We can remember them

BIG TOM: In a piece I wrote decades ago, I nicknamed him Big Tom, and criminal defense attorney Tom Nolan was a big man — well over 6 feet tall, burly and loud. I saw him make an impassioned plea in a murder trial during which he sat on the railing at the front of the jury box. Three of them leaned back in evident concern he might fall on them.

He had a large appetite for life and a passionate love for justice and he was of unhesitating generosity. He battled for his clients and he was entirely committed to the principle that everyone, no matter the crime, deserves to be represented by a zealous advocate. He would make cops and prosecutors crazy, and he relished doing so. When you were in trouble — real, serious trouble — you wanted Tom Nolan sitting next to you at the defense table. He might win. He might lose. You might not deserve to win. But he would make sure everyone arrayed against you had to do their job well. He would go down swinging. He died about a month ago from a swift-moving pancreatic cancer.

PAT: I worked for a couple of years with Pat Boland when both of us were employed at SamTrans. He was the director of a marketing department that won several industry awards for creativity and originality. But that was incidental to what it meant to be a colleague of Pat’s.

This might sound like an exaggeration; it is more likely an understatement: He was the nicest, kindest, most caring person you could ever know — a human being. His sunny disposition and his natural love of fun made him a central figure at the transit agency. He was a selfless man, aiding local organizations and, most notably, refereeing high school basketball games for more than three decades. A heart condition forced him to stop. Ultimately, he underwent a heart transplant. There is no small irony that he would suffer from heart trouble, given how untroubled his heart was. He died in late November.

LAUREN: I have a photo I took of Lauren Seder Antonakos. She is sitting on the beach at Lake Del Valle, near Livermore. She is wearing a swim cap. We are about to race in a two-person relay on a 1-mile course at the lake. Her smile is ironic with a touch of pre-race edginess.

She was wry and sarcastic and smart. She would brook no nonsense, but she had a giving spirit and a tender heart. And she was tough. People often are described as battling cancer. In Lauren’s case, this is profoundly true. Long after her first cancer diagnosis, long after she had been in remission and recurrence and remission again, she served with me on the board of a local nonprofit devoted to providing support and service to women with breast and ovarian cancer, neither of which she had. She served until she could no longer do so.

She never complained. She endured. She died last week.

FOR WHOM: It was in my freshman year at Skyline College that I first saw, through the gentlemanly teaching manner of Robert Brandriff, the brief poetic meditation by John Donne about mortality and the morality of being alive for the time we are allotted.

“No man is an island,” it begins. Its most memorable line, which was the title of an Ernest Hemingway novel, is “for whom the bell tolls.” The poem was written in 1624, a time when it was common for law schools to toll bells in announcement of the death of a prominent barrister. Among many other things, Donne was a lawyer. The fuller quotation, which includes the Hemingway title is this: “Every man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

It is one way we can determine how to live our lives — not in fear of death, but in the embrace of life, knowing that we are all on a journey to the same destination.

We can send to know for whom our lives have been lived, and who lived their lives for us, knowingly or unwittingly. We can send to know by whom our lives have been touched, and enriched, and we can remember them.

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist, whose career included 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He can be reached at marksimon@smdailyjournal.com.