Outside my Mother and Father, few people had a more profound, wide-reaching and persistent impact on my life than John Ater.
I met John when I was 16. I was a deeply troubled youth. Still wickedly angry at my parents, their divorce and how they used me (and my little sister) as a weapon to hurt each other. I was on probation–convicted of juvenile delinquency–and still engaging in bouts of mayhem. Add to that far too much experience hoping chemistry might improve life, plus a penchant for late night theft and I was a handful. I’m not ashamed to tell y’all John was my therapist. I hated him the first time I met him. I hated him a good long while. He had one rule for me. He said, “I will treat you like an adult so long as you act like one. If you don’t I’ll treat you like a child.” For some reason, something unrecognizable compelled me to return week after week. I wasn’t aware of it yet, but I wanted change. I yearned for it from a place I didn’t recognize. But that soon changed.
His undivided attention to me while in therapy was profound. Without doubt, I was never an afterthought by my parents, but John’s ability to listen to me and cut right to the matter at hand was attention from an adult on a whole new level for me. For the first time in my life I was seen by an adult willing to see me as I was, not as a parent would have me. While I wasn’t mature enough to recongize this as liberating, I felt heard and I felt a growing sense of nurture. (Although I only saw this in the clairvoyance of hindsight.)
My dislike of him soon grew into genuine fondness. So, I stuck with him for eight years, from 16 to 24, years old I saw him weekly until I graduated university. By then I had grown to love him. After that we were friends. He was my confidant, a sounding board and a shoulder to cry on. He never asked for anything in return. He gave of himself, that he might receive from others.
He was fond of telling me, “Sean Paul, I am here to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted.” And that is what he did.
San Francisco, May 2010
When I was up and full of myself–which happened a lot in my late 20s and early 30s, he called me on my bullshit. When I was down he lifted me up. I would not have survived two major depressive episodes in my life were it not for his patience and love.
He was also fond of saying, “when you point the finger at someone, do realize you’re pointing three back at yourself.”
My personal favorite was, “evolution gave you two ears and one mouth, use them in their proper proportion.”
They say a mother teaches her son what is expected of a man. And a father teaches his son how to live up to his expectations.
But John taught me something entirely different. He taught me how to be an adult. He taught me how to be kind. How not to hold grudges. How not to second guess myself. He taught me that it was much more difficult to admit when I was wrong or had made a mistake than to deny or ignore it, but that I had a moral obligation to do so, regardless of how I felt. He taught me the difference between morals and ethics. He taught me how to walk into a room and read it, painful introvert that I was. “The people in the room want your attention just as much as you want theirs. Go, ask questions of them, open-ended questions and you’ll make more friends than you know what to do with.” He was right.
John drilled into me that color, creed and sexual orientation–he was openly gay–meant not absolute zippo in the grand scheme of things, that we were all divine children of the Cosmos. And he taught me how to stand firm when my principles or integrity were questioned. To never start a fight, but be damn sure to finish it. Another crucial lesson John imparted upon me was the necessity of asking for help when in over my head, or even when I just didn’t know something. And he always added, “just because someone said no, does not let you off the hook. You can’t stop asking for help.”
He was also fond of saying, “the universe answers prayers in three ways only, ‘yes, no and not yet.’
More than anything John ever taught me, it was the immense amounts of time he sat listening to me at coffee shops and then on the phone when he moved to San Francisco. He never asked for anything in return. All he said was, “be as good as you can to others, at all times.”
I spoke to John a few weeks before he died. He said it would be the last time we spoke. I told him how much I loved him and how responsible he was for me becoming the human being that I am.”Imperfect,” he said, “but fundamentally decent.” These were his penultimate words to me.
John died on January 25, 2026. It was not unexpected, but it hurts like hell. He was 73.
The Cosmos broke the mold when John was created. And I am diminshed by his loss.
John is survived by two sons.
His last Facebook post epitomizes John:
