“Will you please keep it down? I’m trying to die here.” This is what my friend Hob told a group of Emergency Medical Technicians and others who were huddled around him as he lay on the floor of a restaurant. The EMTs must have felt astonished to hear a man joke as he prepared for death.

Hob thus came close to fulfilling a hope that he had voiced years earlier. When a friend asked him how he wanted his life to end, he had answered thus: “I want to die laughing.”

Death was no stranger to Hob. After all, he had done a kind of dress rehearsal for death by living for years with Alzheimer’s disease. His son, using a different metaphor, called it “Dad’s final exam.” With a typical combination of wit and seriousness, Hob himself named this affliction “horseblinders.”

His lightheartedness, mixed with a growing inability to say exactly what he wanted, often issued in striking phrases. The one I remember hearing with most poignancy came when he could not recall what he wanted to tell me. He motioned toward his wife and said: “She is my memory.”

Till close to the end, he retained enough control to create puns and use other figures of speech about his plight, a practice that helped make him what one family member calls “a beautiful model for living with illness.” A few days before that Thanksgiving, he announced: “It’s time to jump ship.”

These facts and many others about Hob emerged from a memorial service held three weeks after his death at age 78 on Thanksgiving Day. Like other friends who took part, I came away from this celebration of his life with a much better knowledge of a man I had thought already well known to me.

For the last several years we had been members of a meditation group, together with Hob’s wife Olivia and two other friends. Every few weeks, the five of us would gather in the mid-afternoon in his living room. After shared greetings, we would choose someone to softly ring a small bell and, sitting in a circle around a lighted candle and flowers, we would close our eyes for a half hour’s silence.

For someone like me who finds meditation difficult, it was helpful to feel the support of others as I turned inward. Afterward, we would exchange reflections on recent events in our lives and whatever insights we might have gained from the meditation. At such times, I especially valued Hob’s wide spiritual experience.

Hob was a true spiritual adventurer. In search of enlightenment, he and his wife Olivia traveled widely and absorbed the riches of various spiritual traditions. Hob became close friends with Father Bede Griffiths, an English Benedictine priest, who established an ashram and lived like a Hindu holy man in India.

Thich Nhat Hanh was another major source of inspiration for Hob. This Tibetan Buddhist monk, in fact, ordained Hob as an elder spiritual teacher, a role that held great meaning for him. Hob’s wide experience was a source of wonder for me because of my limited knowledge of traditions different from my own.

Friends who spoke at the memorial service brought out other facets of Hob’s life from times before spirituality became so important to him. It struck me that he was known by different first names at different points in his life. Those who knew him growing up tended toward “Harry;” others used his formal first name “Harrison;” and those who became familiar with him in his maturity tended to call him “Hob,” as I did.

Who but his oldest friends would ever have known about Hob being captain of the rifle team, a boy who broke the record in his prep school by scoring 496 points out of 500?

From his two now adult children at the service we learned about Hob as a father. His son referred to visitors who used to come to their home: “The presence of so many wisdom figures at an early formative age was his best gift to me.” His daughter recalled their many family trips: “We sang rounds in the car.” Until this time I did not know that singing was one of Hob’s favorite activities but I should have guessed this of such a buoyant personality.

If this brief remembrance of a multi-faceted friend leaves the impression that things were easy for him, that would be a false impression. Like the rest of us, Hob often found things difficult, especially in his last years. Though he could joke about death, he admitted how scared he sometimes was.

Yet I will remember the characterization given by one of his friends who spoke of his smile, his sense of mischief, his humor, and his “joy of life.” And I will especially cherish his unending search for light.

Richard Griffin