Hi  Ginny:

It was nice to talk to you, albeit the circumstances are very sad.  I feel like I have lost a close family member.  Tom was like a brother to Peter and me.  You may or may not know that Tom and I taught together in the English as a Second Language program at Xavier University during 1977-78.  He was an amazingly talented linguist and lover of all that was from other cultures, a trait which lured him into not the happiest of marriages!  He was at Michael’s burial at sea, as much a representative of my family as Peter and myself.  The seemingly macho gymnast of highschool years was in reality a gentle and cultured literary nature with a wry and subtle sense of humor.   He was certainly a profound romantic and I, being agressive and scientific, often found myself in vigorous yet amiable disagreement with him.   I was a revolutionary street intellectual from the industrial age, he was a gentleman out of an English Restoration Period novel.  I listened to Charlie Parker and Count Basie, he treasured Mozart and Edith Piaf.

I am convinced that nothing happens without reason and Tom’s earthly destiny is now fully realized.  He is still with us in a refined form which some day we too will assume and comprehend.  His metamorphosis may seem to be our great loss now, but in the years to come we shall come to realize how without him our lives would have been less than complete.

My best wishes to you and your brother Jim.  And please convey my sincere expression of support and condolence to Victoria.  Through my friendship with her father I am her family also.

Chris von Volborth