Memorial Service Transcripts

Jeremy Fields: Good afternoon. I'm Jeremy Fields. I was fortunate enough to have been one of Jacob's roommates for three years at Yale. And it's wonderful to see so many of his friends and family here. It's actually amazing and as a testament to Jake and how large his personality was that so many people are here. It's impossible in just a few minutes to honor anyone as beautifully complicated as Jake was but this is even harder I think because Jake so ruthlessly believed in the truth and disdained social superficiality. He would never tolerate any of us getting up here and speaking untruths and white lies about him even out of sorrow. So of necessity, I'm going to talk about myself and Jake because that's what I know best but there are so many people here who could be talking up here as well. There's Ben and Jake, there's Quinn and Jake, there's Crowley and Jake, Kurt and Jake, Don and Jake, and so many others too numerous to mention all of whom considered him to be their best friend and that doesn't even include Naomi and Jake, Lucy and Jeremy and Jake. Last night we realized that half the people at dinner considered Jake to be their best friend and there are about 25 of us there. The number of people that he touched personally and irrevocably is remarkable.

I got to know Jacob in layers. We ended up living together our sophomore year mostly by chance and blind luck. When I got to school, Jake had already come and gone, possibly to claim the good bed, the one that wasn't under the dripping crack under the plaster ceiling. When he returned a few days later, my impression of him was of one of the most outrageous people I had ever met. Here was this 200 pound football lineman with a crew cut spewing sentences thick with the words that had barely made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. His conversations were sprinkled with ideas appropriated from every possible discipline. We would talk about utility minimization, homunculi, the will to power, the surface to volume ratio, and quantify his predictions with precise percentages. He didn't drink water or soda. He drank beverages.

He was also the master of creating arguments that were completely wrongheaded or extreme but inevitably founded on impervious logic. The beginning of our sophomore year coincided with his environmentalist phase. When he concluded that taking showers once a week was irresponsible and flushing the toilet was a luxury although he didn't manage to make much headway on the shower front, much to the chagrin of the cleaning staff, he managed to convince a fair number of people of the evils of flushing. To save space in our bedroom, someone had erected loft beds and during the year we would lie their a few feet under the cracked ceiling and talk. Sometimes for hours before we went to sleep. At first we talked about what was easier, the crazy high school stories that all the Sidwell people can attest to could fill volumes of books, as our relationships deepened we began to talk about two things other than his friends and family that were Jacob's biggest preoccupations. Human psychology and philosophy. Jacob was hyper-aware of what it is that motivates people and why they care about the things they do. He saw through power and games, he saw who people were and what they were trying to attain and how they wanted to be seen. And those insights were extended to himself. Even if he couldn't control himself all the time, he was acutely aware of why he did everything that he did.

Philosophically, Jake refused to take the simple way out. I know this is abstract but for me it's essential to my understanding of this terrible tragedy and also one of the reasons why Jake was such a compelling larger than life character. Most of us at some point struggle with doubts about what it is that makes life meaningful and most of us end up patching together a combination of artifice and arbitrary values to cover up those doubts. Jacob refused to do that, refused to simply move on. I think that was the ultimate reason for the pain he felt and lived with and also why he was so attractive to everyone. Because although many of us live with these minor lies, we seek people who are closer to those doubts because they're the same ones who will be able to hint at a deeper truth. I think that was why Jacob was so charismatic, why he was such a leader, and obviously you can see today he brought hundreds of people here. There are so many other things about Jake that I want to say and I can't digest this to you. He was brilliant and complex, he was bullheaded, he was famously generous, he was infuriating, he was clever and witty. He had perhaps hundreds of people throughout the country knowingly or unknowingly imitating his mannerisms.

He knew when everything was okay and when to be concerned. He had so much potential and he had so much to give to the world. We spent some of yesterday looking for quotations for the memorial program that could help us put into words the incredible role that Jake had in our lives. We looked through literally hundreds of the index cards that he kept with quotes and interpretations from his favorite novels and flipped through some of the writing projects that he had been working on. Dana had told us that he was working on a translation of a Kafka story, 'The Trial', and I looked through that as well. For the record, the translation is simple, economical and beautiful. There was nothing really to quote but there was one short line that stuck with me, it was the beginning of a sentence just as the protagonist is being accused of a crime and told what he can expect the trial to be like. It read and I quote, 'the trials have been so long of late.' Jacob was fighting so hard at the end of his life and it's clear to me that he had turned a corner. He was beginning to build a way out of the existential struggle and a way that was intellectually honest enough for him to live with. He was just about to get his MFA in creative writing, he was in love, he was reaching out to his family.

It was a trial, but it's a trial that's a tribute to his need to be honest to himself and if he had been alive to continue we all know that what he would've built would've been ornate and beautiful. I haven't seen Jake in several months but another of our college roommates, Quincy Smith was fortunate enough to see him two weeks ago and I'm gonna read to you his impressions of where Jacob was in his life at the point. Quinn wrote, 'I thought this image might be appropriate to leave you with. Jake looked better than I'd seen in years. He was fit, happy, and laughing in his classical, genuine Jake style. Very much in love, willing and anxious to share some of his writing. Yes this was Jake only two weeks ago, up on his roof, with the city lights behind his constantly wild hair' and this is the way he should be remembered, generous with everything he owned, willing to share everything he created and laughing with you all the way. My heart goes out to Lucy and Jeremy and Naomi and Dana because I know how much he loved them all and I know like everyone who knew him does how hard it's gonna be to live without him. I treasured the time I had with him and I speak for so many people here today when I say that I am unbelievably grateful to have been his friend. Thank you.

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