A Toast for Jarlath Patrick Macbeth O'Neil-Dunne, 1974–2024

A Toast for Jarlath Patrick Macbeth O’Neil-Dunne, 1974–2024 Given at the Burlington Beer Company, Friday, January 19, 2024 Peter Sheridan Dodds, Burlington Vermont Remanifested on October 4, 2025 In the days after losing Jarlath, I spent some time looking through messages, social media, everywhere online, photos, videos, and in my journal which I’ve kept for over 25 years. One line in the journal popped out. It was in a standard write up for a training session from about 10 years ago. I’d gone for a swim, a run in the water (injuries, a common interest with Jarlath), and then gone to Catfit, UVM’s much more gentle version of Crossfit. Jarlath was there, and I’m pretty sure that’s why I was there, and, as you might imagine, Jarlath was being Jarlath. I’d written: “Jarlath is an animal.” 1 Calling someone an animal can go in many directions. This version for Jarlath was of course on the extremely positive side, truly one of the highest verbal accolades for an athlete. So let me, now, 10 years later, expand on the animal framing, and the unique specialness of Jarlath. In ecology, we speak of keystone species, those species which have an outsized impact on how their ecosystem simply is—their existence affects the ecosystem’s overall health and resiliency, which other species thrive, how the ecosystem functions. And then we have charismatic megafauna—elephants, whales, lions and tigers and bears. These are the species that people love, that people would do anything for. Jarlath was the most rare combination of both of these species: keystone species and charismatic megafauna. And though I equate him to plurals, Jarlath was a species of one—sui generis—a unicorn.1 There’s one more major alignment with animals that I’d like to make: Jarlath was playful. He had an otter-like sensibility. He was an explorer, serially discovering new planes of existence, like any new physical training, or bodywork methods, the best practices in his work, anything to do with his kids, community engagement, and even the strange landscape that contains emotions. Now, we often collectively gloss over the fact that people are animals. We’re all animals. So let me connect Jarlath back to the ecology of people. 1An amendment from the given toast. I had almost put unicorn in but thought it might be too overwrought. Iona pointed out after the toast that Jarlath’s spirit animal was … the unicorn. 2 In our research, we’ve uncovered the fundamental taxonomy of the archetypes of fictional and real characters [1]. It’s a six dimensional space where each dimension is a pair of opposite archetypes. And in the core three dimensions of that space, Jarlath is a Hero1 , not a Fool1 , an Angel1 , not a Demon1 , an Adventurer1 , not a Traditionalist1 . Heroes are powerful, resourceful, intelligent, successful. Jarlath. Angels help others, are cooperative, trustworthy, alert to danger, and they move others towards safety. Jarlath. Adventurers are open, playful, unpredictable, funny, enthusiastic. Jarlath. In the three other minor archetype dimensions, there’s one that presents a Lone Wolf1to Diva1axis. He could so easily have been a lone wolf—if we found ourselves in a dystopian world, many people would happily and rapidly line up beside and behind Jarlath—but he was clearly a Diva in our world. So, Jarlath: An Adventurer-Angel-Hero1with strong overtones of Diva. Charismatic, deeply capable, deeply caring, always, always enthusiastic, with a delightfully self-aware, goofy peacock nature. Truly a rare combination. I mentioned enthusiasm as a trait, and with that, Jarlath had many enthusiasms, not the least of which was his children and their paths in life. 3 One of his current enthusiasms was leadership. He was always involved in leadership but it had become a spoken focus. He cared about his leadership, and deeply cared about mentoring others to become leaders. In his leadership, people went along with him because it was fun, because he believed, because he was fully engaged, and he was alongside them, not above them. And the last there is another highly unusual combination: Jarlath was both a leader and a teammate at the same time. Most simply: Jarlath made everyone better around him while striving to make himself better at the same time. Our loss of Jarlath is devastating, shocking. It will always remain so. We will do our best to honor who he was, a folkloric, mythic hero, how he lived in the world, by trying to be more like what he aspired to be, and fostering those elements of the Jarlath archetype in others. So, I’d like to offer up a toast then, to Jarlath, to the existence of the rare charismatic, keystone species of one, to making everyone around us better, to truly compassionate leadership, to helping our communities at all scales, to the relentless pursuit of meaningful enthusiasms, and to ridiculous goofballery. To Jarlath. 4 References [1] Peter Sheridan Dodds, Julia Witte Zimmerman, Calla G. Beauregard, Ashley M. A. Fehr, Mikaela Irene Fudolig, Timothy R. Tangherlini, and Christopher M. Danforth. Archetypometrics, a Pragmateia: Empirical determination of the fundamental archetypes of fictional characters. 2025. 10.5281/zenodo.171179741 . 5