There’s a thing that happens sometimes where you don’t realize you were watching a goodbye until it’s already over. You’re in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, and someone walks through your door, and you have a conversation about basketball and family and golf, and you laugh and catch up and maybe they stay a little longer than they usually do, and you think: well, that was nice. And then on Sunday you find out they’re gone, and you sit there replaying everything, and you realize that was it. That was the last one. That joy you saw all over their face, the one that surprised you, the one you’d never quite seen in that particular way before, that was the goodbye.
I met Jay Lambeth when I came to teach, and I won’t pretend we started as friends. Jay was the regional administrator, the person above the campus presidents, and early on we were in two different corners on some things. I wanted to put student work up in the hallways. Jay had a policy against it. His general position was that certain things simply weren’t done, and I had a general position that if something was in the best interest of the students, I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for someone to hand me permission. So we butted heads. We respected each other’s stubbornness, I think, and over time that turned into something real. By the end of the years I worked under him, Jay was one of the people I genuinely looked forward to seeing.
He’d come by the lab every now and then, not for any particular agenda, just to check in. He’d stand in the doorway or come around and look at what the students were working on, and we’d talk. North Carolina basketball. His family. Golf. He was Carolina through and through, which if you know anything about ACC country means he felt about Carolina the way some people feel about religion, and he wore it the same way, with an easy and comfortable conviction. That Carolina Blue wasn’t just a preference. It was a personal statement.
The last time he came by, I want to say it was a Thursday afternoon. I don’t actually remember the day for certain, but it was late in the week, and he wasn’t there for anything specific, no check-in item, no issue to work through. He was just happy. That’s the only word for it. I had known Jay through a lot of things, and I knew his moods the way you know the moods of anyone you’ve worked alongside for years, and this was different. He was fully joyful in a way I hadn’t seen before. Easy and relaxed and lit up from somewhere inside. We talked for a while about his family and Carolina and golf, and he left, and I remember standing there thinking: I have never seen Jay in such a good mood.
Sunday he was found in his driveway. Just gone.
Peter called me that week. Peter was managing the memorial tournament being organized in Jay’s name, and he asked if I’d be willing to design the flags and the engraved crystal award they were going to present. The tournament was a week away. I said yes without hesitating, and I sat down and did it, and I made everything Carolina Blue, because that was Jay, because there was no other color that made any sense.
I designed that tournament logo for the next thirteen, fourteen years. Every year. Same Carolina Blue. Peter would call and ask, and I’d say of course, and I’d sit down and do it, and every time I did I thought about that Thursday afternoon in the lab and the way Jay looked and how I didn’t know what I was seeing.
Here’s the thing about that kind of memory, and I want to say this carefully because I don’t want you to hear it the wrong way: it doesn’t make you sad, exactly. It makes you careful. Not in a morbid way, I’m not suggesting you spend your Thursday afternoons cataloguing which conversations might be the last one, that’s no way to live. I’m saying something different, which is that when someone drives across town on an ordinary afternoon just to come stand in your doorway and talk about basketball, that is a gift, and the gift isn’t diminished by not knowing its last-gift-ness at the time. Maybe it’s actually cleaner that way. Jay showed up and was fully there, and I was fully there, and neither of us was carrying the weight of what it turned out to be.
But I carry it now, and I’m glad I do, because what it taught me is this: sometimes the people who show up in the last chapter of their story are giving you something they don’t even know they’re giving. Jay was happy that day in a way I’d never seen before, and I think whatever he’d worked out in himself, whatever peace he’d made with something, it came through in that conversation even though we never talked about any of it directly. We talked about basketball, you know. That’s how some people do it. You talk about basketball and what you’re really saying is: I like who you are. I’m glad we worked through our differences. I’m glad you stopped by.
I still think about Carolina Blue when May comes around. I don’t do the tournament work anymore, that chapter closed some years back, but I find myself thinking about that color when the semester winds down and the weather turns, and I think about Jay walking into my lab one afternoon, fully himself, fully at ease, and I’m grateful I was there. I’m grateful I was present enough to notice. And I hope, wherever things end up, he knows that I knew what that visit meant, even if I didn’t know it at the time.
