Here is the transcript of the remarks I gave at Jack's memorial service a month ago:
Freshman year of college I read a book called Word Freak, by a guy named Stefan Fatsis, and fell in love with the weird characters who make up the world elite of competitive Scrabble. I started playing the game almost every day, mainly with my friend Gabby. At Christmas, or maybe it was Thanksgiving, I brought my enthusiasm home. I don’t remember the first game I played against Jack but I know that he surprised me, and himself, with how well he did. By the following summer we were evenly matched, and pretty soon after that I could barely hold my own against him. He was a prodigy, and he was a hard worker. He started studying word lists, going to tournaments. He must have been no more than 15 when he scored 600 for the first time. Mom and Dad bought him a chess timer so we could play proper competitive games: 25 minutes total per person. He eventually met Stefan Fatsis at the Scrabble Club in Chevy Chase DC. It was humbling to go to the Club with him: I’m not a terrible player but the top players treated him differently from me. And when he was playing he was all-in, fully concentrated on the board, his letters, the possibilities and constraints of what was right in front of him. Wherever he lived, it was always news when he found someone who could play with him and keep up, because we knew that in those moments of playing he was at peace.
Wherever he lived. Jack lived, as you’ve heard and can see in the program, in many different places after he first left home. Looking at Mom’s records, I counted 56 moves in the 12.5 years between the end of eighth grade, when he went to his first wilderness program, and his death. Those moves happened for lots of different reasons, rarely happy ones: kicked out because he got in a fight; in the hospital for an extended stay because of an overdose or a terrible injury; a recovery program coming to its end with no clear plan for what would happen next.
Jack was like a glacial erratic, a rock dislodged from its native stratum and carried far away. Then carried again and again with the push and retreat of the crushing river of ice that ground him down: his mental illness, his drug abuse, the world to which he was both exquisitely sensitive and utterly blind. Jack, the glacial erratic, unable to control his course, worried and uncomfortable and angry and depressed about the forces pushing him around, and wishing all the time more than anything to be home.
His last move, to an apartment in Manchester, the first and last place he lived on his own, was the most hopeful move he ever made. But in the end it was a home for the same poisons, internal and external, that dogged him for much of his life. In that apartment for the first time, mere hours after we pushed his body into the cremation oven, I saw that he had the National Geographic map of Afghanistan and Pakistan on his wall; the same map that I have in my office in Islamabad. Looking at it, I wept, realizing in the way that’s only possible when we’re learning something about ourselves, that he had told other people about me, was proud of me. “My brother lives in Pakistan.” I wept because I also wander far from home, but by choice, deeply secure in the knowledge that home is a safe place for me to return to whenever I wish, and because wandering was something he hated and home a place where he longed to be but was not safe. And because I had dreamt of his visiting me in Pakistan, learning what the words on the map meant first-hand, laughing with me and Lincoln and Mom and Dad on the crazy mountain roads of Hunza, sharing a quiet moment of awe in the staggering presence of the Karakoram Mountains. And I wept because I was proud of him, too: proud of his talent at Scrabble; of his poetry; of his paintings and drawings; of his youthful athletic skill; of his struggle to keep it together underneath that river of ice.
He’ll never visit me in Pakistan. I’ll never hear him rap again, or finish the two open games we’ve still got going on the Scrabble app. I’ll never again be able to tell him how proud I am to have had him as a brother. But I’m glad, grateful, that I told him last summer, the last time I touched him alive, that I bragged about him, and that I loved him. I love him still.
Freshman year of college I read a book called Word Freak, by a guy named Stefan Fatsis, and fell in love with the weird characters who make up the world elite of competitive Scrabble. I started playing the game almost every day, mainly with my friend Gabby. At Christmas, or maybe it was Thanksgiving, I brought my enthusiasm home. I don’t remember the first game I played against Jack but I know that he surprised me, and himself, with how well he did. By the following summer we were evenly matched, and pretty soon after that I could barely hold my own against him. He was a prodigy, and he was a hard worker. He started studying word lists, going to tournaments. He must have been no more than 15 when he scored 600 for the first time. Mom and Dad bought him a chess timer so we could play proper competitive games: 25 minutes total per person. He eventually met Stefan Fatsis at the Scrabble Club in Chevy Chase DC. It was humbling to go to the Club with him: I’m not a terrible player but the top players treated him differently from me. And when he was playing he was all-in, fully concentrated on the board, his letters, the possibilities and constraints of what was right in front of him. Wherever he lived, it was always news when he found someone who could play with him and keep up, because we knew that in those moments of playing he was at peace.
Wherever he lived. Jack lived, as you’ve heard and can see in the program, in many different places after he first left home. Looking at Mom’s records, I counted 56 moves in the 12.5 years between the end of eighth grade, when he went to his first wilderness program, and his death. Those moves happened for lots of different reasons, rarely happy ones: kicked out because he got in a fight; in the hospital for an extended stay because of an overdose or a terrible injury; a recovery program coming to its end with no clear plan for what would happen next.
Jack was like a glacial erratic, a rock dislodged from its native stratum and carried far away. Then carried again and again with the push and retreat of the crushing river of ice that ground him down: his mental illness, his drug abuse, the world to which he was both exquisitely sensitive and utterly blind. Jack, the glacial erratic, unable to control his course, worried and uncomfortable and angry and depressed about the forces pushing him around, and wishing all the time more than anything to be home.
His last move, to an apartment in Manchester, the first and last place he lived on his own, was the most hopeful move he ever made. But in the end it was a home for the same poisons, internal and external, that dogged him for much of his life. In that apartment for the first time, mere hours after we pushed his body into the cremation oven, I saw that he had the National Geographic map of Afghanistan and Pakistan on his wall; the same map that I have in my office in Islamabad. Looking at it, I wept, realizing in the way that’s only possible when we’re learning something about ourselves, that he had told other people about me, was proud of me. “My brother lives in Pakistan.” I wept because I also wander far from home, but by choice, deeply secure in the knowledge that home is a safe place for me to return to whenever I wish, and because wandering was something he hated and home a place where he longed to be but was not safe. And because I had dreamt of his visiting me in Pakistan, learning what the words on the map meant first-hand, laughing with me and Lincoln and Mom and Dad on the crazy mountain roads of Hunza, sharing a quiet moment of awe in the staggering presence of the Karakoram Mountains. And I wept because I was proud of him, too: proud of his talent at Scrabble; of his poetry; of his paintings and drawings; of his youthful athletic skill; of his struggle to keep it together underneath that river of ice.
He’ll never visit me in Pakistan. I’ll never hear him rap again, or finish the two open games we’ve still got going on the Scrabble app. I’ll never again be able to tell him how proud I am to have had him as a brother. But I’m glad, grateful, that I told him last summer, the last time I touched him alive, that I bragged about him, and that I loved him. I love him still.
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