James Edward Lynch Carey

Jim was my Friend Jim had many friends, and I was lucky enough to be one of them. He had a knack for making new friends from all walks of life without any apparent effort. People just seemed to know that he was something special and to feel a little flattered that he had thought enough of them to strike up a conversation. Some of us knew him for many years and others just for a short while. But we all had one thing in common: Life was bigger, brighter, and a lot more fun when we were with Jim. Jim was already strong, independent, and tough when I first met him in Junior High School. He was adopted by the Carey’s, but never expressed any desire to find his birth parents. His father was a University History Professor who spent sabbaticals in Latin America and had been a boxer and a boxing coach at Wayne State. Jim learned that being a gringo kid in South and Central America was not always easy. He found the coaching he received from his father more useful than the history lessons. He was a gifted athlete, but found the politics of school athletics distasteful. City League baseball was his sport, and he was a very successful pitcher. He was an accomplished hunter in high school and a remarkably good shot with any firearm he was handed. He also loved fishing and I would steal him away from baseball whenever I could to set lines, or fish Rocky Ford, or the tubes, or sneak into Lake Elbow for some no-trespassing bass fishing. He was a man’s man when he was still growing up. If he felt fear at all I never saw it. He took the good with the bad with apparent indifference. But his composure in the face of adversity was not because he didn’t care. He felt the pain of being let down and being used and being lied to. He could become angry, but he was not an angry person. He cared deeply for his friends and family, and never hurt them back even if they let him down. Jim had trouble reading, but he never complained or asked for any special consideration. He educated himself by listening and observing and most of all by doing. He could take a car apart and put it back together before I knew how to change the oil. He was intelligent and hard-working … just not great at reading. Most of school is being good at reading. He was formed in a crucible of expectations where the things he was good at were under-valued; and he was too strong and too independent to be controlled. Nobody ever made Jim do something he didn’t want to do; or stopped him from doing something he decided he would do. He was tougher than his times and while the times changed, to his credit Jim did not. He prevailed and grew stronger. He was never the friend who needed a shoulder to cry on. You could tell him no and he would just laugh. You never wondered where you stood with him or how far his loyalty went. You could trust him with your life (but maybe not your motorcycle or your girlfriend in his younger years). Jim never engendered dependence or weakness in his friends by being overly-protective. ? Time and distance had no apparent effect on a friendship with Jim. He didn’t need Facebook to help him remember who his friends were. A friendship was part of who he was; and when he lost a friend or family member he felt that loss deeply and permanently. Jim was real thing his whole life. I did not find that his essential character changed at all from when I met him until the end of his life. The last message I got from him had a photograph of him and one of his daughters (Amber) dressed in heavy coats ripping around in a dune buggy on a Nebraska Thanksgiving, 2021. I could fill a book with remembrances of things Jim said or stories about adventures we shared. Yet that would be such a small part of his whole life that it would do him a disservice to do so. We could all write our own books and still fall short of capturing his life and times. He was a truly great man who touched all those he met with his courage, his sense of humor, and his love of life … and left them better for it. No one could ask for a better friend. Mitchell Taylor

I did not know Jim, I had never even met him. I am friends/co workers with his daughter Amber. From all the stories I have heard about him he was a hell of a guy and an amazing dad! I'm so sorry for the loss of a great man, husband, father, and grandfather. I thank him for his service. May he rest in eternal peace and we meet in another life!