So the tail end of that part of the story is that he committed suicide over Passover in 2016. He had been talking about it for years, feeling sorry for himself because of the stroke that was ultimately his own damn fault. I totally sympathize with his frustration over speaking five languages before that and barely being able to communicate simple messages after, but he still had several million dollars in the bank and most of the people I know would probably trade their effective speech for that kind of money. But we all knew he was going to do it sooner or later. His first wife had tried calling him a few times and when he (obviously) didn't answer, she got worried and went over to his house, to which she and I still had keys, found his body, and called the cops, who showed up to find what they claimed was 35 pounds of cannabis in various states of growing, drying, and curing. That was including all the stems, silly cops. She called to let me know what he had done, that she had been questioned for hours by the cops, and the next day was terribly morbid for me when one of my friends from Denver overdosed on heroin in Austin. I had already planned to visit my family's funeral plot at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC where my father and several generations of his ancestors were buried. After that visit, I drove out to Fairfax. The cops had confiscated all of the plants and his four-foot bong, but left several of the curing jars. His first wife said I could take anything I wanted out of the house, and all I wanted were that bong and two of the pictures of him (one with Mikhael Gorbachev and the other with the King of Bahrain) because of the memories associated with them. I settled for his glass pipe instead. I haven't scanned them into computer files but here are pictures I took of the pictures:
And the glass piece:
