Editorially Speaking

By Sheryl LeSage

As most readers of this newspaper will already be aware, Jim Freeman, who was known to most of us via his public persona of Fritz Capone, passed away recently. I can’t share stories about him because I never knew him personally.

However, it would be impossible to be a member of the GLBT community in the central plains without having known who he was, or being affected by his life in some way. I can’t think about his passing without musing over the impact any of our lives has on each other.

When he died, I passed the information on via my Facebook page, and got dismayed responses from all over the country. People who haven’t lived in Wichita for years took the time to send their stories and condolences to those who did know him. People shared stories of how he helped them come out, how he helped them find friends, how he helped them in more material ways. People saw him as a mother/father figure.

The thing that surprised me the most was that not one person had anything bad to say about the man. Not one. We are a community that sometimes eats our young, so to speak, and we don’t always sheathe our claws when someone dies. But for this man we did, and I think that says as much about his life and the way he lived it as anything could.

This path of thought leads me, naturally, to Socrates and Jesus. When Socrates was on his death bed, his young students gathered around him and stood there in tears to witness his passing. One of them summoned the courage to ask him a final question: “Can you leave us with any final advice on how to live?” His answer, after a few moments, was simply, “Prepare to die.”

I tell people this story and they invariably find it deeply morbid. “What?” they ask, “I’m supposed to spend all my time on this earth thinking about moldering underneath it?” And no, of course not.

What I think Socrates meant was just that we all do have to go someday. If we are fortunate enough at the end to be able to reflect on what we’ve done and how we’ve lived, we probably want to be proud of our choices. We all have regrets, of course, but we might have fewer of those if we stopped and pondered whether our ancient dying selves would want us to do what we’re about to do.

Jesus has a contribution to make here, too. While I am not a Christian, I can certainly respect much of what the Rabbi had to say. One of his lessons, and possibly the one most often ignored by the most outspoken and public Christians, is my favorite.  He was talking one day to his disciples, and when they asked how to live, he congratulated them: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” (Sorry about that King James translation; I know it isn’t the most accurate or modern, but it IS the most poetic and it will always be the one I resort to when I feel a need to say anything Biblical.)

The disciples were confused, because as far as they knew, Jesus had been hanging out with them for several years and they had not noticed him ever starving, thirsting, or wandering around in search of a place to spend the night. They asked for clarification, and he explained that — since “love one another” was, after all, his “only command,” that every time they gave money to a beggar, or donated their extra cloaks to the lending closet, or opened their houses to wandering strangers, or visited people in prison, that is, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

However we treat people, especially people at the bottom of the social and/or economic ladder that is how we are treating Jesus, according to the man himself. Live selfishly, he was saying, at the peril of your soul.

Now, as I said, I am not a Christian. Christians don’t traditionally believe that animals have souls, but that seems like crazy talk to me. I remember once wondering aloud how funny it would be if there really was a heaven, but when we all approached the Pearly Gates, what if the final “pass Go, collect $200” factor was the way we treated children and animals? Adult humans, for the most part, can take care of themselves — at the least, we’ve made our beds and now must sleep in them. But kids haven’t done that, nor have the critters.

So what if we are finally judged for that time we didn’t spend volunteering at the Lord’s Diner, or contributing to those backpacks full of food for poor kids to eat over weekends? What if we are judged for the way we’ve treated our cats, our dogs, or even the animals we never see but who live and die at our mercy — or our lack of mercy?

What if it has nothing at all to do with who we married or which church we went to, but really, honestly, how we treated “the least of these”?

The acts we commit during our lives, like everything we do online, hang there in fact and consciousness forever. They don’t go away or leave our memories simply because we might wish them to. A person is never too young — or too old, for that matter — to start living as if each day the last. From what I know of Jim/Fritz’s life, he must have done this, in the best tradition of Socrates and Jesus. I can only hope to do half as well myself.