Michael Lomas

EULOGY FOR MIKE, JUNE 18, 2022 Mike was the grandson of my mother’s eldest brother, Phil Lomas, and thus my first cousin once removed. However, because our families were estranged long before we were born, we didn’t know each other existed until we were both in our forties. I remember that when he first walked into my apartment in New York, somehow I knew right away that he was a Lomas, and we gradually formed a bond that lasted right up until our last, optimistic conversation, the day before the surgery from which he never recovered. Mike was an extraordinary guy with a charming, kaleidoscopic personality. He loved films, Hollywood, fast cars, clothes, good food, celebrities, sports, first editions of Mark Twain, and smart, beautiful women. He also deeply valued history and education. He originally wanted to teach history and after getting a junior college degree, he spent a semester or two at USC. But in his middle teens, he became addicted to hobnobbing with film-world personalities and a glamorous life-style than he knew he couldn’t afford as a high-school teacher. So instead of becoming that, he became a TV commercials director. He was bright, creative, and successful, but by the time he was in his forties, alcohol had done him in. I met Mike in 1988, four years after he had joined AA. He showed tremendous determination and had been dealing successfully with his alcoholism in those years. (Ultimately, he would be stone-cold sober for 38 years.) When he first walked into my New York apartment over three decades ago, he held out his hand and said, with enormous self-confidence, “Hi. I’m Michael, your cousin.” Somehow from the start I knew that we were related, and we formed a bond. For a long time, though, I was never sure just what kind of bond it was. Mike was a natural-born entrepreneur, but he also tried some shady money-making schemes as well as some legitimate ones, many of which nobody could understand even when he explained them. At the same time, he was an inspirational speaker who could hold an audience at a recovery house (and me) spellbound. He idolized his great-aunt, my mother Frances Lomas Feldman, and loved getting together with his newly-rediscovered relatives. But he would also vanish from our lives for months at a time, then suddenly pop up again at a New Year’s Day party in Pasadena or on business in New York. So when the SEC finally caught up with his financial activities, we were horrified but not surprised. Still, our bond remained strong, and when my mother passed away soon after he was locked up, I felt a responsibility to try to make sure that he wasn’t left alone in prison, no matter what he had done, and I was certain that other people on our side of the family shared that feeling. Over the next thirteen years, as he was transferred from one awful Federal prison to another, I began to see that there was more to him than just living large and showing off. He got through prison in large part thanks to AA’s teachings and with the help of his sponsor, but also to his astonishing natural resilience, perseverance, and sense of humor. While he was in prison, he showed the world what he was really made of. Before that I had liked and pitied him; during his imprisonment, I came to feel great respect and admiration. He sponsored other inmates in AA and, drawing on a natural gift for teaching, he successfully tutored numerous younger inmates, thirteen of whom earned high school diplomas. He also never gave up hope that he would one day be reconciled with Christina, Mickey, Wednesday June, and Juli Ann, the children he had wronged. By the time he got out in March of 2021 and went to live with his daughter Wednesday, her husband Steve, and his three grandchildren, Ally, Gavin, and Gabby, all of whom he openly adored, I had come to find his courage and determination inspiring. I think it’s important to mention that Mike converted to Judaism as an adult. Judaism was the religion of his father Milton and the Lomas side of his family. Milton was a well-known union leader in California, but he was also a hard-boiled man and an old-fashioned punitive father. However, even though Mike hated his severity as a parent , he admired him tremendously as a man. I’m pretty sure that for Mike, a passionate lover of history and a deep believer in its lessons, formally converting to Judaism was his way of maintaining a connection with his father and the Jewish side of his family, as well as with Jewish history itself. He was never religious and wore his conversion lightly, but even in prison, he never failed to send me a card or an email greeting on the Jewish holidays. Furthermore, in the fall, no matter where he was or what terrible conditions he had to endure, in the fall he always observed the Jewish New Year by re-reading all one thousand pages of Herman Wouk’s novels, “The Winds of War” and “War and War and Remembrance.” So with that in mind, I’d like to end this eulogy not with the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, but with the famous blessing from Numbers 6:24-26 in the Jewish Torah (the Torah is what Jews call the first five books of the Old Testament), one that is also well known to Christians: a prayer for God’s compassion and also for us to have compassion for others: “May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. May the Lord lift his countenance to you and grant you peace. Amein.”