In February 1998, someone I admired -- a talented, intelligent man -- ended his life. I had the opportunity to read this at his memorial service at the University of Iowa.

In Memoriam: Jonathan Game
When I started graduate school at Purdue's Calumet Campus, another student told me there were two basic, opposing forces: eros and thanatos. Eros was life and love and creation and vibrancy and such. Thanatos was death and decay, stagnation and destruction, the antithesis of life.
I always saw Jonathan as an embodiment of eros, full of the fire, enjoyment, energy and chaos that life promised, and far from the stultification, complacency and archaic order that many people I knew had fallen into. Certainly he could change the mood of the room by his presence.
He was also the only one in the journalism department who had a better hat collection than I did.
I can't say we were very close. In 1995-96 we almost became roommates, but during the apartment search we realized that between my allergy to cigarettes and his penchant for chain smoking while studying, it probably wasn't going to work out.
And that was very like Jonathan. He enjoyed his vices -- not excessively. He took pleasure in the cigarettes he laced with kinnick-kinnick to try and cut back on nicotine. He liked a drink, a good story, a good time, a good argument, the company of women.
He liked to challenge people's beliefs. And I joined in on many arguments, with or against him. But there was no malice there, and Jonathan had little actual malice in him. His most common invective was, "Can you believe. . ."? "Can you believe that," or "Can you believe they did that," or "Can you believe they didn't." He often followed it with, "Man, I don't know. . ."
It was a statement of optimism, in a way -- of hope, an affirmation. Jonathan believed in a greater good and that people could and would see that and act on it. I envied that in him, having lost mine.
He also liked a bit of mischief and would frequently say a little something to perk your ears up or get your goat. You knew that he had taken you in again when you saw the twinkle in his eye and that wonderful grin.
He was absolutely charming that way and perhaps that's why he always seemed to have a beautiful companion.
Certainly I was enthralled by him.
I always felt very comfortable around Jonathan. He was one of the few in the department who did not make me feel out of place because I am a working class kid who had gone to a small, commuter college and did not know the rules or mores of the middle class and the large college. I enjoyed talking politics in Deadwood with him, and between our two divergent views and styles, we came to some interesting truths that did actually borne out later. With Jonathan, what I knew, what I was, was worth something.
Students of his felt the same. Undergraduates who worked for me at The North Liberty Leader had a lot to say about him, and coming from a teaching family, I knew that was a measure of excellence. They did not just learn something, he instilled in many a desire and fire that he had for the subject.
Jonathan was about that. He brought that lust for life, that joie de vivre, to everything he did. He had a boyish quality in the pleasure he got from the simplest things, and enjoyed everything in life, from learning what tricks he could do on the computer with Photoshop to sitting in a sweatlodge with Native Americans and sharing in their ceremony.
I remember him telling me about a lecture he planned to attend at Prairie Lights, some academic reading from his current book of teaching theory. It sounded frightfully dull to me. But Jonathan was about as excited as a seven-year-old going to see Star Wars for the first time. And it was catching.
That was why he was a scholar. He held a fascination for so many aspects of life, and he wanted to explore them fully, wanted to know them in the most intense and thorough ways possible. In the words of Ezra Pound, another iconoclast, "No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere.'' Jonathan was not the kind who hid behind books in the name of academic work but immersed himself in his subject.
It would have been interesting to see what kind of successes he went on to in the future, as certain as he would have made a name for himself.
One of the things people say at gatherings like these is, "he will be missed.'' That's misleading. We already miss Jonathan. That's why we're here.


All material on this page © James D. Wolf, Jr., unless otherwise noted.
Use by others without permission prohibited.

Click here to go back to the general writing page.