A LETTER TO MY FRIEND’S CHILDREN UPON HIS DEATH

April 30, 2022

Dear Belle Halladay And Wylie,

The first time I met your dad, he hit me in the head with a baseball bat.

It wasn't his fault. Gareth was on the same t-ball team as my older brother Joe, and they were excited to finally practice. Being the younger sibling and eager just to be around the older kids, I wandered onto the field while Gareth was warming up in the batter's box. Proud to show his teammates his swing, he let one rip and hit me with his backswing.

Crack! I went down.

He dropped the bat and came to my aid.

My memories of the next couple of minutes are hazy.

But the thing I remember most was being carried to the nurse's station at the Tri Community Center in Oxford, and how worried and profusely apologetic Gareth was as I laid on a bench with an ice pack on my head and slowly came back to my senses.

Yes, that was the first time I met your dad, but we stayed acquainted and were friends for over thirty years, so I have scores of memories of him. There was the night I stayed at his house when I was six years old, my mom buying me a hot pink sleeping bag to entice me on my first sleepover. How much we were shocked when that house burnt caught on fire around Christmastime. Him and Brad Burke directing me and a bunch of our friends in our high school one-act play, the rehearsals taking place outside in their cul-de-sac. Him showing me his clear plastic bins full of Grateful Dead bootleg cassette tapes. Telling me about being stuck in traffic on the way to a Phish show, getting out of the car and handing people mandarin oranges. Visiting him late night at the Oxford Donut Shoppe, Gareth gifting me fresh donuts right out of the fryer. Teaching me and my college roommates how to play dominos. Joining us on a late-night supermarket run, even though he didn't need anything at the store, because "Dude, I love going grocery shopping!"

Me marveling at his ability to ride 100+ miles on country roads on a bike as he trained to go to England for his Sir Gareth trip. Showing off loaves of bread he baked at the place he worked at in Boston. Letting me stay in his apartment after I had a bad break-up with a college girlfriend. Describing to me that he would bellow "Who needs a beer?!" when he was a vendor at Gillette Stadium for Patriots games. Taking my wife Jennifer and I to a local bookstore to read excerpts of “Finnegan's Wake”. Arguing about best sketch comedy TV and his love of “Mr. Show”. Watching him do DJ sets at Ian and Catherine's wedding in Vermont; watching him do a DJ set at his own wedding. Working in LA, celebrating my son coming home from the NICU by going to a soda shop, buying fancy candies and pops. Getting me so drunk in NYC one visit that I almost peed my pants on the airplane after he dropped me off late at JFK. Talking with him about he finally got sober, and how proud he was to have done so all by himself.

I remember him in his drinking days, visiting me and my brothers during my brother's bachelor party at the Clover Club on Smith St., telling us about Belle Halladay being born any minute. Or when he got playfully angry at me for naming my son Wilder, because that was the initial choice for Wylie's name and he (again, playfully) accused me of stealing it.

None of these are stories. They're not even anecdotes. They're just little memories; bits of life I shared with Gareth, recollections I now carry of him and times we shared.

And when I think of your dad and these varied impressions, two words come to mind: curiosity and kindness.

He was someone who could talk to anyone about anything, especially if that revolved around art: painting, literature, music, film, television. He knew so much about it all, and had strong opinions. But he would never lord them over you, he would never assume he knew more than you did. And he was encouraging. My career as a writer and filmmaker is nowhere near where I want it to be or where, when I was younger, I thought I would be. Still, he read everything I sent him and always had laudatory things to say, while never being false with his notes or reactions.

And he was just nice. Generous with his time, the way he treated people, his loyalty to his friends and people he met even for a short time.

Perhaps I'm making your dad out to be a saint. He wasn't. He was a man, a complicated man with faults. I don't mean to speak ill of the dead, but I could tell you stories about booze and sex and lies and vice, and maybe someday I will. I just want you to know that he was, like us all, a three-dimensional human being in all that entails.

