If Bob O’Shea had ever wanted to bring all his friends together in one place, he would have needed to rent Fenway Park. At least this was my fantasy─and that of many others─about the number of people he could call friend.

Last week. Bob died, some three months before his 77th birthday. His death made me weep both for him and his family, and for the loss that I suffered of my longest and best friend.

Bob and I remained close for 63 years, ever since we started high school together in 1943. In both high school and college, he majored in friendship, focusing on personal relationships that always meant more to him than anything else.

At St. Sebastian’s Country Day School, founded only two years before we began as freshmen, Bob led the way in a vibrant social life. While most of his fellow students, notably me, were gangly adolescents, Bob had an assured poise in almost every situation. It was said that, when he called on a girl to take her out, he would also charm her mother as well.

He had a great gift for humor, then and ever afterward. Conversation with him typically provoked laughter, no matter how seriously he took the subject at hand. He had an acute sense of the ridiculous, and never took himself too seriously.

But his life revealed dimensions that we would not have suspected 60 years ago. Some of us thought him destined for an early marriage, often surrounded as he was by charming young women. However, he had the patience to wait for the right one. He married in his 50s, and his life was happily transformed.

Long ago, his friends observed that although he was a bright student, he never allowed school work to interfere with real life. Nor was he obsessed by rules, being celebrated for his ability to charm his way out of uncongenial restrictions.

Throughout his life, his intellectual interests remained strong and active. And his early skepticism about rules belied a steadfast moral sense that helped him provide a compass for those in search of one.

A line in the newspaper notice of Bob’s death describes him well: “Beloved friend of many.” Understating it this way merely hints at the intensity and the scope of his friendships. He was deeply loved by an unusually large number of people.

His family was at the center of his world. When he was 55, to his continuing happiness, Bob married Lauren Curry. A few years after their marriage, he and his wife adopted two daughters in South America. They were a great gift in his life and Bob observed to a friend that he and Lauren had secured the national treasures of Bolivia.

The family circle extended further, for Bob’s love and concern for others included his brothers, his nieces and nephew, as well as numerous cousins. One younger cousin has written of him: “I always knew I could call on him to get grounded, when I felt like a lonely planet out there.”

There were others as well. His niece Janique says: “At last count, his godchildren were numbered in the 50s.”

Much larger was the group of people with whom Bob did business as an insurance agent. He did not regard his customers as mere purchasers of insurance coverage. Instead, he made friends of them and their concerns became his own.

He took his faith tradition seriously all his life but he was not uncritical about it. When the sexual abuse crisis erupted in the Archdiocese of Boston, Bob was deeply angered by both the perpetrators and the authorities who had done nothing to stop it. He loved his Church and, for that reason, felt deeply critical about those who misused its authority.

For me, Bob was the epitome of love and concern for others. I once wrote a column about him in my series on spirituality. Since I did not dare ask his permission, knowing he would reject any suggestion that he was any sort of paragon, I used a pseudonym to describe a man who practiced a ministry of helping other people.

Without indulging in sentimentality, I described him as a kind of saint. This portrayal would have horrified him, but to me it was the reality of his character. The spiritual tradition that he and I espouse says that, ultimately, all you have to do is love.

But this statement drips with irony because loving is one of the most difficult of human activities. It must have been difficult for him too, at least sometimes. But that is the way he lived his life.

This, ultimately, is what made him unique. He was a man whose concern for others stretched wide. If the fulfillment of spiritual life is to love, he reached fulfillment long ago. That is the reason why he leaves behind so many people who both mourn his loss and celebrate his life.

Richard Griffin