A great big loving bear of a man
A eulogy for my friend Vince Lombardo (1962–2018)
1980. An art classroom at W.D. Lowe Secondary School.
I sat at one end of the room. Vince was at the other end.
I lifted up my sketch book — the one with a racing car on the cover — and looked across the room. Vince also lifted the cover to his sketch book — the same one, with the same car on the cover.
He was looking at me and laughing. That boyish, mischievous laugh I’ve seen and heard a hundred — a thousand — times. I laughed too.
Later that year, I sat next to Vince on a trip to the Art Gallery of Ontario and we laughed. We laughed all the way there. We laughed all the way back. Till it hurt. I remember Vince telling me how he couldn’t wait to get home that night to see his girlfriend, Debbie.
I’ve been laughing with Vince all the years since I first met him. You see, you couldn’t be with him and not laugh.
You couldn’t be with Vince and not feel the love, the friendship, the great big humanity that came from his great big heart.
Much of the laughter came from Vince’s mischievous sense of humour. Friends and family have all experienced it. I could go into detail retelling his many pranks but it would take longer than the 38 years I’ve known and loved Vince.
I’ll just hint at a few:
- there was that camping trip, in the dark on the Bruce Trail where Vince wondered what would happen if Jason from Friday the 13th decided to plunge a knife into the canvas of our tent. He thought that was hilarious.
- that car ride on a hot summer day to Rondeau Beach. Vince, in the driver’s seat of the two-door car, told me to roll up the passenger window and he cranked up the heat full blast. I can still see his sweat-drenched face laughing as the guys in the back seat screamed.
- Vince smacking the back of your chair when you weren’t expecting it. Screaming out like a police siren when you weren’t expecting it.
- Vince swimming out to a pier in the Detroit River and encouraging his buddy Mark to swim out to him. “The water’s shallow here,” he said. It wasn’t.
Vince fixed things. All kinds of things. He was ‘Mr. Gadget’, his son Junior told me. He had a gadget for anything that needed fixing.
One of those things was the crank window handle on my Chevette. Kids, in the days before power windows, you had to manually turn the crank handle to roll your windows up and down. One day, my crank handle snapped off.
“No problem,” Vince said. “I can fix it.”
And he did. With the knob from a bathtub. Somehow he got it to work. Nevermind that it took forever to turn the knob to get my windows to go up and down.
Oh, but those were the fun things. The silly things. The many moments of laughter that we shared. We also shared a lot of sorrows and deep conversations.
What I want people to remember about Vince is something that his friends and family already know: That great big loving heart of his.
His boundless devotion and love for family. Friends and family. That’s what mattered to Vince.
I was sitting with Vince on his deck a few weeks ago and he had his grandson Drew on his lap. Vince gave him a great big gentle bear hug and a kiss and told him he loved him. I can still see that smile on Vince’s face as he closed his eyes — it was a serenity that made him forget about his pain. What I was looking at was pure joy.
My wife Lori remembers how Vince greeted her — with a big hug,. He “gave the best bear hugs,” she would say.
Vince would tell us he would give us money if he ever won the big lottery. You know what — he would too.
Vince would get hurt by people, of course. He would get angry sometimes. He was human.
But he would never stay angry. He always forgave. For him, it didn’t make sense to stay angry at you if you screwed up or let him down. You just get together, have a cup of coffee, talk, laugh and forget about it.
And if you needed Vince? Well, I don’t need to convince anyone who knew him that he would be there. In a heartbeat.
In a great big, beating heartbeat inside that great big loving man.
In the musical Les Miserables, there’s a line — my favourite: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
I have seen the face of God. We’ve all seen the face of God.
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazine and online publications for 30 years. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
