Joe Klein remembers his friend:
I spent Easter Sunday with David in hospice. He couldn’t talk and had difficulty swallowing. We held hands for seven hours. He could understand what I was saying and he would squeeze my hand in response to my recollections of our times together—the red convertible, the Bible study, the times he asked me—a man old enough to be his father—for advice, the times, the many times, he gave me comfort and support and inspiration.
David always closed every conversation by saying, “I love you, Joe Klein.” I think he probably said that as often as my wife has. And so I must close this by saying one last time, “I love you, David Kuo.” And I will always love you, and I will always have your enormous heart and spirit to guide me. And I will miss you, and so will the world, especially the least of these. I love you, David Kuo.
I love him too. And I do not deploy this active verb for additional pathos. I believe, as David believed, that David is still here and everywhere, finally resting in the bliss of Jesus.
He and I did not become the kind of friends that Joe and he were. We saw each other occasionally, chatted on the phone, emailed constantly, but spent little time in each other’s physical presence.
And yet I have to say that I felt his presence a great deal in my life. This last Holy Week, he wouldn’t leave me alone. At the Good Friday service, it was as if he were next to me in the pew, enduring his Passion, doubting, fearing, crying out for help. I felt him very powerfully yesterday as I stopped on one of the piers on the Hudson River Park with the dogs and found myself lost in some kind of word-less conversation with him. In Washington or New York or London, in journalism and academia, it is hard to find fellow Christians to simply be with, to be free with. I am not a holy roller of any sort and David was a bit. But the candor of his faith and his total acceptance of mine – and our shared spiritual experience of living posthumously – made all our differences evaporate.
And there was something Jesus-like about David. He soon recovered from any fleeting belief in politics, let alone that fatal dance between the ineffable and the electable. He experienced, as I did, an early premonition of mortality, but unlike me, then had to live the illness in all its brutal, battering humiliation. He walked the Via Dolorosa. And do not believe for a moment that he somehow did that flawlessly. He was no saint in the fantasized sense. He fell time and time again. And he told me about it time and time again. There was no wall there; no guile; just a form of transparency which rested in truth. Which is a form of sanctity. Certainly, I find it hard to believe in a sanctity that is free from sin.
His suffering tore me up. After the last time I hugged him and walked him to my apartment door, I wondered if he could make it down the stairs his shuffling walk was so stilted. Yet he managed to drive home and called me to confirm he was OK. Yes, like a lot of sick people, he somehow seemed to be the care-giver at times. And yes, sometimes I needed his care more than he needed mine.
Maybe it was the way he brought up all those memories of my peers struggling against imminent death at an ungodly age; maybe it was his calm, steady humor and curiosity over our dinners, even as he had been dry-heaving the night before; maybe it was the unexpected sharing, the brutal truth he could impetuously dole out, or his indifference to the tribalisms of the capital city, or his impatience with any nonsense like homophobia. But he did not just make the world less lonely. He made it ever so slightly brighter, the colors more vivid, the love stronger, the urgency greater.
I am so happy for him now. He is where he always was – in Jesus’ presence. But now with no earthly frustration to get in the way. David can be now. Just be. And what a being he is.
The Dish 