanted to get to dry ground for me. 

I knew right then I was no Jim Reilly, and it started to work on me.  I might have gone out of my way to give somebody a ride, but I knew I’d already be thinking about where I would have otherwise been, on my way to work or somewhere, and a bit behind schedule now for the good deed of giving the person a ride.  But I would not be watching for puddles, or thinking about the person getting out dry-shod.  I wanted to be more like Jim.

I got my chance to learn his ways, and to find another memory etch its way into my heart.  Jim moved for awhile into our upper flat at 17351 Warrington.  His next home would be Ann’s, and while he navigated the chancery to clear the way to marry her, we saw a lot of Jim.  He was picking up jobs that he wanted, jobs that allowed him to do good as he saw it, that seemed right for followers of Jesus, that resonated with B.F. Schumacher’s idea of Small is Beautiful.  Kathy and I had, for a few hundred bucks, bought a well-used little sailboat, and inspired by our upstairs tenant, I decided to call it “Simple Gifts.”  Jim saw me painting the words on the stern of the boat and came down, smiling.  Kathy brought out some iced tea and Jim sat with us, and we talked of simple things, and I blinked away smiling tears as I am doing now.

Jim was never really all there, it seems to me, his feet never really firmly on the ground.  I mean he was never really all here.  Oh, he was fully present, especially to you, when he was with you.  He was a great listener who spoke little, but always with a smile, or a look of concern.  But he seemed to be somewhere else, too, and content with that.  I always suspected that it was with God, just on the other side of that thin, clear membrane.

When he married Ann, he didn’t return to the ways of the work world as I thought he might.  He stayed the real Jim, and worked here and there at good work, teaching courses at the University of Detroit, helping out here and there while Ann worked steadier jobs at the university and later at Loyola High.  She always smiled up at her “Reilly”, shaking her head at him and smiling.  And he would smile at her in his silent way, as if to say, “Yeah, I know, I know, but don’t you love me anyway, and aren’t I grateful that you do?”  And together they struggled through the never-easy times, and then the times got hard.  Jim’s cancer didn’t take him as quickly as we all feared it would.  But instead it took him slowly, like that snowbank melting on Warrington.  It was hard for us to watch, even as Ann and the kids adopted Jim’s faithful participation in a life unfolding in a holiness not always seen or felt, perhaps, but always holy.

The last time I saw Jim, he and Ann had met us at an Irish Restaurant in their Corktown neighborhood.  Jim had given up his larynx to the cancer and had one of those throat buzzers that might someday allow him to simulate speech, but on that evening, I could not understand Jim, could not make out the words he was trying to say to me, these words that were so precious now that they came so hard and so rarely.  I remember watching Jim and Ann walking down the sidewalk as we left he place, they arm in arm as Kathy and I were, and suddenly I appreciated Kathy so much more for her companionship, her loving me as I am.  I watched them walking close together, stable in their hanging onto each other, walking back to their small, beautiful house, to live out their small, beautiful life.

I’m still no Jim Reilly, but I still try, and I still see his face and hear his old, non-buzzer voice when I do.  He does not come to mind when I try to do great things.  But in this retired life, those big things are mostly behind me, and it is small things that hold themselves open to me.  The world, I find, is full of rides to be given, and puddles to be avoided for my companions to disembark dry-shod.  And I find that these simple gifts of Jim’s that I can enjoy now bring me into the caress of that clear, thin membrane, heaven just the other side of it.  Perhaps when I get there it will be like Jim’s entrance, not so grand because it was as if he had been there all along.

Jim broke through that membrane one day before my birthday, when 64 years earlier I had broken through a similar strong, thin layer that released me into this world where I met him, and as the Irish would say, “a little bit if heaven.”  It was the Winter Solstice, the day when the earth found itself turned toward the light, giving us imperceptibly but increasingly longer days and shorter nights.  My prayer for Ann and the kids and for all of us is that we sense the light and the warmth growing each day as we accept the embrace of heaven, walking arm in arm with Jim, stable in our hanging onto each other.