Jack Roos, 1932-2025
In the early hours of March 19th, 2025, Jack Roos, my Grandfather, passed on. In a way, it is a relief that he is released from the gradual decline toward the end; for those of us who trust that he is now at Peace in a sense greater than what we can understand, it certainly is a comfort. And of course I miss him dearly, as I have grown to miss him more and more over the many years of goodbye. In a sense, all grieving is already done, and there is only a quiet calm as we wait for reunion. Still, I feel unequal to writing anything about him. Any effort seems too little, yet even a great effort might strike no closer to the truth. Tennyson spent seventeen years writing a fitting eulogy for his best friend; I am not Tennyson. I had always imagined I would have eloquent words on the occasion; but when the time came to share at his funeral, I found the notes I had scribbled down on the plane seemed self-indulgently digressive and abstruse, and I couldn’t read them.
Of course I remember my Grandfather first from my childhood, teaching me to play chess with the seriousness of a man who found our games to be the most intellectually engaging activity in the world, when in hindsight I realize this must have been far from the reality. In the early morning we would slip out of his cabin on Whidbey Island, and walk down to the strand, and there he would flip over the largest rock he could find, to show us the bullfish burrowed in the muck beneath. I remember him persisting, even in these final months, to remain himself in spite of everything: sincere, kind, and mischievously funny, like a little boy. I think often of that little boy that he once was, growing up in Ballard in the 1930s and 40s, sleeping in his drafty attic room, slipping out early mornings to fish on the Sound. That wasn’t very long ago, yet that world and this are very strange to each other already. It will not be very long before the world I know is just as far receded, and things are stranger still. It is a hard thing for humans; even if one were to remain always in the town of one’s birth, the space between moments inexorably grows, and there is no way home again, except by dying.
Jack knew this better than most, I suppose. He was, professionally and passionately, a student of the salmon, who never forget the stream of their rearing in their days as fry, parr, and smolt. They return only the in hour of their dying, changed beyond all recognition. It is a great labor, reaching their end at the beginning, and I do not know if they find any joy in it.
I read his book, once – Restoring Fraser River Salmon: A History of the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission, 1937-1985 – his account of a life’s work. I admit it was a tome, especially for one like myself, who lacks the single-minded, patient intellectual doggedness of the scientist. I’m unlike him in that respect, for my grandfather was a great scientist, possessed of the utmost quiet patience. I don’t understand how he lived for months alone in the wilderness tagging fish, or spent year after year in the slow, difficult, tedious – and, at the end, frustratingly political and ungrateful – work of protecting those precious fish. But I think I understand why he was able to do it all, and be a loving parent and grandparent, and a good neighbor, and a man of God, all to boot. It was all of it an act of love; not merely the affection of a fisherman for the sport, or the inquisitive affection of the scientist for his subject, but the long, meandering, unglamorous life of one man poured quietly out in care for his little corner of this world. Where does this river find its source? My grandfather’s love was, in fluvial terms, a distributary channel of the love of his Creator for the creation. And that is the gravel to which he has returned, in the same faith of those fish who, knowing not what will come after them, expend themselves in the inarticulate hope of new life rising with the spring meltwater.
I am not a strong swimmer; I am no salmon. Yet I will, I trust and hope, one day reach the head of that same stream, and die, and rise in the spring, and I will meet Jack Roos again where the river becomes one with the sea.
