Richard George Galli

In ancient societies when an important man died people sacrificed some of his soldiers and his women to protect him and do his laundry in the afterlife.

A while ago my wife Toby and I had a talk along those lines. If I died would Toby sacrifice our dog Chester to comfort me in the afterlife? Absolutely not, she said. Well, how about the reverse? If Chester died, would Toby sacrifice me so Chester had someone to play with in the afterlife? Toby said she would think about it.

It’s nice to know that Toby will keep Chester safe and happy. It’s nice to have confidence that the good things in life will continue to be good even after I’m not there to experience them.

Some people will be surprised by my death, and some will mourn it, but to complicate their thinking - as I usually do - I have to say that I might have begun wilting several years ago - even before my secret cancer started blossoming and a roadway accident gave me a traumatic brain injury. A routine aging process might have been withering me before the crash and the cancer teamed up to cancel me.

Overall, things have not been terrible. I laugh much more now than I did before. In some ways, I think my medical conditions have introduced me to a new, rollicking, unanticipated state of being: as good as bad can get.

Why Now

Publishing this premature obituary might seem to be a strange thing for me to do, but I am one of the best available sources of useful data about me, and information is quickly becoming unavailable even to me as my memory erodes.

I have been freshening this Sayonara Letter many times for years, and it has become smaller with every major edition. It is amazing how the abbreviated story of a person’s life can become quicker to tell as the years of living it accumulate.

Considering the effects of aging plus cancer and brain damage, I don’t know how long I might persist as a reliable reporter of who I was and what you ought to know … that I might want to tell you.

So I will succumb to my situation and declare that this is the final draft of my Sayonara Letter and I won’t write or publish another edition unless someone develops simultaneous cures for traumatic brain damage, cancer and getting old.

Who I Hoped To Be

I leave truly appreciating that I have been a fortunate guy. I have had much more good luck than bad luck. Confronting the occasional hardships in my family’s life has not been difficult compared to the challenges faced by many others. Our situation overall has always been good compared to what millions of people on Earth have to endure. I met with, worked with, and sometimes spoke in their language with many of those desperately struggling people in Vietnam and Iraq, and I don’t have to take someone’s word about how hard life can be for people who cope with genuine bad luck. Much of the world would even now trade places with me, terminal cancer included.

My life will achieve a shorter span of time than some people might wish for themselves, but the years were plenty enough for me. They were well packed with a variety of things that kept me busy learning and doing and experiencing stuff that normal people around me did not regard as highly as I did.

The most rewarding places I have visited, and the most satisfying things I have done, are the sort of untidy and intimidating places and things that most smart folks would pay good money to avoid. I can’t persuade you to envy or appreciate what I consider to be the best parts of my story.

If someday there is a gathering to help folks achieve group closure – to acknowledge my transition and get past it – maybe this note will be read there – and soon after get published to wide acclaim in The New Yorker, of course. More likely it will be passed around within a very small set of busy acquaintances who won’t quickly remember where they put it.

At this point custom might insist that I help define my own legacy, by reminding people of legends that might or might not be factual. I prepared a list of my defining interests and accomplishments but then I deleted the list. People who knew me well won’t need the list; and people who didn’t know me well won’t understand the list.

If people are not satisfied that they knew me well, and want to crack my code, they should read the most revealing thing I leave behind: a book that started in 1971 as “REMFS” and then became “OF RICE AND MEN” in 2006 and then morphed into “HEARTS AND MINDS” in 2017. It turns out that - with the exception of my family - in my life I was devoted to that book more than to anything else. As a commercial property it has faults that I recognize, but as a personal testament it is perfect.

In my life the prize I wanted most of all was to become the kind of person who would write that kind of book. I would have won that prize if after finishing the book I had been the only one who ever read it.

The Guiding Light

When I was a young man Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom The Bell Tolls” set for me a standard for comportment that I have tried to live by ever since. The melancholy protagonist is a man who dies on a mission that he could have avoided, in a battle that he knows is already lost.

At the end of the book, Robert Jordan has been wounded, and he is trying to hold himself together for a little while, so he can slow down the enemy soldiers who are pursuing his friends. Barely able to move, his consciousness waning, he prepares for another losing fight - because his life still has some utility. He will do what he is able to do, until he can’t do that anymore.

Scattered about the last few pages of the book are these thoughts of a man whose capabilities have been shattered:

Each one does what he can. There are many worse things than this. Every one has to do this, one day or another. You are not afraid of it once you know you have to do it, are you?

I hate to leave, is all. I hate to leave it very much and I hope I have done some good in it. I’ve tried to with what talent I had.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave.

You do not want to complain when you have been so lucky.

Best Wishes.

Richard

In addition to his wife Toby, Richard leaves his children Jeffrey and Sarah, his sister Janet McElroy, his stepsister Elaine Savattere, his stepbrother Donald Brennan, and numerous nieces and nephews. He was the brother of the late Barbara Cummings.

The family will host a memorial gathering on Sunday, December 8, 2024, from 5-8 p.m. at home.

Donations in his memory are requested to Hope Health Hospice, 1085 N Main St, Providence, RI, 02904, which provided compassionate and thoughtful care for the past 18 months.