In life and death he brought friends together

The news arrived via e-mail on Tuesday as bad news often does these days. It was cryptic at first — “I’ve just heard the worst news about Rich Jassey,” a friend wrote — and then the details began to emerge.

Rich was my classmate in Sibley for 13 years. He was a tornado, a moonbeam, a lion and a prince. He had the energy and predictability of a Tasmanian devil. He could make anybody laugh.

Everybody — everybody — loved Richie, unless perhaps they envied him for his unequaled popularity. Ask 100 people who have lived in Sibley for the last 25 years, and I’m certain that 95 of them have a story about Rich.

A message board, linked to the obituary that ran on the Minneapolis Star Tribune Web site last week, included dozens of tributes to Rich, many of them stories about his high school antics. My favorite, from a classmate a year older than us:

“My favorite memory of him was on a senior high youth mission trip in South Dakota, where he and another friend ordered their burgers under to code names ‘Chico’ and ‘Frito’ just to make the poor lady behind the microphone have to call out those names,” wrote Lorri (Biehl) Puckett of Tucson, AZ.

Vintage Rich.

He died last weekend in Minnesota after a battle with liver disease. His friends and family held a memorial service in a Minneapolis suburb on Friday and if I hadn’t been finishing a round of chemotherapy I would have been there, if only for the delicious stories I’m sure were shared.

The weather on Friday was dicey, but I know that God probably threw a ray of sunlight on the proceedings as Rich’s fidgety, energetic body fell into its final, heavenly home.

Sibley’s class of 1982 is an interesting study in relationships. Close friendships were forged, I’m sure, but in many ways, the 90 or so classmates were like an amoeba, thriving off the group as whole rather than individually.

Because of that, when I got the first e-mail on Tuesday about Rich’s death, I fought to resist the notion that I was his best friend throughout our school days, and he was mine. When you have a personality as big and well-loved as Rich, everybody wants to claim him as their own.

Rich and I lived two blocks from one another, and we spent countless afternoons in a second-story loft that had been built into the eaves of his parents’ two-stall garage. The day the tornado hit Sibley in 1981, he and I were driving the perimeter of the spent golf course, watching the dark clouds move in from the west. He worked maintenance at the course and spent much of his free time trying to work in a hole or two of play.

Rich was a natural athlete, but he had a bum elbow that made it impossible for him to play the physical sports in which he would have easily excelled. During junior high and part of high school he happily served as student manager, knowing full well that if his arm was healthy he had the brains and speed to be a star quarterback and a champion wrestler.

So, instead, much of his energy went to the performing arts and his studies. Rich and I spent countless afternoons together, and one indelible memory is that no matter how I tried to tempt him away from his homework for some time in the sunshine, school always came first. He would sit at the dining room table in his house a few blocks north of downtown and listen to Elton John albums while slaying algebra problems.

And when he finished, if it was getting dark outside, he’d pull out an album by comedian Bill Cosby. Oh, he loved that stuff, and he would make me listen to the same routines over and over again, laughing until his face turned bright red.

Rich was with me at a high school speech contest the days I had my first seizure when I was 15. We had both competed early in the day and were at a bulletin board waiting for results when the grand mal seizure hit.

As the story goes, Rich want to find our speech coach, Jeff Zwagerman, and breathlessly reported that I was seizing. But he didn’t put it that way. “Zwag,” he said. “Jason is having a fit.”

“Is he upset because of the rating he got from the judges?” Zwag asked.

“No,” Rich said. “He’s having a fit!”

“Jass,” Zwag, who doubled as a terrific English teacher at the time, saw a teaching opportunity. “Rich, animals have fits; people have seizures.”

Rich answered: “All I know is that he’s having one right now.”

One of his legacies was that Rich hosted scores of dances in his family’s magical garage in the seventh grade. Well-chaperoned and with tons of food and games, they gently nudged us into adolescents and, true to the way we interrelated back then as a class, everyone was welcome.

Everybody had a friend when it came to Rich.

So, as the Internet buzzed with memories of him this week, I couldn’t help but think that he’d probably be pleased that so many of his far-flung friends were reconnecting again for the first time in 25 years. We were sharing laughs, tears and memories of a special friend who had an ability to bring people together and share a common experience.

In this case, it was compassion for an extraordinary man.