Even the way James “Jim” Kinhan’s celebration of life ceremony began reflected the way he had lived.
“Grab a kazoo,” ushers told people as they filed into the South Congregational Church in Concord on Sunday afternoon.
In a two-hour ceremony attended by more than 200 people, punctuated with several renditions of “This Little Light of Mine,” Kinhan’s friends, family and former colleagues recalled a man who had been joyful, silly, generous – and most of all, loving.
The former therapist and right-to-die advocate who died of colon cancer earlier this month made national headlines earlier this year when he stumped Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with a question about death with dignity in a televised town hall.
But back home in Concord on Sunday, Kinhan was remembered for his decades of local volunteerism, kindness and indomitable cheer.
In the last months of his illness, Ginny Mierins, Kinhan’s partner, recalled he often said the same thing.
“ ‘Maybe we didn’t have a good day. But we had a good hour,’ ” she remembered him saying. “And we have so many good hours.”
Surveying the crowd, which filled the church’s pews and spilled onto the balcony upstairs, Mierins quipped that she “(couldn’t) help but think if he were here he’d be trying to figure out a way to make this a fundraiser” – a line that earned belly laughs from the audience.
Kinhan’s daughter, Maryellen Kinhan, read from one of her father’s favorite books, The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, ending with its meditation on friendship, and the line he liked the most – “For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”
John Kinhan, Kinhan’s younger brother, began his address to the audience soberly.
“To be, or not to be. That is –” he said, before his brother Michael Kinhan interrupted theatrically.
“HELLO,” Michael Kinhan said. “Let’s lose the Shakespeare.”
John Kinhan obliged, instead telling the audience about Kinhan’s antics from adolescence into adulthood – like screaming at the top of his lungs as they passed through a carwash.
But Kinhan, 12 years his senior, had been an unwavering, protective and guiding presence, John Kinhan told the crowd.
“We were all better for Jim’s presence and his influence, and his devoted love, all of us. That’s a fact. Undeniable, immutable, and remarkable,” he said.
Peter Kinhan, his son, said he hadn’t shared his father’s beliefs about the afterlife. But he had felt his father’s presence, since his death, in unexpected ways. An avid golfer, his father had been felt when he unexpectedly got a hole-in-one, he joked. But also in the moments he spent with his daughters before school – a mirror image of the Batman-and-Cheerio mornings he had had with Kinhan as a child.
“You are a part of me, and a part of who I am,” he said.
Kim Yarlott recalled not Jim Kinhan but “Mr. Jim,” who tutored and mentored children in her school for years.
Yarlott recalled a man stopping her on the street with Kinhan’s signature “Woo-woo-hoo-woo!” to ask if he could volunteer.
“He didn’t just volunteer. He became the fabric of the school. Actually, more like a beautifully rich, poetic and bright tapestry,” she said.
Yarlott said she had come to rely on Kinhan to work with her most challenging students. To the defiant student who declared: “I can’t!” Kinhan always had the same, smiling reply.
“And what if you could?”
Kinhan had lived in a world of possibility, Yarlott said, recalling the many adventures the two of them had planned for students. She remembered taking a class of elementary students to hike a mountain – only to find the passage road closed upon arrival.
Kinhan tested the gate, and finding it wouldn’t give, decided to go another route. A class of second-graders in tow, he simply hiked up Mount Kearsarge – on the steep side.
“The next time you hear someone say ‘I can’t’ – throw your head back, smile and say: what if? What if you could?” Yarlott said.
Gerri King, Kinhan’s former colleague, said she remembered him calling her to tell her, in his final months, that she should come see him soon.
“With my heart in my mouth, I said: ‘Should I come tomorrow?’ And he said, ‘No – I’m playing golf tomorrow,’ ” she said. “He finally could fit me into schedule five days later.”
Kinhan had been a “genius” with patients because he was genuinely fascinated by his clients, she said, and because he really cared.
“He was my professional role model, and he was my personal role model. He taught us how to live, he taught us to live until you die. And he taught us how to die,” she said.
(Lola Duffort can be reached at 369-3321 or lduffort@cmonitor.com.)