Jim McAnaney
June 5, 1952— August 23, 2007
Eulogy
for Jim McAnaney
Tom Hinchcliffe
Hello, everyone. I would like to extend to you a customary “good morning” greeting, even though, to be completely honest, it’s a lousy morning. A good man, a good son, a good husband, a good friend, a good public health administrator, a good neighbor has been snatched from our lives. And we are all the poorer for his absence.
Aldous Huxley, the English novelist and occasional philosopher, wrote towards the end of his life that he had spent all of his adult years thinking about the human condition. And, after decades of thought, the best advice he could offer us was just to “try to be a little kinder" to each other. To me, that sums up what Jim did in his life—he was invariably just to be a little kinder.
Ever since Thursday, when Dr. Shpaner, Jim’s co-worker and good friend, called to tell me the devastating news, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jim, and three things keep coming to mind:
- First, I still cannot believe that he is gone. How many people can you think of who were SO ALIVE? Who had such a ZEST for life? Who took such joy not just in the big moments but in the little, everyday ones? How many people can your think of who were so continually good humored? There is a line from Psalm 118 that sums up this gift that Jim possessed : “THIS is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad.” Jim rejoiced in each day.
- Second, Jim was a real man. He was a real man in a culture where there are too few real men. Yes, he could talk sports with the best of them, or tell the bawdy joke. But he also had the guts to overcome drug and alcohol addiction and then the compassion to help others to do so. And he had the guts to stick up for his employees when they were being bullied. And he had the guts—while others remained silent—to speak out to his bosses, letting them know whenever they were planning or actually doing something that was really, really dumb, and he let them know in the clearest possible language that people with HIV/AIDS would suffer because of this dumbness.
- Third, he had a heart as big as he was tall. If you were in trouble—whether it was something physical or whether it was something else in your life that was creating a problem for you—your marriage, your kids, your lover—whatever it might be—you could not have had a better person to be there for you than Jim.
Now, I need to take a few minutes to talk about my own story in order to tell you how Jim came into my life.
In early 2003—on my daughter’s birthday in fact—I was told by the Health Commissioner himself that the training unit that I had created and headed for almost 20 years was going to be abolished as quickly as possible. The purpose of this cut was to help meet the mayor’s budgetary reduction goal set for the Health Department.
In a large department of more than 1200 employees, the only people to be affected by this budget cut were the ones whose job it was to make sure that public health employees received the training necessary to do their important jobs.
As a consequence of the elimination of my unit, its members were transferred to other units in the department. I landed in AACO—the AIDS Activities Coordinating Office—the unit of the Health Department that works on addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic that is so devastating our community. The director of AACO at that time was Joe Cronauer and he could not have been nicer to me. Joe, however, was not to be my everyday boss. My new boss was to be Jim McAnaney, the program manager of the surveillance and epidemiology unit in AACO.
Where formerly I had been a senior departmental manager reporting to a Deputy Commissioner, now I was no longer a manager and I was reporting to a manager, Jim, who was in turn reporting to a manager who reported to a Deputy Commissioner.
So, besides losing my unit less than two years before I was scheduled to retire, I also was organizationally demoted. Both of these were tough on me. I felt that all of the good work I had tried to do for decades counted for nothing in the eyes of those who had made the decision to scrap my unit.
The reason I mention all of this is that on my first day in AACO I could not have had a better piece of good luck. For it was on that very day that I was to meet one of the most decent persons in my life. And we were to become great friends.
I vividly recall that day. Shortly after shaking hands with Jim, he clapped me on the shoulder and said, “What say we go and see your new office?” We then left my old haunt at 11th and Market and headed for my new one at Broad and Walnut. On the way there, Jim revealed that he did not like what had happened to me, and he wanted me to take the time I needed before settling in to my new duties. I thought this was a remarkably sensitive thing for him to say, especially to someone he didn’t even know—and someone he probably didn’t have much choice but to accept into his unit. And what he said made me so immensely grateful that I immediately wanted to plunge in and do the best job possible.
At some point in this same walk, Jim said enthusiastically, “I think you’re going to like your new office.” He laughed. “For one reason, it’s separated from the Commissioner’s Office by a 15 minute walk. The distance helps. They’re not walkers.” He laughed again, before adding more seriously, “And our unit does good work. We also have fun. You’ll see.”
I was skeptical. But not for long. I had worked more than 25 years in government, but I had never before met a group of people who were warmer, more friendly, or more professional than the men and women I was to meet in Jim’s unit. We worked hard. And we cared about the work and about each other.
We did have fun. If you knew Jim even slightly, then you would know he was a terrible tease and a wicked practical joker.
