Eulogy for a contender
My friendship with Joe began in our teens in New York City's Spanish Harlem. We shared a Latino background. Two parents hailed from Puerto Rico, a third one from Spain, and my mother from Cuba, where I was born. My bond with Joe went beyond our heritage. We both graduated from the same grammar school, high school, and college.
We had been to each other's weddings, and I became his first daughter's godfather. Throughout our adult lives, we debated which was NYC's best baseball team. We wore our respective baseball caps to a Yankees/Mets World Series game.
We had once made a eulogy pact. I don't remember when. Or which one of us came up with the idea.Those were my opening words when I eulogized him. We agreed that if I left first, Joe would eulogize me, and I would eulogize him if he passed on before me. We probably made that pact in college.
Over the years, talk of our eulogy pact faded. For decades, I don't recall us ever speaking about it. However, in 2017, it began surfacing in our conversations. Perhaps it was because we knew we were closer to our end than to our beginning. Yet, neither of us openly thought it might be sooner than later — or so I thought.
Early that April, I visited him at the physical rehabilitation area in Southside Hospital. Joe talked about falling out of his bed at home. But his ailment appeared to be more serious than a slip from a bed. He was obviously in decline, though he alluded to getting better. The end came April 17, sooner than anyone could have conceived.
Joe had a knack for seeing trivial interactions as reflections of what he termed “a world of insanity.” He pointed to a doorway near his hospital bed and said, “So it took 12 interns more than five minutes to shove through that door to get to me for a 30-second interview.”
As I got ready to leave, he added, “You and I are in the exiting acts of our lives.” I wrote both his interns and exiting comments on my smartphone, never thinking I would share them several weeks later.
At the Mass, I shared memories of him with those in church. One saying he often repeated was, “I could have been a contender.” His immediate family sitting in the first pew nodded approvingly. They knew of his infatuation with Marlon Brando's line from “On the Waterfront.”
Later that day, Joe's cousin from Las Vegas pointed to her smartphone. She had a photo of that Brando line written across a blue banner. She said, “That handcuffed prisoner story is a new one on me.”
Joe's “I could have been a contender” feeling might have implied he considered himself a loser. Just as the Brando character in the film felt for giving in to the waterfront mob pressure. He threw a boxing bout he could have won, a win that might have led to his contending for a title match.
I could write a book about the countless humorous stories he shared with me. For more than 30 years, Joe he was a corrections officer in New York City. Once, he had to transport a handcuffed prisoner in his car. The car broke down twice. After the third breakdown, his frustrated passenger from the back seat pleaded, “Get a cab. I'll pay for it.”
Also, in the eulogy I spoke of our revisiting our old neighborhood in 2000. It was Joe's idea. He often romanticized the past. Of all the places we went to, we stayed forever at the Central Park grounds in NYC where we once played baseball and dreamed of becoming major league ballplayers.
My last words from the pulpit were the reasons why I would miss him: “We would no longer phone each other as we did regularly. And the birthday greeting exchanges on June 24 and July 12, as well as on New Year's Eve calls? Over! But above all, I would miss those three words he often ended calls with — ‘I love you.' ”
I wish I had added, “Joseph Peter Lopez, you were always a contender!”
The Thursday after the church services, I drove to New York City, parked, and anxiously rushed to Central Park across from Mount Sinai Hospital. It was my fourth time at that park since my teens: once by myself, another time with my wife and then two young children, and in 2000, with Joe. I sat on a bench.
The last thought I recalled while sitting there was a trove of jumbled memories. It included remembering Joan Didion's book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” in which she tried to make sense of her husband's sudden passing.
I got up from the bench, went to the middle of the field where we once played, closed my eyes, and imagined Joe walloping baseballs high up into the air and my “shagging his fly balls” during the summers of our youth.
As I started out of the park, I stared back. I felt fulfilled for having honored our pact, and instinctively sensed I could never return to this patch of land … our once sacred ground.