In Memoriam
Eric Steven Weiss
1950-2021
We come from Love. We return to Love. Love is all around.
God is Love. – Pierre Wolff
All of Life is a homecoming, a coming home to Love. – KA Kubicek
Beginning way back in our life together, Eric and I often
spoke of such things. We shared a spiritual journey. When his cancer in the
need for a liver transplant, we talked for hours on the phone about life,
death, gratitude, hope, and Love – central themes for our respective religious
backgrounds. We also talked about music, the day’s political upheavals, and
family life. After the transplant the change in Eric’s spirit seemed palpable
to me. Pretty much all other topics faded into the background as he would talk
about his new lease on life to spend with Lois, their children and
grandchildren. Each day he felt was precious. Come what may, he would say, he
was grateful for just one more day.
We met in September 1968 as Freshmen at Trinity College,
Hartford, CT. Four years of excitement, some hard work, and some risky and even
dangerous behavior. He was the roommate of my High School Tennis Doubles
Partner, David Barans. This was how we found out we each had alternative names:
Eric was called The Kid…I the Chief. After four years, I
ended up playing drums in the Outerspace Band and Eric emerged as our manager. He
managed to get us into some iconic venues: Jack’s on Mass Ave, CBGBs and Max’s
Kansas City….and oh yes, The Warwick Inn with its poster sized photo on the
wall of The World Champion Chinchilla. Managing us proved more difficult. We
were a headstrong bunch of unmanageable musicians. That he succeeded at all was
a miracle and an early sign of his perseverance.
There are a lot of directions I could go with this
remembrance, but it’s our conversations on the spiritual dimension of life and Eric’s
cars that bring it all together for me.
First, there was his Chevy SS Super Sport which like the two
of us had a name, ironic as it was: The Storm Trooper. And I and one or two
others from Trinity were in it the night he totaled it on the FDR while showing
a few of us “The City.” His cousin Alan rescued us.
The Storm Trooper was followed by a green Firebird. An
uncharacteristic Saab nick-named the Slobbbb came next. For the band, he found
us a Checker Station Wagon which could hold some gear and five of us from town
to town playing gigs. I swear that car could drive itself.
Then it came. One day he asked me to drive him to Hawley
Massachusetts to buy a used car. We didn’t know it, but the car was at a Buddhist
temple and a community young men who were devotees of a Tibetan Lama, Dodrupchen
Rinpoche. It happens the Rinpoche was visiting America for the first time and
at this very place where the white Oldsmobile was living. Before purchasing the
car, we were given a private audience with Dodrupchen and his sidekick, Lama Jingtze.
During this audience we sat down in front of a shrine and the Rinpoche taught
us an ancient mantra which I have never forgotten. Only after this transcendent
experience could we drive off with the car. Had Eric not found this particular
car we would never have met this most Holy spiritual guide. I still use the
mantra often, and consider it a gift from Eric to this day.
The years 1980-83 we were both in school in NYC: he in Law
School, while I was in Seminary. We would compare notes on our school life, and
I that’s when I attended Gabe’s Bar Mitzvah. We were finally launching our
adult vocations. Our mutual love of music, however, always remained the glue.
Music, that mysterious universal language that is difficult to describe, but
which can propel the musician and the listener to new dimensions of the spirit.
Kurt Vonnegut once said we have been given one good idea so far: to be
merciful. Perhaps, he said, we may get a second good idea, and what it is he
could not guess. But Vonnegut was sure that somehow music is the second good
idea being born.
All of which is to say, we shared a yearning for the
spiritual life, and music had given us rare times when that which is utterly
other and beyond this world would break in: moments charged with soul.
Eric shared with me the beauty Jewish life, and I would in
turn, at his request, share who Jesus the Jew was for me. In our conversations,
Jesus emerges not as a dividing line between our two sacred traditions, but the
hinge that forever joins us all as people who serve the same God - in whose
service is perfect freedom.
Before the liver transplant, Eric made me promise to be here
for this day if things did not turn out well. Fortunately for all of us, it
turned better than could be expected, and we all were gifted a few more
wonderful years with our dear friend, manager, spiritual fellow traveler and loving
husband, father and grandfather. Today we are here to give thanks for these times
we have had together.
Eric now knows better than I can ever say that indeed, we
come from Love, we return to Love, and Love is all around. He has been and
remains a significant part of the love that surrounds us, just as we will
eternally surround him with our love every day.
All of life is a homecoming. Eric has gone home. In the
grand scheme of things, we will not be far behind. What a gift Eric has been
and remains. Now it is time for us to share Eric with everyone we meet,
everyone we know, everyone we love.
Because Eric was Love personified – the Love of God, HaShem,
the Love that sent us here, and the Love that calls us home. Amen.
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