- You might find that the pens you used at your desk would mysteriously lose their cartridges.
- You might have rubber bands or balls of paper fly into your work station.
- Your snack—an apple or a banana or muffin—that you’d put on your desk would disappear while you’d gone to run an errand, only to reappear a while later.
- You might sit down in your adjustable chair without paying much attention and find that it had been adjusted so low it almost kissed the floor. The next day—before you’d had a chance to have your coffee—you might sit down in your chair without thinking much about it, only to find out that this time the seat was now so high your knees knocked against your desk.
- And you could never count on being able to answer your telephone without experiencing a ripple of anxiety that the phone cord had been almost invisibly tied together so that when you picked up the receiver, the entire phone would come along with it.
And then there were the games. There was a miniature shuffle board to play with. There were even golfing contests IN the office, with filing cabinets and trash cans serving as obstacles to frustrate you from sinking your putt.
These practical jokes and games, however, were NOT time wasters. They were an essential part of what made Jim an effective manager. Think about it for a minute. Every day we were dealing with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We were dealing with the sickness and the dying of young men and young women and sometimes of children. As a surveillance and epidemiology unit, we knew the numbers. We knew what HIV/AIDS was doing to our community. Jim was caring enough to realize that we needed the occasional recreation to help keep sadness and depression and despair at bay. He was an excellent psychologist.
He was also a manager who set standards but who trusted you to do your work.
HOWEVER, if you screwed up big, you could count on receiving a spanking. He would take you into his office and very quietly but emphatically let you know that what you had done was unacceptable and he DID NOT want it to happen again. I know of several occasions when this happened. I also knew I did NOT want to be on the receiving end of such a spanking.
I’d been in the unit for several months before I learned that Jim had cancer. But in all of the time I worked in his unit after then, I don’t recall his ever taking a day off except when he was receiving a chemotherapy treatment that very day. The next day he’d be back in the office, acting as though nothing special had happened.
We talked a few times about the cancer, but Jim was like Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood. The strong, silent type. He never showed signs that he was worried or scared. He was always upbeat. Because of my background in psychology, I suggested a couple of times that he might want to talk some things out with a psychologist and I could recommend a few good ones. After the second time on this subject, I remember Jim saying to me that he got all the help he needed along those lines from the AA group he attended weekly.
Jim was constitutionally optimistic without sugar-coating reality. He knew the score, but he also knew it was important to keep playing with all your might.
One Christmas, I surprised Jim by giving him a book. It was one of my favorites, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. A story in that book I particularly liked was the tale about a Zen master who was chased by a tiger. He jumped over a cliff to escape being eaten and found himself hanging from a vine. He looked up and saw the tiger waiting patiently. He looked down and saw a second tiger snarling below. He also saw that two mice were busy gnawing through the vine. Just then the Zen Master noticed a strawberry growing wild in an outcropping near him. He picked it and popped it into his mouth. Ah, how sweet it tasted!
That was Jim. Catching and savoring the little delights life offers—even when there is a hungry tiger above and an equally hungry tiger pacing below.
One of those great delights in Jim’s life was his family—Suzy, his wife; Nicole and Tristan, his two children. After his mini-vacations, he’d enthusiastically show me the pictures he’d taken. You could feel his love and the pride and enthusiasm as he talked about them. And as he became more and more interested and skilled in photography, he’d show me the pictures he’d taken of his house or garden or family or friends or even just sand dunes. Some of these pictures were truly beautiful.
After I left the City in early 2005, Jim and I stayed in close touch. On a number of occasions a gang of us would meet for lunch at Pine Street Pizza, where we had to have their delicious, artery-clogging bacon cheeseburgers, and Jim would add heaps of salt to his. He would also buy a large plate of French fries covered with cheese whiz, which he’d insist on sharing with all of us. Jim and I also got together on social occasions and for dinners, and that is when my wife and I got to know Suzy, who quickly became our friend.
When Jim began the bone marrow /stem cell transplant process late this spring, I don’t think there was any doubt among any of us that he would beat the cancer. But fate decreed otherwise.
Jim died all too young. But if you can define a good life as one where you leave the world a little bit better because you were in it, then surely Jim led a good life.
In closing, let me mention what I think of as attribute of Jim’s, one that made him so interested in Buddhist philosophy. Jim knew that significance—and deep meaning—were found not in the big events in life but in the small things, the everyday events, the little interchanges we have with each other, the little kindnesses. Jim would have agreed with William Blake, the eighteenth century mystic, painter, and poet, when Blake wrote the following:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Thank you.