We went through periods where we didn't talk much. Gareth was one of those people who, even if you didn't see or speak to each other in awhile, you were able to hop right back into your friendship as if no time had passed. We were each in our late thirties, on opposite coasts, tending to our kids and our busy show business careers when I received this email out of the blue:

from: Gareth Hughes <gxxx@gmail.com>

to: James Francis Flynn <jxxx@gmail.com>

date: Apr 6, 2019, 6:15 AM

subject: So... (warning: heavy)

So, there's really no easy way to say this, and it's gonna kinda crap on your day no matter what, but...

I've been diagnosed with liver cancer.

Nothing I drank, smoked, or slept with led to this. Just a thing that is. But it's serious and terrifying.

We've got a great doctor, and we're hopeful. And there's really only one option with this, and that's to go right straight through it.

So that's our plan...

Just want you to know, and to hear from me. We love you and your family and hope to talk to you soon...

-Gareth

We kept in much closer contact after that.

I would email, text, or call often just to check up on him, and early on, he told me he did chemo on Wednesday mornings. So I set an alarm on my phone that just read “Gareth”, for 9AM every Wednesday, and that was my reminder to contact your father, even if we had nothing particularly important to say to one another. He inspired that kind of fidelity.

Sometimes, he didn't respond. Sometime, he just told me how much it hurt, or how tired he was. But sometimes he sent text messages so long they might as well have been emails, or even the beginnings of a novel. Sometimes he was able to muster that kind of energy, especially if it was about a book he was reading, music that he liked, or a recommendation he wanted to give.

In the last years of your father's life, he devoured movies. The final email he ever sent to me was a list of all the movies he had recently watched, with ratings for them and little comments in the margins. Even with the amount of agony he was in on a daily basis, he never let that stop him from living his life fully, making future plans, hoping.

He and I were trying to make a movie ourselves, largely about his experiences with cancer. As I envisioned it, it was going to be a filmed monologue of him reading the beautiful pieces he wrote, about growing up in Oxford, Ohio, our hometown. About his first bout of cancer as a baby. About meeting the art critic Jerry Saltz. About the cancer that would end up taking his life.

We had long phone calls to talk about the project, and some of his final messages to me were in July of 2021, during a particularly brutal series of chemo treatments and hospital stays that would mark the end. He sent me a picture of him in a hospital bed looking particularly bad, saying you kids were calling him “zombie dad”. He never lost his sense of humor.

And then he died. I cried on the side of the road in the middle of West Texas, texted him that I loved him even though I knew he'd never see it. Ever since he was diagnosed, I knew he wouldn't live that long, but still, the end seemed so sudden.

I adored your dad. I was better for having known him. I miss his big loud stupid booming voice. I miss hearing his voice on his podcast with Brad. I miss discussing books, music, movies. I miss his outlook on life, the grace with which he faced the immense pain he dealt with daily. I miss those Wednesday messages, and it was only this past week, so many months since his death, that I finally turned off the “Gareth” alarm on my phone. I just wasn't able to do it before now.

Today, April 30, 2022, we come together in Brooklyn at the Gathering For Gareth. There will be people from so many parts of your father's rich, full life, and you will hear and ingest so many of their recollections and impressions that they inevitably will meld with your own. I'm writing to you about my own experiences with your dad because, the older I get and the more insight I gain, I realize that, over time, memories become so much of what remain of those we love. I hope by sharing some of my own memories, you get a slightly better sense of who he was.

After all, you are part of him: your smiles, your eyes, your names, your faces, your curiosity, your kindness. When you were born, you became his whole world. Now that he's gone, you are the way he stays in it.

With love,

James Francis Flynn

P.S. – On a personal and perhaps selfish note, one of the only good things to have come from your dad's death was that I got to know your mother. I have come to see Amy as a funny, smart, caring, creative, competent woman who is stronger than you'll probably ever know, and I am honestly in awe of her. I am so happy and proud that, even through this terrible situation, we have come to be friends.