Blaise DiNardo served Rochester all of his long adult life. From the day, barely out of his teens, that he donned the uniform of the Rochester Police Department, to this Sunday morning just passed, when he breathed his last at 87, he was a protector and a friend to his hometown.
And to his team – the Rochester Red Wings.
That’s where most people knew him. That’s where everyone knew him. Stationed, impeccably dressed, ever gracious and polite, handsome like an old-time movie star, at the ballpark. For one generation it was Silver Stadium on the northside, for another it was Frontier Field downtown. For almost 60 years, he was the security man for the hometown baseball team.
For almost 60 years, he was a friend to hundreds of thousands, part of a unique baseball family that includes a tall, beautiful owner, a prematurely gray general manager, an octogenarian organist, some guy named Uncle Phil, and a man with a rubber cone on his head. Them, and the people of Rochester, in the seats on a summer’s night, with the crack of the bat and the passing of a train and the wafting scent of the brewery on the wind.
That was Blaise DiNardo’s world. That was Blaise DiNardo’s role. That’s what community is.
And that deserves to be told. It deserves to be shouted from the rooftop, and remembered as the sweet reality of an era. Lives can be well lived, service can be rendered, hearts can be touched, and good can be done, and Blaise DiNardo did all of those things, at the house that Morrie built, and at the house that Naomi built. At the baseball park that is somewhere between home and heaven.
But I almost ignored his passing. Consciously, purposely, deliberately. Not because of the way he lived, but because of the way he died.
Mr. DiNardo took his own life.
He went out Sunday morning, by the carousel at the beach, on a bench where the north wind threatened snow, and shot himself to death. The cops came and the tape went up and the fire department hosed away the blood.
A week before Christmas, in his 88th year, where Rochester children laugh and dance.
I wondered why there. Was it a memory of the summers of his boyhood, or the summers of his fatherhood? A place from the past or a view he admired? Or just someplace that wouldn’t make a mess at the house? And I wondered about the cops and the medics, the firefighters, whose memory of that place would now be tagged with the sight of an old man slumped over and dead.
That’s what I thought. And that, of course, I couldn’t talk about it.
You don’t talk about suicides. You don’t report them. You don’t memorialize their victims. You ignore them.
At least that’s how it was when I came up. When I learned reporting from the people of Blaise DiNardo’s generation, the rules on suicide were clear. We all knew about Hemingway, and how it clustered and could run in families, and that you especially never mentioned it if it involved old people or young people. You didn’t want to give anybody any ideas.
I’ve followed that rule for almost 40 years, recognizing that in the current day that view is not common. Now suicide is open and discussed, its victims celebrated. Suicide rates are largely unchanged over time, so apparently neither approach makes much of a difference.
But typically, I stick with how it used to be.
Blaise DiNardo, though, makes me think. It is unjustly out of whack to let one Sunday morning obscure decades of a purposeful life. His legacy can’t honestly be shunned because of a social convention. I know what my church teaches about suicide, and I know what his church teaches about suicide, but I am nowhere near man enough to judge Blaise DiNardo. I can’t truly condemn, criticize or even question the actions of a man of his stature and decency.
And I can’t know the circumstances and reality of anyone else’s life.
So I won’t worry about how he died. I will remember how he lived.
I will rejoice in how he lived.
There is no whispering that needs to be done. No furtive comments or shaking heads.
Just the celebration of an exemplary Rochester life.