In memory of Jack Holland, 1947-2004

Jack with nephew Timmy atop the Empire State Building, 2002

At times it seems that this life doesn't get any easier, and I am now old enough to have had friends who have upped and died on me. It is five years today since my friend and colleague Jack Holland died of cancer, a mere eight weeks after his diagnosis -- unmercifully swift.

I still think of Jack regularly, as I am walking Manhattan's streets. If there are ghosts, then his is still here, hanging out in some mythic bar with a notebook and a glass of Chardonnay. He was a wise and humorous man, and a loyal friend. After the Sept. 11th attacks, when it seemed that terrifying, mind-bending forces had been unleashed, Jack was a source of calm reflection to many people, including strangers in bars who would hear him offering his reasoned, rational perspective, and start to listen, ask questions.

I caught a glimpse of Jack at the end of his life, working alongside him for four years before he died. Strange then, to discover in a recently published book, a memory of Jack just as his life was starting. The book, Stepping Stones: interviews with Seamus Heaney, is by Irish critic Dennis O'Driscoll. Heaney was briefly a schoolteacher in Belfast and remembers teaching Jack when he must have been maybe 14 or 15. Heaney, once called 'the poet of poets,' is asked by O'Driscoll in the book if he felt he had succeeded in broadening the perspectives of his students. The Nobel laureate says:

One pupil, by the way, did triumph – the late Jack Holland, the novelist and writer on Northern Irish affairs, who eventually ended up in New York. Jack was in class 4B and his essays suggested he would make a path for himself. He had an appetite for language – and a sardonic sense of humor. If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.

Thank you, Seamus.

Jack Holland certainly triumphed over his horrible childhood in god-awful, religious war-poisoned Belfast. Knowing this, I often looked at him and wondered if perhaps having led such a diverse life, he sometimes wondered if it was all real. Heaney wrote the following words of himself, but I think they also fit Jack:

And there I was, incredible to myself,
among people far too eager to believe me
and my story, even if it happened to be true.