“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.”
— Lao Tzu
Friday, August 21st, 2026, two days after his seventy-seventh birthday,
Jim Hussey made the crossing.
He was my closest friend. And now, like Marty before him, he is gone—dissolved into something I can name only imprecisely, and only in the language of metaphor and quiet grief.
All of my closest male friends have now departed. I am not yet sure what to do with that fact, except to write it down and let it breathe.
Perhaps today is the day I finally let myself grieve it fully.
The Architecture of a Life Well-Lived
Jim did not have an easy beginning.
He grew up in Alaska, in a home where his father—a sheriff with the Anchorage police—wielded authority through violence. Jim took the beatings in stride and, for years, saw them as just part of life. When cruelty is all kids know, they simply call it normal.
It took a spiritual counselor, years later, to say plainly what Jim had never been given permission to hear:
“You were abused by your father.”
That sentence cracked something open in him. And what poured through that crack, over the decades that followed, was nothing short of remarkable.
He entered the Vietnam War in 1968 through the Navy. When he returned, he did not retreat into bitterness or isolation. Instead, he traveled—Spain, France, and other places whose names he carried like postcards—moving through the world and leaving genuine marks on the people whose lives briefly intersected with his. There was something in Jim that was constitutionally incapable of passing through experience without making real contact with it.
Back in America, he settled in Oregon.
He married his first wife in the early 1980s. That marriage did not survive her infidelities—but Jim, with characteristic grace, never allowed bitterness to become a personality trait. He metabolized the pain and moved forward. That was always his way.
What followed was a life built on curiosity, community, and an almost gravitational pull toward those who were suffering. He became deeply involved in the Transcendental Meditation movement, collecting friendships the way some men collect grievances. He took up clogging and folk dancing—not as hobbies, exactly, but as additional rooms in which to show up fully.
He visited with Haven Boggs long before the Living Enrichment Center of Oregon came into being. Jim was to become one of the first members of Living Enrichment Center, which grew to a membership of several thousand people in the early 1990’s, popularized by its charismatic and nationally known minister Mary Boggs. And in one of his most quietly significant chapters, he became the first paid employee of the Dougy Center—a nonprofit devoted entirely to helping grieving children navigate loss.
He worked in the mental health field throughout the Portland area, including at Columbia River Mental Health—where, long before he knew me well, he had already crossed paths with my first wife, Donelle. The world Jim inhabited was always smaller and more interconnected than it appeared. He worked for Green Cross, which deployed him to Indonesia in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—a magnitude 9.2 megathrust earthquake that killed nearly 228,000 people across fourteen countries. In the shattered province of Aceh, Jim sat with survivors and taught them techniques for immediate relief from trauma, including the tapping solution, offering his presence as a form of medicine in a place where medicine alone was not enough.
He returned from Indonesia and went on to earn his doctoral degree at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, becoming a licensed psychologist. He eventually joined the staff at Kaiser Sunnyside Hospital in Clackamas County, where he worked until his retirement in 2023. He worked in the Brookside wing—the very building I had been wiring for electrical construction in 2006, just before I left the trades to join the City of Portland’s Water Bureau. We had been in the same building, in different roles, without knowing it. That kind of quiet coincidence seemed to follow Jim everywhere.
A man devoted to helping the living grieve. And now, the living must grieve him.
The Architecture of a Friendship
Jim and I first found each other in 1992, at an Empowerment workshop that Sharon and I supported alongside its creators, Diane and Michael Sutton. It was the kind of room that sorts people quickly—those performing their growth, and those actually doing it.
Jim was doing it.
Our wives—Sharon, Jo, and Eddy—later found each other through a women’s group they co-created in 1994, inspired by the Empowerment Community. With characteristic wisdom and mild conspiracy, they arranged for their husbands to meet. That is how Jim, Marty, and I became friends. We showed up initially out of obligation to their vision. Gratitude followed, as it tends to when you stop resisting what is good for you.
We became close. Three men who had each, in their own way, survived their pasts and themselves. The couples group began meeting monthly in 1996, and what was built inside that gathering—over years and seasons and the slow accumulation of shared life—was something I will never fully be able to articulate. It was simply one of the genuine gifts of my life.
Twenty-one years later, Marty left us on September 11, 2017. Six months of malignant melanoma—a cancer he had believed himself cured of in 2013, after enduring six excruciating months of Interleukin II therapy. When the cancer returned in March of 2017, he met it with deep terror. Yet over those final months, we watched a man negotiate the approach of death with genuine curiosity—about the spiritual life, about the possibility of healing—until he ultimately chose Oregon’s Death with Dignity to end his life on the day of his choosing. His passing ended the couples group.
