What He Said: Requiem for Joe Cassidy

On Friday, April 17, Emmeline Skinner Cassidy, age 20, shared a quote from her father, Joe Cassidy, on the meaning of life: ‘If it’s not about love,’ Joe had said, ‘well, it’s not about anything at all.’

https://twothousandfourhundredmiles.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/if-its-not-about-love-well-its-not-about-anything-a-tribute-to-my-dad/

Sadly, Emmeline was reading these words at Joe’s funeral, in Durham Cathedral.  

I wasn’t there; I was here, in Toronto, feeling that day particularly remote from England. Until he died on March 28, Joe had been principal of St. Chad’s College at Durham University and a Reverend and a Canon of the Cathedral, and the funeral was attended by many mourners in the majestic setting. I tried to follow proceedings on social media. One person tweeted ‘I’d guess about half the people who just got off my train at Durham are @ChadsAlumni, here for Joe Cassidy’s funeral.’ Later, the same man, @wallaceme , added that the funeral was ‘Sad but also a beautiful and fitting tribute.’ Later, Facebook posts appeared, agreeing with that description. A friend of mine in Durham who attended sent me a link to Emmeline’s eulogy and pictures of pages in the Order of Service. From such nuggets, and from my memories of many hours spent inside the Cathedral, I was able to imagine being there, sitting perhaps at the back, on the right, at the far end of a pew. I see the rows of fossil-studded marble columns, trilobites embedded permanently in the polished stone.

But in fact I am far away, really far away. In miles: 3,404; in kilometres, 5,478. From the great distance, I have been feeling Joe’s loss. Our families have been friends for 17 years. I met Gillian, Joe's wife -- now, I suppose, his widow-- at a mother-and-baby group in Durham.  It turned out that Gillian and Joe and their two small daughters had recently moved to town and into the same house where my friend Kate and I first lived in Durham, in 1994;  a house intended as the dwelling for the principal of St. Chad’s College, which Joe was, and Kate and I were not. It was an amazing old warren of a building with endless rooms and multiple staircases and, we decided, a haunted cellar. Kate and I got it cheap because the college wanted it occupied until they found a new principal. Gillian gave birth to their third child in that house, a boy who became my younger son’s best friend for a time. Even after my family and I left Durham to move to Brighton, 300 miles south, our families visited each other, and Gillian and I saw each other in between, in London and Bruges and Harrogate and Edinburgh.

And most wondrous of all, when we moved to Toronto, Joe and Gillian and children were here waiting for us. Well, not exactly in Toronto, and not precisely waiting for us, but nonetheless, they cushioned our arrival in Canada immeasurably. Joe, who was born in Quebec, and used to live in Toronto, enjoyed spending summers in the town of Crystal Beach, on Lake Erie, a 90-minute drive from Toronto, where they had bought a house which we visited soon after our arrival. I believe we fell on them like long-lost family.  First, though, they came to Toronto to see us in our new university rental house, still empty, waiting for the arrival of furniture. ‘Warm in here,’ Joe commented, when they'd decanted themselves from their car.

‘Yes,’ we said. ‘We put the air conditioner on but it doesn't seem to be helping.’ I pointed at the thermostat. Joe nodded, then wandered outside to look at the air conditioner. The actual machine. That had not occurred to us. We didn't realise it was kept outside.

‘It’s not switched on,’ he reported. He turned a dial or flipped a lever, or something, and suddenly the house became cool. Afterward, we all went to dinner at a Hungarian restaurant on Bloor Street that Joe remembered from his student days. As we walked along, he pointed up one side street and said ‘I used to live there.’ Another block; he pointed down the road to the left. ‘I used to live there, too.’ And so on. Whenever we met up in Toronto, over the four summers we've been here, wherever we went, it was the same story. Joe, it seemed, had lived on every block in the university area. I asked whether he had had the habit of moving once a month. He laughed.

The thing about Joe that we learned from getting to know him in Canada is that he had done and been so many different things. I teased him about it last summer, joking that he had lived numerous lives, somehow telescoping time. Casual chats over dinner or during walks with the kids along the Lake Erie shore led to throwaway comments like ‘When I was teaching physics in St. John’s, Newfoundland…’ or ‘Yes, I remember living in Detroit…’ Joe had been a Jesuit, a philosopher, an ethicist, a teacher, a guidance counsellor, a volunteer working with street people, an economic modeller in Nicaragua, a college principal, a husband, a father, a Christian. A friend to so many. 

I’ve read a lot about Joe’s accomplishments since his death, many of which I didn’t know (for instance, the economic modelling in Nicaragua). He could operate air conditioners and cook chili; he took my son kayaking with his own. All my children have been shocked and saddened by his death. The youngest betrayed her creeping Canadian-ness by asking, ‘But now who will do the barbecuing?’ Joe could grill burgers and ponder ethics, discuss God and install new kitchen cabinets. He died way too soon, and at 60 years old, way too young. His loss is just so damn sad. I continue to see his shadow around the corners of our neighbourhood, in front of houses where he lived, once, in Toronto. I may be far away from Durham, but Joe’s memory seems nearby.

I am confident that Gillian and their children will continue to feel Joe's presence, to find the imprint of his love, around every corner in their lives, in all the recesses of their hearts, everywhere they go. Forever. Because as Joe said, it's all about love.