Don Lacoss is gone? One year ago today and I’m just finding out? I had a feeling that something was wrong in the moral fabric of the universe. I’m just terribly sad to find that we’ve lost Don.
My thoughts turned to Don in the past few days and I wanted to check his email address when I saw the obituary and the lovely recollections on the blog here.
It was last week that Jo and I were walking in Paris in the rue Larrey, just off of the Place Monge, and we looked up at the apartment where we had once lived, where Don and Carolyn had once lived. (It was Don, I think, who told me that he was redubbing it the rue Larry, Moe and Curly.) I didn’t have much trouble remembering the yellow wallpaper, the tiny bathtub, the balcony, and picturing Don in the impossibly curved bed with the bookshelf full of abstract sculptures.
I can’t think of Ann Arbor without thinking of Don. He was a fellow traveler in French history but so much more than that. He lit the place up with his personality and his wit. I can still see him in the corner of our living room or deep in a chair on our back porch, sitting on the floor caressing (our dog) Maddy, or curiously looking over (our newborn) Margot. He knew everything I listened to, everything I’d read, everything that was going on, and had a wisecrack or an insight about all of it. He made the whole thing – graduate school, French history, ideas – seem like a glorious adventure.
Random thoughts come to mind: Don’s picture of himself standing in front of “Foucault’s Furniture.” Don’s remark that he would never write the same after the arrival of hypertext – Everything connects to everything, no? – and Laura Down’s comment that she couldn’t imagine him ever having written in a linear fashion. Our email exchanges. While I was in Paris studying French sensationalism of the 19th c., Don sent me weekly updates on the O.J. case. The conference panel we did together a couple years after graduate school. It was performance art – Don could play the academic better than most of us.
I’ve felt at a loss that I haven’t seen more of Don in the last years. I’ve missed him. We exchanged emails every year or two and shared updates on kids, writing projects, misanthropy. But especially kids. I haven’t seen Benjamin in the flesh, but I felt the immense power of Don’s paternal joy every time we wrote.
This news leaves me terribly sad. But I can’t deny the pleasure it has been to read all of these recollections and see these pictures and remember how much love and friendship and wit and charm and intelligence Don spread. My thoughts go out to his family and all of his friends. We miss you, Don. Greg Shaya