Grief of that magnitude tends to end things.
Jim took up golf during this period, and it became a real passion. He would get Frank Hartley, Sharon, and me out on the course regularly, and those hours together were a genuine pleasure. The golf course was Jim’s primary relationship with the natural world—he had little interest in the hikes that Sharon, Marty, and I frequently took into the Columbia River Gorge. He also golfed often with Jo’s family, including her son Ben and son-in-law Brad, both based in Washington.
Then the body began to speak. Jim started showing distressing physical limitations—struggling to walk uphill on warm days, wearying more easily than before. It was eventually discovered that a major blockage in a coronary artery—the widow maker—had been quietly doing its work. A stent was placed in time, and he was given a path back toward normal life. But something else had already begun. Blood work revealed abnormalities, and Jim was diagnosed with multiple myeloma—the same disease that eventually took my mother’s life. He broke a bone in his back, and so began his occasional reliance on morphine to manage the pain. He tried four different treatment protocols, each one leaving him more diminished than the last, each one followed by lengthy hospitalizations. He refused the fifth option, which was considered the most brutal of all.
Throughout his own decline, Jim continued to give. His brother Jerry had received a bladder cancer diagnosis and was deteriorating steadily. Jim—despite his own ebbing energy—stepped in to help manage Jerry’s hospital visits and to address the practical dimensions of a life that had begun to come apart at the seams. He ministered to his brother with care and consistency, even as his own reserves ran low. Jerry died earlier this year.
Jim was placed on palliative care, which helped for a time. Hospice care came two weeks before the end. He was able to remain at home, and to die in a way that honored his spiritual life.
It is hard, watching the steady parade of those you love most as they dissolve into the beyond.
The Circuit Running at Higher Voltage
Jim saw himself as a traveler on the path of the Tao.
In the terms I think about most, he was someone who had faced his second death long before the first. The ego-bound self—the part that clings, defends, and builds elaborate structures around its own importance—had been largely dismantled in him years before cancer rendered the question moot.
He was something of a Bodhisattva. A soul who had quietly seen through the fabric of ordinary illusion, yet still chose to remain present for others—to help them move through their suffering with greater ease and dignity. He understood, with rare clarity, the difference between the world as it appears and the world as it truly is.
In my electrician’s language: the energy running through Jim had always operated at a higher voltage than most wires can carry. He was, more often than not, a saint in human clothing—though he could grip the mortal experience with genuine passion when the moment called for it. That was the paradox of him: deeply unattached, yet fully alive. Surrendered to the Tao, yet present enough to make you feel, in any given conversation, that you were the most important person in the room.
He had more than his share of transcendental experiences, and spoke of them without fanfare. He wore his spiritual depth lightly, the way a river wears its current—you only noticed the force of it when you stepped in.
He did push back on me, now and then. He had little faith in the ego’s messages and often disagreed when I suggested the ego was not the enemy. Our paths diverged in places, even as they resonated deeply. That friction was part of what made the friendship real. Jim did not mirror people. He met them.
The Last Tee Shot
Three weeks before his death, Jim joined Sharon, Frank Hartley, and me for what would be his final round of golf.
There is a video of that day. His last tee shot on the 8th hole—a par 3. He was too tired to play the 9th.
I have watched it more than once. I will not describe it in full, except to say that watching a man give everything he has left to a single moment—knowing, or sensing, that the moments are running out—is one of the most honest things I have ever witnessed. No performance. No commentary. Just the swing, and the ball, and the particular grace of a body doing what it loves while it still can.
He was too tired to play the 9th.
I think about that sentence more than I should.
The Last Hug
His birthday arrived just two days before the end.
I visited him the day before his birthday. I was the last person he was able to get out of bed to embrace. My visit tired him so deeply that he canceled all other visitors that day. He made the turn not long after I left.
There are moments you carry differently than other moments. They do not sit in memory the way ordinary recollections do. They settle into the body—in the sternum, in the hands—the way a current lingers in a wire after the power is cut.
That hug is in my core now.
I expect it will remain there.
What He Declined to Leave Behind
In the weeks before his death, I offered Jim a series of questions. I wanted to give him a chance to leave a verbal legacy—a gift for those who would remain. He had expressed regret that he did not submit a chapter for a friend who had written a book about her Dougy Center experience. I wanted to give him a chance to get his voice on the permanent record.
