I Wish You Could Have Known My Husband, Jim Reda

Good afternoon. I am honored to be asked by hospice to join you and memorialize my husband Jim Reda.

At the practice for our wedding

Jim died of colon cancer on July 11, 2020 – right in the midst of the Covid lockdown. He was diagnosed in December of 2018. At the time I wrote:

Over the holiday, my husband, my love, my "I finally found the joy of true love" was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. The darkest of ice, the deepest of snow, the worst type of flight delay. Physically I feel as if I just had open heart surgery and the surgeon forgot to sew me up. Besides being the most talented and sweetest of geniuses, Jim is otherwise healthy, optimistic, and determined. I keep bringing to the front of my mind that he bicycled across the country by himself despite odds making wonderful friendships along the way. This gives me hope. For now, we wait for answers, for structure, for the treatment to begin, for the path to follow on our journey.

The beginning of chemo

Jim and I fell in love in December of 2004 after a lifetime of knowing each other. It's a memory I cherish. I’d returned to my hometown for a weekend of surprise parties to celebrate both my best friend since high school Cathy’s 49th and my father’s 75th birthday. 

Dad, Jim, and Cathy

Cathy and Jim

Jim is Cathy’s big brother and her party was held at his home though he arrived late from a work holiday party. I also arrived late as my sisters and I had been cleaning up after Dad’s party. I’ll never forget, I was sitting on the floor among friends at the back of the room when Jim entered. He saw me from across the room and literally jumped over everyone to sit by me. That was his style – high level energy and enthusiasm. We talked the evening away and within 2 months we were engaged. Our wedding was a large family affair and I don’t think our parents could have been any happier. My Dad through the years, would often call Jim his son.

Our marriage was blessed by joy. We’d been seasoned by life and recognized when we finally got it right. We’d dance in the kitchen, ski the mountains, bicycle Vermont, kayak its rivers and lakes, host friends and family, teach youth, travel the world...

I wish you could have known him—he would have left you smiling: 

Jim was silly and nerdy and full of energy. He as easily invented the first digital camera as he’d drop to his knees to get a child to giggle. 

Jim was wicked smart but also humble: no one except his work colleagues and his family knew he held seven patents in electronics, optics, and color, yet all the teens he taught would tease him about the khaki shorts, white socks, and sandals he wore in the winter—and he’d laugh right alongside them—punctuating the point by mischievously modeling his muscular calves. 

At the White House, after presenting for his company Videk.

At GIV, he'd always join the teens in fun

At GIV, he was a very popular teacher, teaching programming!

Jim was adventurous and determined: even a speeding apple shot at him by a truck driver and nearly killing him did not stop him from continuing his solo bicycle trip across the country in his mid-50’s—and then retelling the story forever afterwards. 

On his cross-country ride

And reaching his goal!

Jim was a deep seated romantic and a trickster: daily playing love songs and the blues on his piano, enjoying old black and white movies, kissing me at every mountain turn or bike stop—yet also masterminding and carrying out pranks such as maneuvering his high school teacher’s VW onto the roof of the school or redoing his father’s plumbing so he could turn on the cold water when his older sister Mary was too long in the shower. 

Jim playing on the piano "When I'm 64" the song we left the church as a newly married couple to.

Always a jokester

With his sister Mary

I wish you could have seen the twinkle in his eyes or how he’d tear up: I remember how he sparkled trying to entice his tiny granddaughter into dancing with him in the streets during the Fourth of July parade and how tears flowed down his cheeks when he was awarded best teacher by the teens at Governor’s Institute the very first time he taught them.

Jim was very talented but also continuously learning: he built additions to our home, created a device that captured the music from player piano rolls and replayed it on computers and other instruments, he crafted indigenous flutes and strum sticks – and directly after surviving a horrifying, live and death, emergency surgery, returned home and taught himself to build and then play a harp.

Demonstrating his invention that captured music from play piano rolls and converted them into digital files.

Emergency cancer surgery in Gettysburg

As soon as we got home, he built this harp

Jim a city boy, loved calling me Farmer Ann and what I brought into his life—he embraced our new home, enjoyed my gardens, the owl in our woods, and though a cat person when we met, adored our dogs and helped raise two litters of puppies tenderly rocking them every night to get them accustomed to being held. And then convinced me to keep our dog Charlie who had stolen his heart.

With one of our puppies

Jim and Charlie

Jim loved his two sons Peter and Patrick, Pat’s partner Emily, his granddaughter Satori, and my daughter Tegan who he was a second father to, even teaching her to drive, encouraging her to get her first job, and just two years ago helping her find her first home. He was very excited when he knew Pat and Emily were going to have their second child, and managed to see his grandson Enzo born just a few days before he died—exclaiming some of his last few words "Wow, wow, wow!". He must be proud that a second grandson, Kier, was born to Peter and his partner Elaina just two months ago.

