Hockey This Winter Is Helping Me Cope with Loss and Grief, Perhaps Even Playing a Healing Role

I made a new and fun friend out on the pond late last week, and at just the perfect time. His name is Donnie, and he moved to Maine about two months ago. Donnie hails from Flin Flon, Manitoba. That’s a long way from Maine! Donnie is my very first friend from Manitoba. Given that province’s legacy with hockey, I think it would be impossible for me not to try and befriend him.

Anyone who’s followed hockey in North America closely for a while knows of the pedigree of hockey players from Manitoba. It produces a special breed of men on blades — guys like Ron Hextall, Dave Semenko, Jody Shelley, Colton Orr, Bobby Clarke, Jordin Tootoo. Guys who skate with . . . an edge, you might say.

Donnie is on the shorter side, a bit like Bobby Clarke, but unlike Clarke Donnie’s in full possession of his teeth. During our warmup strides around the pond Donnie immediately identified himself as warm-natured and fun loving, perfect for our game. We his new shinny pals in turn had good fun with Donnie’s western Canuck heritage. On this February Friday morning Donnie was outfitted in black, from toque to boots, giving him a real outlaw-on-ice aura; I branded him the “Manitoba Mauler,” then settled, simply, on “Sandpaper.” He loved it. Importantly, I was smiling.

My pond pals always try to have a special set of skates over Super Bowl weekend, and with our skate Friday morning we inaugurated what we termed our pond’s Summit Series competition, derived of course from the legendary Canada-Russia Summit Series of 1974. In consideration of our chronology we couldn’t quite meet eight games in our series, settling instead on 2. We also needed time to sip Friday beers.

In time honored tradition we tossed our sticks into a pile at center pond to pick sides, and my stick got separated alongside Donnie’s. I liked that, a lot.

As our game got going Donnie and I took turns delivering high-pitched, highly exaggerated color commentary of the action. It was spirited and silly enough to make a lot of the guys smile and chuckle a bit. Me included. Now I was really happy that Donnie had been called up to our pond all the way from Manitoba.

Since the end of January I’ve been struggling with sudden and shocking loss, real life-reorienting agony, and so I went to the pond last Friday with my skates and sticks and gloves to get out in the crisp air and try and recreate and sweat and connect a bit with my buddies and maybe, just maybe, feel somewhat decent again, without effort or thought. And thanks in great measure to Donnie and Jim, Art and Lare, Mike and Andrew, and others, it worked. Wonderfully.

* * * * *

On the morning of Tuesday, January 30 I woke up at my ordinary time near 6, powered up my phone, and checked text messages. My best friend from college, Amy, had addressed a message to me and two other close friends and classmates. This is what Amy’s message delivered:

The rest of that Tuesday for me was a haze of shock and grief and eventually anger. A lot of anger. Mike Gill was my classmate and fraternity brother at the University of Dayton, and for about 20 years we bonded in D.C. as our respective careers in public policy flourished. Mike’s career was considerably more accomplished than mine, and he made our school and our fraternity brothers enormously proud.

I logged on to four different D.C. media web sites to try and find more detail to help me understand what had happened. It actually took effort to identify the crime involving Mike amid all the violent crime files cluttering the sites. That angered me. I’d known that in recent years D.C. had fallen into a harrowing abyss of unrelenting and shocking violence, even by its own standards, and was especially known now as the car jacking capital of the world. Amy sent us more details as she learned them. Our college fraternity brother, classmate, and friend had been savagely attacked while sitting in his car outside his wife Kristina’s office on K Street, waiting to take her home at the end of the workday.

We learned that Mike’s wife found him fighting for his life lying on the sidewalk just outside his car, his assailant still at large, and that Mike would never return to his family, or to us, so grave was his wounding. Mike was an organ donor, and he was being kept alive on life support in a D.C. hospital a few days to allow for his adult children and family and close friends to travel into D.C. to say goodbye.

