“Greetings from a dead man!”
Of all the ways Rick Massumi could have told Bill Duggan that he had terminal cancer, he chose to type those words in a text.
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“Surprise diagnosis for me,” Massumi wrote on Nov. 14. “I have advanced metastatic cancer, with no chance of survival and very little time left.”
Duggan, who owns the D.C. bar Madam’s Organ, laughs now at the wryness and lack of lament in those texts. But at the time, Duggan responded in the only appropriate way to the realization that he was about to lose a friend — with a lot of curse words.
“You looked so good when I saw you,” he wrote in between expletives. “Lets get together immediately.”
There are many ways to tell Ronald “Rick” Massumi’s story. We could start at the beginning, when he was a kid growing up in McLean. We could cut to the middle of his life, when he was an attorney working for the Securities and Exchange Commission and doing pro bono work for music festivals, artists and local businesses. But starting at the moment the 68-year-old realized he was dying feels right because of what happened after he received that diagnosis.
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The scenes that have played out in recent weeks in his D.C. home could make for a screenplay, albeit a strange one set against a backdrop of nude paintings and a giant statue of Jesus. (Those make up just a fraction of his diverse art collection.)
Massumi never married or had children, and he confessed over the years to a few people that he often felt lonely. But his front door in recent weeks hasn’t looked like one that belongs to a man who has no one. People have been passing through it constantly. They have come from down the road, other states and even other countries.
And they have helped Massumi in different ways. They have tracked down a hospital bed for him. They have searched for the type of beer he first drank (Coors). They have organized his awesome collection of cowboy boots. They at one point sneaked a cat, his favorite one, into a hospital. And they have sat with him, sometimes talking and sometimes in silence.
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But what struck Duggan as unusual the more time he spent at the house, and what he tells me about in detail on a recent evening, was not what people were doing for Massumi. It was what Massumi was unknowingly doing for them. Most of them were strangers to one another until they learned he was dying. Now, they text and call one another, and they describe their relationship using words such as “magical,” “beautiful” and “family.”
“It’s been pretty amazing to watch,” Duggan says. “To me, in a town like Washington, where people are so separated or in their own bubble, he had bubbles going out in so many different directions. And until he was dying, all of us in these different bubbles didn’t even know about one another.”
Most people have to die before all the important figures in their life come together. It’s at their funeral that their favorite high school teacher sits in the same room as their favorite boss. But Massumi, who was one of the longest-serving board members for the National Council for the Traditional Arts, got to witness those connections.
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“It really was amazing how people were rallying around him,” said his younger brother, Brian Massumi, who lives in Canada. “When I was there, I kept thinking to myself, ‘It’s like a wake, but he’s still with us.’ ”
He described his brother as having an “insatiable curiosity” and said he was in high school when their parents split up and their mother took them to live in Arizona. From there, Rick Massumi went to Vassar College. He then attended Georgetown Law and worked as an attorney for the SEC before going into private practice. Brian Massumi said one of the things his brother was proudest of was the work he did free behind the scenes. He produced music for bands he feared would be forgotten, and he fought to keep gentrification from changing D.C. neighborhoods by doing pro bono work for local businesses.
Duggan said he met Rick after he offered to do legal work for Madam’s Organ nearly 20 years ago, and their friendship grew from that. He shared with me a list of people who have been coming by the house. It contains 25 names. At the top are the words “Rick’s Salon.”
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One of the names on the list is Lida Junghans. She has known Massumi since she was 18 and he was “a cool, dashing 25-year-old.” They later dated for a bit but eventually settled into a “friends-for-life” relationship. Junghans described him as a “divining rod for the special and the rare,” a person who throughout his life knew good food and good music and wanted to share those pleasures with people. She lives in Massachusetts and has made the trip to D.C. several times in recent months.
Another name on the list is Karla Soptirean. She was working in Munich as an IT consultant when she learned through Duggan that Massumi wanted someone who wasn’t tied down by a job to go on adventures with him in his final months. The pandemic had left her feeling depressed and burned out, so she quit her job and arrived in D.C. in December. She planned to travel to exciting cities with Massumi and dine in great restaurants. Instead, his condition declined faster than anyone expected, and she took on caretaker tasks. Dying can be ugly, and she saw all of that — and she decided to stay beside him. She called him "a mentor.” He called her his “guardian angel.”
Junghans said she wasn’t sure what to expect when Massumi told her about Soptirean, but she came to “love” and “trust” her. Soptirean also played a key role in a scene that brought happiness to Massumi. During one hospital stay, when it was uncertain whether he would make it home, she tucked his beloved cat in her jacket and with Duggan’s help took it undetected into his room.
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“He always told me, ‘I don’t have anyone. I’m so lonely,’ ” Anastasia Novoseltceva said. “And now, all these people are coming from all over the world. He has so many friends.”
Her name is also on that list. The Russian native met Massumi a decade ago when she was 20 and staying in D.C. for a summer. They ended up at the same performance because of a mutual acquaintance, and afterward he drove her and her roommate home. When he saw that they were staying in a high-crime area in a run-down house, he offered them a free room in his home. Novoseltceva said they were skeptical at first but quickly realized he only wanted to help them. They also barely saw him because he worked such long hours.
Over the years, she and Massumi formed a close friendship and once traveled to Russia together, where he danced to the accordion in her family’s home. He told her she was the daughter he never had.
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“I was raised without a dad, so to find one across the ocean,” she said. “For me, there is no word. The word does not exist to express who he is to me.”
After he had several strokes, she drove him to his medical appointments. She was with him on the day he was told he had liver cancer. In the months since, she has finally gotten to meet some of the people she had heard him talk about and some she hadn’t.
“Everyone is texting each other, asking, ‘How is everything? How are we feeling?' ” she said. “I had only one close friend here in the United States, who was Rick, and now I have, I can’t even count on my two hands how many I got from this sad situation.”
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On Friday afternoon, after mostly sleeping for two days, Massumi died in his home. He had come from a broken family and had never formed his own, but in the end, he was surrounded by a wonderfully weird one of his own making. And he recognized that.
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Duggan shared with me a text Massumi asked Junghans to write on his behalf and send to the group.
“This experience has brought an unexpected and incredibly moving new element I treasure,” it reads. “It is like a whole new family has blossomed up around me. I watch in wonder as all these people rally round me and I feel a unique and powerful love pouring on me unlike any other I have ever experienced.”