Deceased November 11, 1997
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In Memory
Our close friend John Schillo died by his own hand on Nov. 11, 1997, in Asheville, N.C. John had been a physician at the Veterans Administration Hospital there for many years. He is survived by his wife, Deborah; and three children, Elizabeth (13), Edwin (11) and Elinor (9); his mother, Blanche; and his brothers, Edwin and James.
John grew up in and around Baltimore and graduated from Loyola High School, a Jesuit institution that greatly shaped his outlook and capacity for critical thought.
We met John and Deb, his partner since high school, in college. John was a very special friend to us, and a roommate in our senior year. At Amherst he pursued both pre-medical studies and an English major, a ranging academic duality that reflected the disparateness of his inquiry into life. Our friendship with John was central to our passage through those years.
After college, John returned to Deb and Baltimore, where they lived while John endured medical school and Deb worked as a librarian. They married in 1979. They were wonderful companions, enthusiastic tour guides of their native city and eager and frequent co-vacationers at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. Within a few years of their wedding, John and Deb moved to Roanoke, Va., for John’s residency. There they started a family. A few years later, they settled in Asheville.
John always conveyed a genuine interest and curiosity about how we were, what we were doing, how everyone in our family was—not just our kids, but our brothers and sister and parents, whom he really barely knew. And he would want to know all about our work, asking detailed questions, probing and latching onto something interesting. And, John always kept us abreast of how his mother and brothers were, and what they were doing, always with pride.
Throughout his adult life, John came in close and graphic contact with death, disease and the searing and unpleasant corners of our society—at the Baltimore police laboratory (where he worked after college) and at hospitals in Baltimore, Roanoke and Asheville. He harbored no illusions about people, and for all his personal courtesy and his eager ability to relate kindly to all sorts of people, he never romanticized human nature or the common person. John came to some pretty hard, and sometimes even shocking, conclusions as a result of his experiences. But he also attained calmly reason understandings of people without the fortune or wherewithal to make productive sense of their lives. John drew too from the tremendous reservoir of his reading of literature and science fiction, mystery and comic books (of which he was a prodigious collector). Once asked why he read no non-fiction, John replied that it was all too transitory.
John was relentlessly honest and direct—about people, culture and ideas. He gently but firmly rejected all dogma and almost all organized thought other than hard science and the fruits of common sense, whether a political ideology or an established view. John suffered the fools at hand but not the foolish conventional wisdom. It’s not that he rejected all political views or even spiritualism. In fact John had very definite political views—an eclectic assortment that reflected his pragmatic and thoughtful insights about life and the world. John was Jesuitical in his emphasis on reason and learning. But his spiritualism was a celebration of the natural world, and if he identified with any cause, it was the preservation of our earth and environment from humanity’s collective folly and arrogance.
From before college, John was a vegetarian of long standing—he remained one all his life—but he would never say that he was one for a moral reason because he didn’t want to cast any aspersion on friends who were confirmed meat eaters. John certainly wasn’t a vegetarian for health reason—he would frequently indulge himself in unhealthy portions of all sorts of things that didn’t happen to be meat or fish. But master of argument and dialectical analysis as he was, he would only say in explanation of his vegetarianism: “It’s because I like it.”
As with so many things, John had a deeply conflicted connection with his career as a doctor. He knew the precise date of his eventual retirement and the number of years, months and days remaining to arrive there. But as the testimonials by his fellow doctors at his memorial in Asheville attested, John was a highly respected colleague and a skilled physician, one who could handle any situation in the emergency room, one who paced the halls reading a medical journal, absorbed—as he liked to tell us—in the problem-solving challenge of the unexpected crises. And, something else one of those doctors noted that caught us short: all the lives that John saved.
Among John’s terrible problems in his last few years were the physical pain and often limited movements resulting from several back surgeries he had had to undergo. This burden exacerbated the melancholia and depression that beset him for many years and that finally proved too much for John to bear.
We have probably said more here than John, a deeply private person, would have wanted us to. But we think he would agree with this thought, which his death brought home most acutely: we all need to make that extra effort for those who are troubled and ill of spirit. John was a healer who deeply respected the science and knowledge of medicine. We can best honor him and cherish him by engaging in the simple human acts of healing that can make great differences, and by raising our children to extend themselves likewise.
Larry Gold ’75
Scott Vayer ’75
Susanne Slater (Smith ’75)