In the hours and days ahead my fraternity brothers and classmates who’d known Mike formed a group text chain to share updates and console one another. One update that came from Kristina bore the grim finality:  

“Hi all — the police just returned Mikes phone to me. We are sitting at his side and saying our goodbyes. We are beyond devastated! We are planning to have services at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown on February 16 at 10:30 (I’ll update if that changes). A friend will play an REM song during the funeral and we are working on a reception afterwards with a band. He loves you all so much! Kristina (from Mike’s phone)”

Mike developed a love for D.C. that I marveled at. It truly became his home. He fell in love and married and started and raised a family there with Kristina. He was politically active in ways that garnered commendation from both sides of the aisle. How often have you heard that said in that town over say the last 50 years?

The Washington Post published a moving tribute to Mike that helped me quite a bit.

When I lost my mom in September 2022 the overarching feeling was one of relief. She’d long been in declining health, and departed us quite peacefully. I felt reasonably normal in about three weeks, more or less. I remember feeling grateful to God that He called her in the manner He did.

The trauma I’m experiencing this winter with Mike’s loss is of another realm entirely. And of course the manner in which it unfolded plays a large part of that. My classmate and fraternity brother and Washington policy mentor and friend was the victim of an unimaginable act of violence, and so most immediately we who met and befriended him in school and maintained ties with him over 30-plus years were hit with a tidal wave of shock, initially. Soon this was followed by profound grief. Then, for me at least, depression.

Even in deep grief the shock doesn’t recede deeply, or far, I’m finding. And so I’m finding this to be a one-two-three flurry of punches of unprecedented anger, depression, and loss. 

And the setting of the violence is weighing heavily on me. Quite simply, I cannot shake the sense that my hometown and its distinctive association with daily, unrelenting, horrific and senseless violence snuffed out the life of my classmate and brother and friend. 

The trauma has galvanized and coalesced my classmates in a way none of us could have imagined. I suspected that we’d swiftly become a well organized circle of phone battery depleting texters, and we have, but importantly I think we are spending even more time on the phone with our voices, reaching out and touching base, aching voice to aching voice, inquiring, consoling, sharing . . . most importantly just talking to one another. I have not felt abandoned by God in this moment, and my classmates seem like angels dispatched by Him to help me.  

One night I was on the phone with my UD classmates Jim and Becky Kronk. We were sharing with one another the hollowed out agony we were feeling over the nature of Mike’s departure. I noted that at our chronology we are not only rather naturally losing parents but even peers, and that with respect to the latter, as things like strokes or heart attacks or disease call, we can in a relative sense process that. But not this. And Jim poignantly responded, “Mike was stolen from us.” And so a prime driver of our deep, collective, unshakable grief is a sinister sense, of not loss so much as being so suddenly and so viciously robbed.

I can’t imagine what Kristina and Mike’s family are enduring.  

Amy’s husband Tim is also a dear friend and fraternity brother, and I’ve worried about him more than anyone else since we received the news. Tim and Mike attended high school together in St. Louis, then went through UD together, then shared so much about their respective professional lives and families all these years. I reached out to Tim that first awful day, just to let him know that I was praying for him, and thinking about him, but I’ve tried to keep some distance since, as Amy has on numerous occasions informed me of the depth of Tim’s despair.

Tim captained the University of Dayton hockey team in the 1980s while we were fraternity brothers. He borrowed my gloves for the entirety of his senior season skating for the Flyers, and I like to think they brought him a little goal scoring luck. For much of the past 20-plus years he’s coached university club hockey programs in Ohio, as an after-work passion-vocation. This hockey season he’s helping out the University of Miami Redhawks club team. I wondered at various times the past couple of weeks if hockey could be a bit of a lifeline to him this winter as it was emerging to be for me.

* * * * *

One summer workday about 20 years ago I was seated out on the patio of Mackey’s, D.C.’s famed pub on L Street Northwest, for happy hour. I was working then on K Street, and Mackey’s was a short and pleasant 5-minute walk from my office. It was I remember a remarkable summer day in D.C., with a rich blue sky and warm but notably un-sticky air for Washington in summer. You savored those rare delightful summer days in D.C., and I chose to with a few cold ones outside after work with a few work pals.

