When I learned he was gone, I turned out the light and cried like a child. It was too late in the night to make calls, and better to remember the grace and reconciliation he brought into hundreds of lives, including mine.

We met 11 years ago when he congratulated me on my first milepost as a recovering alcoholic: one month of uninterrupted sobriety.

I remember feeling surprise and a twinge of awkwardness. In the long and uneven history of reluctant abstinence, 30 days without a drink didn’t seem to qualify me for the Olympics. I wasn’t totally sure that he was serious. Maybe this was some harmless initiation rite impressing the neophyte with the long grind ahead down a road that had chewed up millions of vows and shaky resolutions.

It wasn’t an act. He was serious. He was a big guy with a quiet and unhurried voice and a face that seemed to invite trust. He had the modest presence of a man who long ago had ridden out a storm and come to terms with a kinder self. He smiled often and without provocation. I don’t know if this made him the stereotypical lawyer, but he was a lawyer, it turned out, and a good one. We sat in a coffee shop that day, and my education at the age of 64 began to expand.

He said 30 days was an achievement. Tomorrow, he said, it would be 31, and 32 the next. He didn’t tell me to do the math, but the idea was hard to mistake. If I didn’t get absorbed with the road ahead, he said, it would be simpler. If I didn’t let myself be smothered by guilt looking back at my follies and self-indulgence, it would be easier. It would be easier if I dealt honestly with the offenses of my years of alcoholism, made my apologies and asked those I’d wronged to forgive me. I needed to know that I didn’t have to walk the road alone. And in the end I would be free, released from the temptation to wear a mask or to reach for false and fickle suns of gratification. I would find that the make-believe world of lubricated good times could never be as good as a new and sober today, because today we could look at the world with clear minds and a new respect for truth. And if we weren’t totally rid of the self-deceptions and shams of our drinking years, at least today we could now recognize personality warps for what they are and try to blunt some of the jagged edges.

He said “we.” He was then in his 19th year of sobriety. He’d been a cop and then a trial lawyer, Gerald Freeman of Minneapolis. There were times in his drinking career when he’d given a reasonable impersonation of a hell-raiser, but that was then. What he became in the next 30 years was a man whose wisdom and internal strength rescued the lives of scores of men and women in his profession, and scores of troubled people who had never known him until alcohol shredded their lives. He listened to those who were willing to put the pieces back together and to restore value to their lives, and he became their advocate.

Alcoholics Anonymous wisely counsels anonymity among its members, although because of its work in raising public awareness, alcoholism does not carry the same degrading stigma it once did. The rule of anonymity is not set in granite. There are some whose circumstances make it difficult or in fact impossible to keep that identity secret. In this, Jerry and I were alike. I wrote of my drunk driving case and subsequent treatment when I was a newspaper columnist in Minneapolis; Jerry was a founder of an organization to restore alcoholic lawyers to sobriety. We became friends and, five years ago, he became my sponsor in AA. In the first few years we lunched often, talked about our lives, about the Vikings, occasionally about politics although we weren’t always working with the same alphabet there, and later we talked about his declining health. He was careful not to brood about it. But he had trouble with his legs, and then more serious organic trouble that began taking him away from his work, and from the AA meetings, where he was always a figure of great esteem.

After each luncheon, we’d clasp hands and pray together and then exchange a hug. Our lives moved on different tracks and we were never the closest, drop-in friends. But we didn’t have to be that. Ours was the friendship of understanding, respecting what we saw and felt and heard in the hours we were together. Our meetings weren’t all that solemn. Jerry had the story teller’s gift, robust and creative and a few times inexhaustible.

His health eroded. He had respiratory breakdowns, sieges of pneumonia, and later his disorders compounded and forced him into extended hospital treatment. He underwent operations and rehabilitation. He never showed a symptom of giving up. Three and four times he appeared to be at the edge of death but rallied. His disposition seemed never to change. Incredibly, he was still courteous and interested when he had the energy, lying on a hospital bed, scarcely able to breathe.

I began to remember his instinctive humanity of our talks. Once I told him of a grief that kept recurring, something out of years past. It was fostered by a regret so painful that I kept digging it up, wanting in hindsight to redress something that was beyond reach. We were silent for a few moments. I looked up and found my friend trying to smile, but doing it rather damply. “That was yesterday,” he said. “A lot of yesterdays. This is today. You’re all right. You can let it go.”

I visited him at a hospital in Rochester in late December a few days before my wife and I left on a trip to Europe. By then he was in and out of consciousness, sometimes recognizing his visitor, sometimes not. He had stopped breathing once, but his wife’s swift call to hospital attendants brought him back. He was asleep and briefly alone on the day I visited. I called his name and told him I was Jim, coming to see him. He began to open his eyes and tried to speak. Nothing came. His eyes closed. “Jerry, I brought a Christmas card.” There was no response. I didn’t want to leave because I knew I wouldn’t see him again. I’ll never know whether he heard me. But I wanted to give testimony to this lawyer friend of mine, with whom I had prayed, who had said today is what mattered, so give it your energy, your generosity and your care. I spoke as clearly as I could and told Jerry Freeman what he had brought into my life.

I said my work had been filled with the faces of people we call famous. Some were admirable people, some not. Among all these, I had never met a man who moved me more profoundly than Jerry Freeman. This was a man of integrity and commitment but still a regular guy in any crowd yet always in search. I remembered the trip we shared in the Holyland six years ago. We’d seen the historic sites of Christian, Jewish and Islamic faith, the church that had risen above Golgotha, and affirmed our baptism in the waters of the Jordan. And then we stood together and looked across the deep gorge that is now called the Wadi Quelt, and saw the same dirt road, virtually changed in 2,000 years, that Jesus Christ walked from Jericho to Jerusalem.

No one spoke. The sight reached across the chasm of centuries, overwhelming and indelible.

Before I left the hospital, I touched his arm and his cheek and thanked him for all he had given me. I don’t know if he heard. The night I returned home from our trip I looked at my email letters and learned that Jerry had died on Christmas night. His loved ones were with him and he died in peace. He couldn’t have known the number of lives he saved or changed. I can only tell you that mine was one of them.

---Jim Klobuchar

Copyright (c) 2005 Jim Klobuchar