Jed Devine

This is my eulogy from Jed’s Memorial in NYC, June 14th, 2025 I have been trying to find the words for a tribute to my beloved husband. There is so much that I would like to say, but I am not a crafter of words. So I thought of breaking it down into parts to help me through it. In the early summer of 2001, an old friend called out of the blue and asked me if I would like to have a summer correspondence with this great guy, smart, funny, all American, a ballplayer, photographer. Intrigued I said, yes, I’ll email him. She replied that he was a Luddite and during the summers he lived on a small island off the coast of Maine with no cars, electricity, running water; like in an earlier century and that he would write me letters. I agreed and received the first of a whole series of handwritten letters, in whimsical hand drawn envelopes along with a copy of his wonderful Friendship book. He was an incredibly deep and graceful writer. Back and forth our letters flowed, a couple, then three, then everyday for 6 weeks. They were the kind of letters that delved deep, full of questions, descriptions of daily life, our former lives, what we loved to do, how we thought. September came and Jed was going back to the city and teaching. My friends said I should get down to the city as soon as possible to meet him. So I came down Sept 8th. He came to pick me up for dinner and when the elevator doors opened, I thought, even though he is wearing a Kelly green polo shirt, this could be serious. The next day he asked me to meet him downtown on the Hudson, for a surprise. He had bought tickets for a sunset sail out past the Statue of Liberty, curling around the lower Hudson. I was standing with my back to the schooner, as I get seasick just looking at boats. Once he realized that, he said not to worry, we would just skip it. I said let’s give it a whirl, and on we went and had a beautiful sail, with no seasickness at all. When we came back into the slip, Jed asked if I’d ever been to the top of the World Trade Towers. I hadn’t, so we took the elevator up and had drinks at Windows on the World. I remember having a Cosmopolitan (Sex in the City days), and he, an Irish whiskey. He took me around all the windows pointing out the bridges, the sites. 36 hours later they were gone, and the world had changed. We were together ever since. I started to learn what was most important to him immediately. After the first plane hit, he took his camera to the building’s rooftop and shot negatives, and then the second plane struck…..and then he realized that there were people jumping. He put away his camera and came down to his loft leaving a message on the answering machine for his family that he was okay, especially worried about Siobhan, who had just arrived at Newark airport as the first tower was hit. He then left the loft with just a change of clothes and a Strand bag full of undeveloped 11 x 14 negatives. You learn a lot about a person when a calamity strikes. He was fully present, comfortable in his own skin. Generous. Kind. He was passionate in his love of family, friends, his work, poetry and the arts, teaching, sports involving hands and a ball (which didn’t include soccer), horse racing, and the 4 cats that were in our lives at different times. He was an avid Giants football fan. He routed against the Yankees, instead routing for the Mets, or whatever team was the underdog or whose coach he liked. He was a serious athlete who was followed by scouts from a young age. A bad tackle in High School ended his dream of becoming a professional ballplayer. But as I learned in our more that 23 years together, he was always able to accept and pivot. When balance issues made it impossible for him to use his large format cameras and be in a darkroom, he turned to digital color photography. He loved to make things. That is how he put it. He made the ordinary, extraordinary. And he did an astounding body of work. He gave me the gift of having 2 stepchildren who in turn with their spouses gave me the gift of being a grandmother to 4 grandchildren. He was by and large a homebody and what he called, a “local traveler”. He was a Romantic, a pragmatic, he was reasonable, and unreasonable, would call himself a recluse, but that was not exactly true as he could be the life of the party. He was capable of passionate anger and letting people know his views, and stony moods. He made politically biting postcards and posters and took politics very seriously. He had such a great sense of humor and a wild laugh. He loved teasing and I am gullible, so I was a good mark, until Siobhan gave me his tell. A nostril flare! The grandchildren delighted in knowing this and would always be looking at his nose when he was horsing around. He was superstitious. Black cats, hats on beds, ladders, mirrors. He became a Black Hat master of Feng shui, he read palms (his Polish grandmother had taught him as a child). and after much reading, believed in no free will, which we argued about. And I held onto the belief that he would live until 87 as that is what a Chinese palm reader told him in Confucius Square decades before. Maine was a huge part of his life, living in another time, within the natural world’s rhythms, the 12 foot tides, the changing weather, his small market garden, the fox who came nightly to the compost heap, the star filled skies. He had cleared an area by hand with his great friend, Jim, so that he could build what he called a wooden tent, but which was, in fact a comfortable wooden house with a view of the water through spruces, ledges, out to the lobster buoys and boats, and beyond, at night the blinking lighthouse on Mohegan. He was especially proud of the windowed outhouse that he built on his own, along with the more than 150 species of daylily that he had planted. He had made an Eden. When I want to imagine peace, I visualize being on the deck with him having a cup of tea in the late afternoon, or watching the nightly fire in the wood stove with our 2 cats. We lived our lives together with much joy.  We spent much of our time in our studios working nearby each other. We understood each other and were deeply connected through our work. He was my second pair of eyes. In 2018, we were told that he had a rare heart disease and had only 20% of it’s function left. He faced this with great fortitude and grace, working to live as long and as well as he could. He pivoted again to what he could do, leaving what he couldn’t behind. He lived in the present……And he lived well beyond his prognosis. He was loved and had loved deeply. He had a singular life, felt himself lucky and lived as he wanted, doing what he loved. Julien Barnes wrote after the death of his wife “What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there,” “this may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible”. That is how I feel, that I have lost greater than half of myself, but am grateful for the years that we had together. Living with him made me more of myself. Jed would often use this phrase that he heard from an Irishman after asking directions…they were quite complicated. But after each part, the Irishman would say “go on reassured”. When I ask Jed what I should do, that is the phrase I hear. “Go on reassured”