Bob CollinsThey held David Carr’s wake in New York last night.
The New York Times columnist died from complications of lung cancer last week.
The Daily Beast has the story today.
David’s silver-haired sister-in-law, pre-school teacher Linda Carr, recalled her first meeting with him 45 years ago at the modest Carr family home in Hopkins, Minn., otherwise famous for its Raspberry Festival. “He had long hair, a plaid leisure suit, and was just nuttier than a fruitcake,” she said. “I’m a pre-school teacher and David loved me of all people. He was a great guy. He really was.”
Linda added that shortly after dinner ended, “David was arrested in the driveway” of the house in Hopkins, though she didn’t mention why.
Yet the people who showed up for Monday’s wake—each of whom seemed to have enjoyed, at one point or another, an intense personal connection with the youngest Carr brother—“simply verified the fact that David became good man,” Joe Carr declared. “Not only a good writer, not only a good columnist. He was a great father. He was a great brother.”
Carr’s earlier life as an addict was well chronicled and true to the nature of journalism, nobody glossed over anything.
A thirtysomething man who introduced himself only as “Michael”—as in, “My name is Michael and I’m an alcoholic”—talked of becoming close to Carr in AA meetings and supporting each other through sobriety and much else: “He was the first friend I trusted with 100 percent full disclosure…Eight years ago, I was in the darkest place in my life…I said, ‘OK, if you can make me sober, God, I will accept that the fun is over, my life is over. Just take this despair away from me. I’m fine with no fun.’ And then I met David.”
Related: David Carr, Times Reporter, Is Eulogized (NY Times).
