Memories of Del. Finding Light at Dark Times.

[canyonwalker]

At Del's memorial service on Sunday guests were once again invited to share a memory of him. It's a custom in Jewish mourning. Unlike a few days earlier at the house when everyone, all 8 of us, spoke, at the service only a few of us rose to speak. Maybe people felt intimidated by the audience of 30, maybe the fact that our sharing was the last thing standing in the way of dinner had people just wanting to get past it. 😅 Here's the story I shared:

Back in March or April of 2021 I was with Del and D at a custom suit shop in San Francisco. This was a few months before their wedding, their second wedding, with a big Jewish ceremony in New York. They were getting their suits refitted as they'd both lost weight. D had been successful with diet and exercise. Del's weight loss happened for a different reason— cancer. The cancer he beat, at the time. Del was fretting about how well-wishers at the wedding would congratulate him on losing weight and ask how he did it.

"You've got to get ahead of it," I suggested. "Own the topic. Tell them it was cancer and losing weight was, like, the one good thing that came out of it."

"Well, I tried a lot of of methods unsuccessfully," Del vamped with comedic delivery. "None of them worked. But then I got cancer and the pounds just melted away!"

I share this moment not to make light of a dark subject but to recall how, even at times of darkness, Del found and shared the bit of light within it.