Through the blue sky, I can see Tom forever.

My friend Tom died last week just shy of his 80th birthday. His death wasn’t a surprise, but it came as a shock.

Those of you who have experienced the sneaky trainwreck of loss understand this irony. We think those we love and admire most will live forever. We can’t fathom their absence.

Tom had an impressive resume, but it wasn’t his three-plus decades at the University of Illinois in the field of economics and law, which he helped invent, that shone the brightest. It was kindness, curiosity, and gregarious friendliness that made him a giant.

If somebody in his community experienced need, he’d do his part to help, to pray, to connect. He was hands-on, can-do, and was uncannily curious about the bigger picture. Was this a systemic problem? If so, what could be put into place that might ease this conundrum forever? Though he was no fisherman – born and raised in Indiana – he ascribed to that worn proverb: Give them a fish, your neighbor eats for the day. Teach them to fish, your neighbor eats for a lifetime.

His favorite album was the Beach Boys’ 1966 Pet Sounds. Never before had such layered, exquisitely produced music been pressed onto vinyl. It was an enthusiastic, ambitious, and beautiful album – adjectives that describe my friend.

Tom wanted things to work out best for his students, the department, the university, the world. He thought big. A baseball fan (and former Little League coach), he played smart and swung for the fences at life’s every at-bat.

He was among the handful of friends to read an early draft of my second novel Almost Home, which I’m still in-process of shopping for a publisher. He enjoyed the story, felt kinship with the characters, and liked my writing (though I may have injured him with scattershot commas).

There was one thing he urged me to change, and this comes with a spoiler alert: The plot explodes in a fire in which a beloved dog, Shirley, goes missing and is presumed dead.

Tom asked me, is there some “un-cheesy way” (his words) that Shirley could be brought back to life?

Could she emerge from the woods after several days gone and walk back into the arms of protagonists Maggie and Jeff?

To Tom, this would make for the kind of ending for which he rooted for everyone. Suffering redeemed. Estrangement mended. Happy, blue skies. Wouldn’t It Be Nice.

Such an eschatological view of life – attempting to look at life through heaven’s eye – posits that life ends well. Death, certainly, is not the end. If your life isn’t going well at the moment, no worries. It’s not the end. At the end, all will be well, and all manner of everything will be well. Shirley will trot out of those woods, in other words, but maybe not this side of the Jordan.

This blue-sky thinking figured metaphorically and literally for my friend.

Tom loved living on the plains because, he said, “There are some days when the sky is so blue, you can see forever.”

Another truth about the plains I learned in my sojourn there was that from October to April, skies are slated with clouds. My wife and I were not fans of this long, cloudy season.

Tom didn’t disagree. In fact, an old adage in hiring new faculty at the university was that there’s nothing in Champaign-Urbana that would get in the way of one’s work at the university. It was a village surrounded by corn and soy, isolated from the distraction of good weather during the school year.

The clouds, Tom said, just make the blue skies all the more glorious. (He used words like glorious, magnificent, gosh-darn, and marvelous a lot.) On those rare days when the clouds parted, you could see through the blue for miles and miles. This, to my optimistic friend, was breath-taking and worth the cloudy wait.

That’s Tom’s view of things now that he has entered into his rest. His body no longer ails him, his heart no longer fails him, the worries that attempted to darken his days no longer nag.

My heart aches in his absence. While I’m elated and humbled to have been his friend, I feel like a sack of ashes as I join mourners from around the globe. The liturgy prompts that even at the grave we make our song alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. It is years of practice that steel me to say words like that at a time like this.

But even now, from where I stand here in Valdese, I catch a vision of those blue skies about which Tom reveled. When I close my eyes, I can see for miles and miles.

I see Tom’s satisfied face.

Blue gilds everything.

There’s not a single cloud in that glorious sky.