A Friendly Goodbye

I have an old photograph that means a lot to me although the picture quality is disappointing, grainy and dull. Taken in our dark, Vancouver basement rental, it shows me as the tired new mother of our firstborn, Evan, who is held competently by our friend Kit, with her husband Jim smiling beside her. Dean took the photo (good job, babe) to commemorate a farewell visit. After five years as a Regent College student, Dean had completed his thesis; after 3 1/2 years on staff, I’d left my job to be a full-time mom. Together we were packing house in preparation to leave the Regent community for Dean’s first teaching job at Lithuania Christian College in Klaipeda, Lithuania. Jim and Kit came round to offer their warm goodbyes.

On July 17th news of the death of James I. Packer appeared on social media. He was 93. I felt sad and grateful at the same time – sad that I won’t see him again, grateful to say that we were friends. During the mid-1990s when I was Faculty Secretary and then Assistant to the Academic Dean, Jim and I came to know one another and developed a mutual affection.  

Though he was a renowned author and speaker, I never found Jim to be aloof in conversation. At the annual Regent staff and student September retreat at Warm Beach, Washington, we sat long in conversation over Saturday’s lunch as he told me some of his story and how he received the head injury that marked him for life. The good news, he explained with a smile, was that he no longer felt pressured to participate in team sports. When he learned that I was a beginning birder, he invited me to join him and Kit for a sunny birding walk among the beach’s reedbeds that afternoon. We complained together about what Kit described as the “little brown birds” typical in fall migration, when the annual moult made sparrow species look nearly identical.  

While I was Faculty Secretary, J.I. regularly brought me the originals of his class notes (notes keyed on his famous typewriter) to be photocopied for distribution in class. Many of the originals were faded from reuse and the letters at the end of each line had been lost from years of being copied. Sometimes if I had time I would retype his notes for him.  

One of my tasks as Faculty Secretary was to annually update bibliography for incoming students. When my repeated memos requesting just two or three works for the list produced limited results, I sent a follow-up memo to several faculty including Jim, this time wording my request as a poem. Jim’s response was immediate and, wonderfully, also in verse. Who knew that the publisher “IVP” and “Sangwoo Youtong Chee” (part of his official title) would rhyme? 

As “one of the most widely respected systematic theologians of the twentieth century”, Jim wrote the forewords for a prodigious number of books. As a result, his box in the mail room overflowed with parcels containing the publishers’ advance copies. To make space for incoming post, I often walked armloads of books upstairs to his office, carefully setting the new books among piles already teetering on the table.

Jim created time for writing projects by intentionally booking flights to his speaking engagements with as many long stopovers en route as possible. I can’t imagine how he found airport lounges to be productive spaces, but, clearly, he did.

His mind was so quick. Once I noticed J.I. leaving the chapel just as the weekly service was about to start. He explained that he had just been handed a thesis chapter by a student, so he thought he would run to his office and take ten minutes to read it and write his responses in the margins so he could return it to the student right away. Ten minutes. He did it, too.

In the great Oxford tradition, Jim, who gave his energy to so many worthy activities, didn’t seem much bothered with his wardrobe. I remember him favouring tweed jackets, trousers perhaps a touch too short, belts with the leather cracking near the buckle, shoes worn beyond what could kindly be called “broken in”. I made the point of praising his look whenever he wore something fresh. Jim certainly noticed when I wore red, and complimented me. Red was a favourite colour, he said as he beamed in his squinty way.  

When I had my birthday one Wednesday in January, Dean surprised me with a celebratory bunch of helium balloons. By Friday they had begun to droop and I knew that by Monday they would be laying on the floor. So that afternoon I took them to my colleague Kathryn’s office and suggested we have fun by sucking the helium from the balloons to make our voices high-pitched as munchkins’. One by one we invited faculty members still in the building to join us for a laugh, and J.I. was a smiling, tweedy participant. He commented that he (like Eugene Peterson) had never sucked helium before, and I teased him that he should be careful lest his head float towards the ceiling. Jim gamely inhaled from his red balloon and, though his distinctive voice didn’t change much (neither had Eugene’s), we all shared the wonderful laughter. But, in those days before smart phones, there were no photographs, no videos.

So here I am with only the one (terrible) photo with Jim. I might have taken more back then, nearly 25 years ago, but I guess I didn’t want him to think of me as another J.I. groupie. We were just colleagues, just friends. I wish I’d had my turn to say goodbye.