Jim Forrester

I want to thank you so many of you for being there for me during this wrenching period of my life.

My life has been blessed with three sons. All were outstanding students, yet each so different in their worldview and their approach to life. Brent, creative and articulate, uses his gifts as a comedy writer. Justin, the scientific son, brings logic and sensitivity to his patients. Jeff, the spiritual son, found his identity through his vast knowledge of philosophy and religion, which he expressed in his writings and poetry.

Let me tell you about Jeff before you met him. Jeff was a beautiful child, with the sparkling, soulful brown eyes and flaxen red hair of Scotch-Irish ancestors. Both his mom and I were once redheads, so he had no choice. Every day of his early life, Jeff’s mom strapped him on her back Asian-style on her way to work. In her county hospital office while she read x-rays, little Jeffrey slept in an open filing cabinet drawer. I suppose that’s why Jeff never got sick…he had already met every germ there is by the time he was two.

As a teenager, Jeff was not like you know him.  He was half-extrovert, half-introvert. He was a devilish prankster, and he made friends easily. But whereas his brothers gravitated to sports, Jeff was always drawn to the contemplative life. So he did not follow society’s beaten paths, he forged his own direction and left a trail. He explored the lure of quiet meditation during an entire summer when he lived a hermit’s life in a remote cabin in Northern California, occupying his solitary days with reading philosophy and meditation. I first recognized how serious he was when he shaved his head and announced he would one day become a monk.

In those years, Jeff discovered a second passion, the saxophone. For Jeff the lyrical jazz improvisation of John Coltrane was spiritual. His consuming passion and focus led him to spend 6 hours a day honing that skill. Again listening to his own muse, without a shred of help from us, he applied to, and was admitted to the highly competitive Interlochen Music Academy in Michigan. Interlochen is a feeder music high school for Julliard and other music-oriented colleges. At Interlochen his teachers told us Jeff was a music prodigy.

As he finished high school, Jeff announced he wanted to spend a year in India training with a master of an instrument called a shennai, an instrument somewhat like an oboe. I knew that for Jeff, he had found a perfect path…he was leaving home to pursue his two great passions, music and the life of a monk. He traveled through India, Thailand, Burma and most of Asia. It was then that we first realized that he had a unique writing style. His long letters sparkled with vivid images, unexpected emotions as he captured experiences so different from the life he had lived in Malibu. What a unique literary gift he had for seeing and feeling humanity. 

Somewhere along his travels through Asia, the monk’s existence won out over music. He dropped music and focused his passion on becoming a Buddhist monk. Now I saw that Jeff was finding and formulating his own answers to many of life’s deepest questions through the study of Eastern philosophy, so different in its emphasis on the spiritual rather than the materialistic, and yet so similar in its search for why we are here. As Jeff returned for his college years, we in his close-knit family all saw that the balanced prankster/extrovert-spiritual/introvert we knew in his high school years was now completely dominated by his spiritual side. Going to dinner with Jeff when he returned from his Asian quest was now an undertaking, and quite honestly, sometimes a little painful. Jeff was there all right…he listened and he laughed at others’ stories, but he offered no comments and he suggested no topics for conversation. Now he specialized in monosyllabic answers to questions. We loved each other, he just didn’t want to talk about it.  In his worldview at that time, he found peace and solitude in just being together.

In his college years Jeff majored in religion…what else…and read voraciously. He had a massive library. Once again Jeff changed course. I discovered if I wanted to get Jeff into a two hour discussion, all I had to do was ask a question about religion. He was finding his own way to enlightenment by sharing his knowledge others. He was defining his own path, discovering the discipline that would gave meaning to the rest of his life.

But which discipline should he follow for his own life? For a while he gravitated to Korean Buddhism, but sometime during those college years in either New York or Boston he met a guru whose teaching seems to have special resonance with educated, spiritual, deeply philosophical people. Jeff became a follower of the guru Adida, and a member of the worldwide community that follows his teaching. I will not presume to understand Adidam or his fundamental principles, but I can speak with conviction about the community he created. They are gentle. They are sensitive and giving. They are incredibly loyal. Quite simply, the community members are among the best human beings I have met in my passage through life.

When Jeff first became ill with lymphoma, Barbara and I flew to Kauai to be with him during his first course of chemotherapy.  Our time together turned out to be deeply meaningful, as we realized how much we each loved each other. Jeff’s quiet constrained side faded as if he was returning toward his extrovert childhood self. Jeff became more open and vulnerable, less inner-directed, reaching out again to the world at large. In a strange and beautiful way Jeff’s illness made our family even closer. When Jeff returned to LA for more advanced treatment, his brothers and their families…Dawn, Lexi, Sydney...became deeply involved in his care. Jeff’s enduring legacy is that in living out his personal tragedy, he forever changed the lives of each of us…he created unbreakable bonds within our family.

