WTWN #97 - George

In memory of George Edgar Kelley, April 17, 1962 — June 27, 2025

I found out last week that one of my dearest friends from high school, George Kelley, had died at age 63.

George was part of a small, tight-knit group of friends in my younger days—people I hung out with, who I learned from, and who supported me. It’s no understatement to say I wouldn’t have made it through high school without them.

George sparked my love for astronomy and physics. We used to look through his telescope in the side yard of his house on North A Street in our hometown of Monmouth, Illinois. Or we’d meet at 5 a.m. in the pitch dark in front of the Haldemann-Thiessan Science Center at Monmouth College and go for walks while observing and discussing the morning sky.

George organized nighttime meteor counts in the countryside, where several of us would sit in lawn chairs on deserted country roads, facing as many compass directions as possible, and count the meteorites we spotted burning up in the atmosphere. He submitted our results to the American Meteor Society. We would have been 16 and 18 years old at the time.

Something I just remembered. George also had a superpower: he could whistle through his eyes.

Deaths in my “inner circle” have been happening more often lately. At sixty-one, there are no guarantees, and it’s anyone’s guess how much time we have left.

But I feel as alive as ever. And therein lies the unfathomable nature of morbidity.

“Old” isn’t as old as it used to be. I’m strong. I can bike the respectable distance to and from work. I’m able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. (Couldn’t pass that up.) And I’ve taken up swimming. My body is still capable of being sculpted into shape when I take care of it.

It’s a desolate feeling when you think of how much death surrounds us all the time. The night I found out George had died was one of those nights I’d gone to sleep with the pang in my chest that I, too, will also soon be gone, and in the not-too-distant future. Relatively speaking.

As Nada Surf has sung in “See These Bones”: “The lights in the city are more or less blinking.”

Life is short, no doubt. If there’s something you need to attend to, you'd better get down to business.

In the dark without my glasses, I reached for my phone to check the time and saw an email header from George.

When I put my glasses on, I saw that it was not an email from George, but from 'George and Paul' (sounds like a Beatles reference, I know). Paul, George’s partner, was responding to an email I sent to George three months ago, encouraging him to read Orbital by Samantha Harvey. He said he’d put it on his list. I wonder if he got around to it. Beautiful, space-themed book, by the way.

Paul told me simply that George had passed away.

I let it sink in—George was dead. George, about whom I had written my best-known poem, Looking at Stars with George, which was published in 2022.

I’m glad George had a chance to read that.

I did not sleep well—I felt more alone than usual in the night, despite my family sleeping nearby. It never really gets dark in the summer in Ostrobothnia; it’s so far north that there’s an eerie half-dusk all night, where you can almost see.

In the morning, I woke up early to read a little and work on my essay for the week. I also wanted to share the sad news with friends, which helped—reaching out to a few other friends who knew George. It was important to me not to avoid or skip the feeling, not to pretend it didn’t happen.

Being the bearer of bad news often means people never forget they heard it from you. When I was a radio DJ and had to be the one to read the news of John Lennon’s death on the air in December 1980, I prefaced my announcement with, “I hate to be the one to tell you this.”

At my college reunions, I’ve been the one who reads the list of deceased classmates. For some reason, I find it easier to read that list than to listen to it.

It’s been more than a week since I received the news about George. Yesterday, I finally had the chance to watch his memorial service, which has been archived on Facebook by the funeral home. My tears finally flowed during one of the musical selections, Paul Williams’s “The Rainbow Connection” from the Muppet Movie, which was somehow oddly perfect for a funeral.

The memorial also included the beautiful “Winter Song” by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson, which I had never heard.

(If you can’t see that video in your country, try the Spotify link below.)

When I die, maybe people will remember me as someone who was not afraid to share difficult news. Someday, maybe someone will send an email with a link to my obituary, saying something like, 'Just to let you know, David passed away,' or, as my friend Bart said when he told me about Richard a couple of years ago, just two words, 'Sad news,’ and a link.

In the end, that’s what our lives are reduced to: a few words of remembrance in email or text, a web link, maybe a Facebook video of a memorial service. Maybe a tombstone.

If we’re lucky, maybe a little bit more.

Who knows how, but I’m still here.

David