Memorial Service Transcripts

Jeremy Waletzky: Thank you all for coming. Dear Jacob, I love you. We love you. We are here to mourn your transition and celebrate your life. My heart feels like there's an elephant stamping down on my chest. But also, my heart feels joy and singing for your life and for what you brought to all of us. Jacob, you are, were a wonderfully complicated, multifaceted soul. Your presence was large and you had great influence on everyone around you even when you were not speaking. Your face was very expressive, at times evincing bemusement, 'mischievous', playfulness and I guess I must have to add a sardonic smile from time to time. At your core was a tremendous sweetness. A core of great loving and caring which was so evident under your sometimes burly exterior.

At times, you were a sarcastic cynic but on many occasions, you said to me, 'as hard as I am on others, I am much much harder on myself.' And this was clear. Distinct from your cynicism was your biting, incisive, dark humor. Jacob, you were, are very very funny. You shared this trait with my mother, one clear source of your bond. Jacob, you were a party animal. You led, not followed. Your favorite book was 'Ulysses' by Joyce and which you had already read three times and were planning to read this summer with Dana. 'Ulysses' ends with three words, 'yes, yes, and yes' and these words characterize you and your approach to life. You were a risk taker, that was your character, you imbibed life, but you are your authentic self and neither conforming, colorless, nor grey. Over the last few years, you sent me your current favorite books for me to read, you said it was to help me understand you but also to prepare me for your writing. These included books by Martin Amis, Richard Klein, George Bruhner, and others. I enjoyed most of them. Although you shared bawdy, irreverent, hilarious traits with many of these characters, nowhere, nowhere in these novels was your loving warmth and caring, some of which have been spoken about previously.

Your friendship network was extraordinary. I'm so happy to see everyone here today. You maintained friendships that you had started when you were age one. There is a group of Sidwell friends here who started with you at first grade, many from Yale and many afterwards. Close friendships like these need continuous attention and 'nurturance.' You provided these in great measure. Your generosity has been spoken of previously.

From my perspective, Naomi is, was, one of your closest friends. The mutual support you gave each other, each in your own areas was so heart-warming. Jacob, your ability and talents were limitless. You often found school though dull and boring, this all changed when you found your calling, fiction writing. You had a love of words and their precise use. The Oxford Dictionary, as people have mentioned was among your favorite books. You completed the New York Times crossword puzzles daily although you found the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday puzzles too easy for you. It was especially gratifying to see and experience your excitement about graduate school. You acknowledged how this was aiding in your developing writing skill. You were happy to receive a scholarship based on merit. I would like to do is to read something that Jacob wrote. This was part of a short story and he read it aloud when he had finished his coursework for his MFA. The hero is Nestor. A 300 pound former lawyer.

'The noon sun glared at him through a cloudless sky. It was probably 85 degrees. How come Chicago was only the windy city in the goddamn winter? Yea it was fine to be fat in February when everyone was scurrying around trying to protect their paltry, uninsulated bones, but come summer and the whole surface area to volume equation became a lot less favorable. One of the things about being large was that you got free lessons in thermoregulatory biophysics. Fat people sweat more because their volume being a cubic function increases much more rapidly than their surface area, it being a square. Nestor had once worked out that he'd need an additional 14 square feet of skin to diffuse the heat, the way a normal man that is 180 lbs. that his height, 6'1 would. To accommodate this additional epidermis, he would've have to grow 2 feet and become about 9 inches narrower. Real fucking useful.'

Many other aspects of Jacob deserve mentioning and I'll put them now for the people who don't know Jacob. Jacob had a tremendous love of style, he was always impeccably dressed for any occasion. He worked very hard and succeeded in creating a perfect, carefully sculpted muscular body. He loved all the creative arts and he demanded excellence in all of them. His apartment showed his love of books. There were piles everywhere. The piles had five, six, seven books and there were eight, nine, ten of these piles in his apartment. Jacob, I am so glad we had a chance to correct our troubled relationship and feel all our deep love for one another. I also want to mention what other people have said that these last five months one really got a sense of Jacob and how wonderful it was to have had that time together.

I'm going to close with some Rilke. 'In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us. They are weaned from Earth's sorrow and joys as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers but we who need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth could we exist without them?' Now another quote, 'love and death are the great gifts, mostly they are passed on unopened.' Jacob, I love you. We love you. Dad.

Lucy Waletzky • Gustav Peebles • Jeremy Fields • Dana Goodyear
Jeremy Waletzky • Naomi Waletzky