Jeff’s final year was, from the physical standpoint, extremely difficult for him. He had innumerable courses of chemotherapy, and as each failed, the new set of drug infusions was more potent than the last. In effect he would be clobbered by a one week drug infusion. He would struggle through the second week as more and more cells in his body died. Sometimes he was unable to even walk to the bathroom. Just as he regained strength in the third week, it was time to return for the next infusion and begin the cycle anew. As the tumors progressed, he was forced to begin opiates for pain. Jeff hated them because they dulled his bright intellect. In Jeff’s last year I learned about a strange contradiction in the meaning of courage: it is a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die. As Jeff faced unrelenting therapeutic defeat after defeat after defeat he taught me the meaning of courage.

What was the source, the wellspring of Jeff’s courage? It came from love. I saw that the single greatest blessing bestowed on Jeff, the source of his indomitable courage, was Sepia’s love. Jeff told me many times he could not have held on to hope until that very last day without her. Sepia dedicated these last two years of her life to Jeffrey. Sepia’s love and caring for my beloved son will be my most beautiful and enduring memory from the two years that we all…Jeff, his family, and his community…battled cancer together. The lynchpin of Jeff’s support was Sepia. This was the font of his courage, the reason he could find a reassuring smile for each of us despite severe pain and daily nausea and the withering toxic side effects of treatment.

In the last two months, Jeff’s friends flew in from all over the world to be with him. Their support gave meaning to his life even as it ebbed away. Many of those who came from far away were members of his Adidam community. Australians Matt and Felix slept on the floor of his ICU room; NorCal Steve and Canadian Tomas stayed in Sepia’s home for several weeks with Jeff near the end. Many others many stayed for long periods through the last year, so Jeff was never, ever, alone. The community was there for me as well, and so their support of Jeff and me will never be forgotten, not by me, or Barbara or Jeff’s brothers or their wives and children. Seeing the incredible number and depth of friendships that Jeff achieved in his life makes me tremendously proud to be his dad. At his informal memorial in Sepia’s home, as his many friends spoke about his life, I thought of the memorial to Christopher Wren carved in a Manhattan church: “if you would seek his monuments, you need only look about you.” The depth and breadth of those friendships is now a source of solace for the unique pain felt by a parent who loses a child. Jeff’s was a life well-lived.

At Jeff’s memorial, his many friends from his community spoke passionately and reassuringly to me about the concept of “transition” from life on earth to spiritual existence. It is a fundamental tenet of Adida’s teaching, captured so beautifully in Jeff’s last words. Each of us have our own dream, our own vision of the spiritual life. I must admit that I am uncertain what it is or what it will be, but I do know that Jeff is alive in the minds and hearts of all who knew him. And so I also know that each in our own way will see Jeff in the sunset, hear him in the thunder and feel him in the rain. It is that knowledge that allows me to continue on.

Jeff passed away three weeks before the publication of our book The Heart Healers, which captures the astonishing story of the greatest medical breakthrough of our time. Jeff was the editor of the book. I wish he were here to see the tremendous initial reviews it is receiving, because his words and ideas are on every page. In the past 2 years, even after his initial diagnosis, the book became our mutual labor of love. So now the book and his words stands as my own treasured personal memorial to Jeff. The experience we shared is my own private literature, to be read over and over. The dedication of the book, which I wrote long before his passing, says, “This book is filled with stories of courage in the face of adversity. One I do not tell is that of my oldest son, Jeffrey, who personified this quality as he edited this book.” After Jeff’s passing, I decided to use my substantial honorarium as I know Jeff would have, buying a number of books and giving them to his friends. If you are reading this and did not get the book, you are a friend. Let me know.

Finally, I am comforted by Jeff’s last words to us, written on the day before his passing, and by learning from several different friends that on that same day, he spoke quite specifically about his serenity in confronting death. Thomas Edison’s final words were, “It’s very beautiful over there.” I believe those five words speak a century later to Jeff’s vision. My greatest fear had been that his passing would be painful for him and that as a doctor and parent I would be helpless to alleviate his pain. The final blessing of his life was that his passing lasted only moments, as if a Great Spirit’s finger touched him, and he slept.

I want to thank each of you so very much for your notes, cards, emails and calls during this single most difficult time of my life, with the passing of my beloved son Jeffrey. For a while I found it difficult to do even the simplest tasks. Your outpouring of support has been absolutely critical to helping me find my way out of my gloom and despair. Thank you for teaching me once again that a friend in need is a friend indeed.

Jim