He declined. He called the idea too self-indulgent.
I understood, even if I didn’t agree. Jim’s way of moving through life was never about recording himself, though he spent a lot of time writing a book—never published—some of it inspired by the theories of Spiral Dynamics. His gift was always in his presence, not in preserving it. So, Jim—I’ve shared only the tiniest part of your story here, as gently as I can.
You can express any displeasure with me on the other side.
The Day That Held It All
That final Friday morning, I went to see Jim right after a death in Troutdale during my TIP work. I was still carrying the fragile, unnamed weight of a stranger’s grief—a woman my age who had suddenly lost her husband. Then there was Jim, unconscious, struggling to breathe, and gone within an hour of my leaving after I performed a shamanic practice for him. Later that same afternoon came yet another loss in downtown Portland—a young man dying from an overdose.
Friday was not a gentle day.
The universe, apparently, had decided I needed the full curriculum.
The Coyote Returns
Shortly after Jim passed, Sharon walked through North Clackamas Park and came upon a white coyote.
The coincidence of it stopped us both.
Because Marty—our Marty, who left us nine years earlier—had written about a coyote in his final creative work, penned just two weeks before his own death. We had been attending the OHSU men’s cancer survivors’ writing group together for several months. I too had carried a diagnosis of malignant melanoma, though I was graced with a remarkable intervention that spared my life. (Thank you, Dr. Steiger.)
Marty’s final piece was a story of release—from societal expectation, from rigid structure, from the slow oppression of the human spirit—and of the infinite freedom that waits beyond all of it. The coyote was his symbol. His avatar. His sign.
And now, it seems, Jim’s too.
Marty’s story deserves to be read in full, and so I offer it here:
“We visited the Riverview Cemetery last week, Doyle and I. Truth be told, I dragged Doyle there with me. I’m a green burial plot owner, and I wanted to see my plot and its surroundings in the morning sun from the East.
Although the hour was early, a couple of parties were already at the site—evidently an early graveside service, and a couple visiting a recently interred loved one with their dog. I was also looking for a sign of completion—a sign that Eddy and I had completed the arrangements for a ‘final rest’ in a good way.
I looked up the hillside and remarked to Doyle, ‘Look, a coyote loping through the midst of the people and their pets with such obvious self-confidence. You can always recognize a coyote—even if you don’t think you have ever seen one before. They are never frightened—just there, immune to danger and above the fray.’
Yes, I recognized my sign—the age-old sign of the trickster, the shape-shifting presence of the coyote. May he safely inhabit this place forever.”
Two friends. Two coyotes. One symbol, crossing the same threshold from opposite sides of a decade.
I do not know what to make of this, except that I know better than to dismiss it.
The Numerology of 77
In numerology, dying at 77 carries particular resonance. The doubled energy of the number 7 speaks to deep inner wisdom, spiritual awakening, and the completion of a profound inner journey. It suggests a peaceful transition—a soul that has finished its earthly curriculum and moves forward into something vast and unencumbered.
Jim has arrived at the singularity point, where the individual dissolves into the Cosmos. Chronological time has collapsed. What remains is the eternal constant—the current without the wire, the awareness without the form, the Tao moving through everything, unimpeded at last.
Seventy-seven years of energy transmission. A lifetime of holding a frequency that most wires cannot carry.
And now, Jim’s energy is free to roam the universe’s unlimited bandwidth of being.
To Jo
Jo, we are so deeply sorry for your loss.
Your love for Jim—and his for you—was one of the most quietly sustaining things I have ever had the privilege of witnessing. You were the axis around which so much of his later life turned with grace. The warmth the two of you created together was visible to everyone who entered your orbit. It made rooms warmer. It made people feel, without anyone having to say it, that love like this was still possible.
The couples group you helped build was one of the genuine gifts of my life. What grew inside that circle—over years and seasons and the slow accumulation of shared life—I will carry forward as long as I am here to carry anything.
Thank you for sharing him with us.
A Final Word Across the Threshold
Jim—I will not insult you with vain attempts to reach you through thoughts and prayers alone.
I already know that I am with you, eternally, in my heart.
You were my closest friend. And you were, without performance or announcement, one of the finest human beings I have ever known.
You were never frightened.
Just there.
Helping others.
Immune to danger and above the fray.
May you now inhabit that something vast and unencumbered—pure, unembodied, moving through the universe the way a coyote moves through a cemetery, with such obvious self-confidence that even the nearly dead stop to watch.
We all miss you.
I miss you.
