My mother died on July 10, 1999. She was ninety-four, and pretty much died just from being old. About an hour and a half before she passed, she made a dirty joke that just about had me rolled over. We had this guy named David taking care of her who was gay, and he took her into the bathroom. Much to my surprise, even though it took her a very long time, she finally managed to get something done in there.
When she came back out, she said, “I hate having somebody fooling around with my bum.” Then she paused and looked at him and said, “But you, David, you love somebody fooling around with your bum.”
I was there when she passed, and I had already forgiven her all of her sins a couple of years before. It was the smartest thing I ever did because then they all evaporated. But I had never forgiven her to her face, because I felt she would regard that as a sign of weakness. I don’t know how I knew this, but I could see she was about to say the last thing she was ever going to say, and so I looked into her eyes and said, “I forgive you everything.” And she said, “Yes. I know.” That was all she had left to say and then she passed away.
In those days, I was putting out something I called the Barlow Spam that went out to about 2,500 people all over the planet. I had written up an account of my mother’s life and death on it, and John F. Kennedy, Jr., had received it. The reason he was late getting to his plane on Friday, July 16, was that he was writing an exceptionally long email to me, which I did not receive and read until the afternoon following my mother’s burial.
John didn’t like email. He was dyslexic, and writing made him feel uncomfortable. He thought of himself as less literate than he really was. In the email, John said he was so glad I had been with my mother when she died. He had been with his mother at that moment and knew this would be one of the most important experiences in my life. He also said that now would be a good time for me to come see him so we could reflect on this together.
On the morning of my mother’s funeral in Pinedale, which I had intended to be a joyous event to celebrate her life, I got a phone call telling me John’s plane had gone missing. I was the one who had taught him how to fly in Wyoming in a Cessna, and in fact I’d had a phone conversation with him about two weeks earlier in which I told him I felt like he knew just enough about flying to be dangerous.
My exact words to him had been, “You are always as chronically late as I am because you are constantly enchanted by whatever is going on in the immediate present. It wouldn’t do to set one’s watch by either of us. This means you are going to fly yourself into conditions that wouldn’t have existed had you left on time. Which means that you will find, as I have, that you are flying on instruments whether you have an instrument rating or not.
“I have just one thing to ask of you. Which is if you lose sight of the horizon, don’t look for it. Just put your eyes on the instruments and believe them. Pay no attention to what may seem to be going on outside the aircraft.”
But when John flew into the vicinity of Martha’s Vineyard an hour later than he had planned, he lost sight of the horizon due to a well-known ocean effect that I had encountered many times while flying back east. And he did exactly the wrong thing.
My first desire upon hearing what had happened was to believe that John and his wife, Carolyn, had staged a complete disappearance so they could join their own special witness protection program, get plastic surgery, and have a life like other people. It was an extraordinary fantasy. I wanted Carolyn to have a better life than she did. John had been exposed to the media all along, and so he was far more accustomed to dealing with it than she was.
On September 21, 1996, I had attended John and Carolyn’s wedding on Cumberland Island, a former enclave for the Carnegies and the Rockefellers located about seven miles off the Georgia coast. To keep the media from overwhelming the event, the whole thing was kept hush-hush, and all the guests were instructed not to even talk about it on their cellphones. John and Carolyn had done blood tests and signed their marriage licenses on separate private plane flights before the ceremony.
Everyone who had been invited to the wedding stayed in a lovely inn that had once been part of the Carnegie compound, and John and Carolyn were married in the First African Baptist Church on the northern end of the island in a community that had been settled by former slaves. The entire event was beautiful and incredibly moving, and I was truly honored to have been there. John had attended my wedding to Elaine, and if I had ever been given the opportunity to marry Cynthia, he would have been there as well.
My initial reaction to John’s death was that it was a lot like losing a younger brother, but over the course of the years we had known each other we’d had a bunch of different relationships. What had begun as kind of a father-son connection had become two guys hanging out. Then John began to be like a father to me, because he was the one person I would turn to when I needed insight on how to manage something gracefully on an emotional level. Both of us knew a lot about death, and he had totally been there for me after Cynthia died.
Not many people knew what a truly remarkable human being John was, and how successful he was in what he was really trying to do. He set out to be a good man. That was his central goal. When John was a junior at Brown, he called me one night and said, “You know, this is going to sound incredibly arrogant, but it would be a cakewalk for me to be a great man. I’m completely set up. Everyone expects me to be a great man. I even have a lot of the skills and tools.
“The thing is, I’ve been reading the biographies of great men, and it seems like all of them, my father included, were shitheads when they got home. Even Gandhi beat his wife. What I think would be a much more interesting and challenging ambition for me would be to set out to become a good man—to define what that is, and become that. Not many people would know, but I would have the satisfaction of knowing.”
In 1993, about seven months after John had saved the life of one of his friends by rescuing him from the water after his kayak capsized, the two of us went to see Prince perform at Radio City Music Hall. We were both tripping, and Prince was going off and the place was full of all these bridge and tunnel people who were swaying in their seats like kelp in a mild swell.
Nobody was dancing, and John turned to me and said, “I bet if you and I got up and started to dance, everybody would.” And I said, “I think that’s possibly true, but there’s also a good chance if we do get up to dance, there will be a feeding frenzy directed at you.” He said, “That’s a risk I’ll take.” So we got up and started to dance and then everybody got up and started dancing. Nobody even recognized him.
The last time I saw John alive was at a dinner party held by this foundation he and Paul Newman had created to give awards to corporations that had made significant differences in their communities, and for their workers. John thought if he put me right across the table from him in this slot between Puff Daddy and Alfonse D’Amato, the Republican senator from Long Island, he would get a chance to see me dig Puff Daddy and go right on hating Alfonse D’Amato.
I hadn’t been in my seat for more than two minutes before I knew I didn’t want to have much conversation at all with Puff Daddy, while Alfonse D’Amato and I immediately tried to figure out ways to make each other laugh even harder.
It was a round table, and John kept looking slyly back and forth at us. At one point, D’Amato said, “You know what we gotta do?” I said, “What?” And he said, “We gotta get your friend there to run for may-ah of New Yawk on the Republican ticket.” I said, “It doesn’t strike me as out of the question.” When I told John about it, he was amused, but back then the Republicans had not yet turned themselves into the nightmare they have since become.
Some people do not seem destined to get old. John was definitely one of them. He was truly a sporting lad; if he had lived, I think he would have come up with all manner of ways to crank the system. He really did love New York, and the idea of him becoming mayor would not have been out of the question.