Jim and Peter

Jim and Pat

Jim and Emily

Jim and Tegan

Jim drew folks to him, and it was never clearer than when he entered his cancer journey: complete strangers became friends. Despite the ups and downs of treatment, Jim kept that twinkle in his eyes—he skied the trees with his UVM oncology nurses, joked with his doctors, and entertained other patients at the hospital—even danced with his infusion pump who he would rename at every oncology visit. At that time, Jim became a volunteer ski instructor for Vermont Adaptive—he took joy in the athletes’ delight—and even taught a blind teen from Florida to ski and snowboard! The athletes had wanted him to return to coach Special Olympics a second year but that was not to happen. 

Jim dancing in oncology

Jim talking about coaching for Vermont Adaptive

December 2019, Jim entered the UVM hospice program. But after only a few visits and as the Covid pandemic began, our visits transitioned to Zoom. I’ll always remember how difficult that was: as he had cancer, Jim would spike fevers and when Sandra took his temperature she had to immediately leave because it was a Covid symptom. She returned the next day in full hazmat garb and Jim had to take the Covid test – the first kind – the painful kind. And of course, it wasn’t Covid, he was failing. 

Covid complicated so much: Jim and I knew he wanted to die at home which meant it was imperative that neither of us got ill. Jim would gently tease me about how it took me an hour to clean everything after shopping and how he wasn’t allowed to touch the mail for five days. And as Jim had colon cancer, I was terrified of running out of cleaning supplies and toilet paper. Covid also made it impossible to have any folks help us out—hospice volunteers, friends, or family members—until the very end. It was me and the hospice team of Sandra, Jess, and Ezra.

Jim would say “Why do we need hospice?” and I’d say "for me, Honey". It’s true, the hospice team held me up then and now afterward in my grief. 

I’ll be forever grateful to them as during that anxious time, they allowed Jim to have a graceful death. They taught me how to physically care for him—oxygen, bed sheets, turning, catheters, morphine... They answered my emergency calls, discovered what was meaningful to Jim, and shared with us a process, much like StoryCorp, that allowed Jim to share his story with and say his goodbyes to those he loved virtually—which our dear friend Lisa helped organize from afar—and our dear friend Ray later collected into a beautiful tribute video. 

Just Jim—tribute video by Ray McCarthy-Bergeron

And it was Sandra who was able to engage Jim to fix one last thing and to play his beloved piano one last time, for which I will be forever grateful.

After Jim died, at the time I most needed friends and family to stay with me, instead there were no casseroles or folks staying with me due to statewide Covid regulations. Directly after I returned from Jim’s funeral from our home town in Rochester, NY, I was isolated and alone for the first time in my life under quarantine for travel and without a “bubble”. I knew I needed help. The pain is the worst I've ever known. I called hospice and it’s been Ally who has helped me understand my grief and talked me off many an emotional cliff. 

But Jim also kept me going—even after his death. What I want you to know about my sweet, wonderful Jim is that he was amazingly courageous and full of grace in approaching his own death. And how he did so, inspires me to this very day to keep moving. As I wrote to him after his death,

Our life together, as it was, is over. I need to find my way up, up to the sunshine, to the new path. I think often of those conversations we had towards the end of your life here. You didn't want me to be sad but we both knew I would be. You wanted me to be able to fully embrace the life I would have without you at my side. You wanted me to continue living in the joy we had found together. You were at peace with your death. Was it the long journey with cancer that had given you that acceptance, or was it just how you had lived your life—always in the moment? 

I appreciate how even then you were leaving me a trail to search for. I'm reaching for it, taking your hand. I'm trying to climb out of the clouds and into the sunshine again, to find a new path, the one I didn't know has been laid out for me since the first day you kissed me. It is what always was meant to be. It is.

Hospice at home

Like many of us here, I wish I could say that I've reached the sunlight, or that I no longer cry daily or that “I’ve healed” whatever that means, or that I’ve moved beyond the point of consciously trying to put one foot in front of another. But grief isn’t like that. It’s like a heart-sized, shiny, midnight blue stone that we’ve picked up on the beach. We feel its weight press upon our heart, sometimes making it feel like we can’t breathe. Our new lives grow around it but the stone does not shrink. I feel its heat. I sink into its stillness. When I try to toss it away, it rebounds. But should I try to toss it? Should we? Why would we ever want to forget? For the grief we’re really carrying is our love for our beloveds and their love for us. Solid as a stone. I'm hoping that each of us can find the space to carry that love forward and through its strength, share it broadly into the new world we’ve entered, generously multiplying the joy that our beloveds gave us.

Thank you.