The Mackey’s patio was one of D.C.’s best for happy hours. Something about having cold draft beer out in those conditions must have made me nostalgic for porch sipping at my fraternity house back in Dayton, Ohio, for I BlackBerry-ed my fraternity brother Mike Gill to tell him about it. At this point Mike was transitioning from relative newcomer to Washington into a difference-making force in policy. I just wanted him to know about the sublime sipping conditions, and of course to see if he could possibly join me for a cold one.

That email wasn’t sent 5 minutes before I felt a tap on the shoulder, and turned to find a beaming Mike Gill leaning against his bike next to the Mackey’s patio railing. Mike didn’t miss many beer siren callings, especially at UD. Seeing him so suddenly on such a splendid D.C. day, with the two of us then well migrating upward in our respective policy careers, is my fondest memory of our shared time in my hometown.

In a few hours I’ll board a plane and head back to my hometown to say goodbye to a friend of nearly 40 years. My classmates will join me from all corners of the country, in extraordinary numbers. The tears for our friend will come in great volume, but the hugs among us will be huge and long lasting, and I’ve told more than a few of my college pals this week that I genuinely believe that we’ll actually find pockets of authentic joy in this cruel reunion.

* * * * *

Team Donoghue faced off versus Team Keeley in the inaugural Super Bowl Weekend Pond Hockey Summit Series last Friday. I had “Sandpaper” Donnie on my side, so I like our chances. Informal scorekeeping, joined by widespread, compromised elders memory, further joined by a commendably friendly spirit for the elite competition, led us to judge game 1 a tie, making Game 2 a Series determining showdown.  

Team Donoghue’s roster of furiously churning legs set my charges well back on their heels. Game 2 was 4-0 Team Donoghue with whiplash dispatch. We appeared to have a drama-free conclusion to our inaugural Summit Series. I hastily called a timeout.

Summoning my squad into a tight huddle in front of our cage, I issued to them a stern, salty-language-laced challenge, the family friendly version of which was akin to ‘Might we have more to give to one another in this inaugural mission?’ I immediately looked into Art’s eyes and saw volcanic smoldering. Andrew seemed still primarily concerned with the whereabouts of my water bottle, but I trusted that some of my messaging seeped in. In “Sandpaper” Donnie I saw blank-faced, emotion-less resolve; it was easy for me to imagine then that perhaps a fresh application of tin foil was now covering the knuckles within his gloves.

Art led our comeback attack. “Sandpaper” cleared creases at both ends with unnerving, distracting villainy. Quickly we notched our first tally. Another swiftly followed. Suddenly, we had a modicum of back-checking, even! We added a third unanswered tally, and at 4-3 we could see our adversaries buckle a bit with doubt and distress. My charge’s hearts swelled with drive and conviction. You could see it. I forget off whose stick the game-tying, sudden-death-inducing goal was launched, but suddenly dogs at the pond’s edge stopped napping. 

The ensuing 12-15 minutes delivered heart-stopping, end-to-end opportunity, the drama remaining unresolved. Quality chances at both ends, back and forth. Men of mightily clogged medicine cabinets back home, 90-plus minutes into this instant classic, now laid out flat on the sheet to thwart crossing passes in prime scoring areas. And then, at long last, the intrepid forechecker among us, Lare, taking a centering feed, ended it, delivering Glory to Team Donoghue.

A poignant handshake line at center pond followed.

When we finished and were removing our skates Donnie and Jim and I sat together on a bench and discussed great skating trails maintained through winding woods in Ontario and Quebec. We learned that all three of us enjoy golfing and forged a pact to put pegs in the ground together this spring. We walked together through the woods to our cars in our newly formed fellowship of friendship and fun. Feeling invigorated and renewed, I drove straight to my gym for a supplemental workout. I got home, showered, and felt inspired — for the first time in nearly two weeks — to try and write something creative and uplifting.

Late Saturday night I was driving back from the Maine-Providence hockey game with a good buddy when I received a text message from my college pal Tim. His Miami Redhawks, he informed, had scored a game-tying goal with 50 seconds to go, then won it in OT. He sent me a photo of his jubilant charges.     

And Timmy added a single line accompanying the image: “Nice to feel joy again.”