Geoff Loranger
December 17, 1962 – February 11, 2024

My brother Geoff passed away on February 11, 2024 of complications from kidney disease. He was 61 years old.

I’ll say it up front: he had a difficult life, not just from the nephropathy, which is horrible, but early on from a complicated mental illness as well. In the end they proved to be a devastating combination. In adolescence he began acting out with strange and erratic behavior, which was passed off by school counselors and the like as, well, adolescence. He could vacillate in a moment between happy and quite flippant. His view of the world, when you could get a glimpse, often seemed off-kilter. These were actually early signs of bipolar and schizophrenic tendencies. This was complicated and worsened by deep trauma when, unbeknownst to anyone, for a few years in his late teens and early twenties he was the victim of prolonged sexual abuse from a member of the clergy who clearly took advantage of his disordered mental state. In his twenties he started getting into fights and various trouble with the police, was arrested a couple of times, and ended up in mental health wards a few times as well. At that point he was an adult and responsible for his own care. He always maintained that there was nothing wrong, though he did agree to a long-term prescription for lithium, which he took much of the time for a few decades and which caused the initial damage to his kidneys. Docs noticed that problem in the mid-00’s and took him off of it, but the damage was already done and quietly getting worse. In 2016 both of his kidneys failed and he was required to have dialysis three times weekly from that point on. He spent the last eight years of his life undergoing treatment while under the sincere belief that he had been misdiagnosed and that the doctors were often out to hurt him. His ability to deal with the dialysis and go by the strict diet and lifestyle rules was very limited. Consequently his blood was often full of toxins, making his mental health and behavior increasingly worse. Mom was there to help him, or try to help him, every day, but despite her Herculean effort this was an unbreakable spiral and he just got sicker and sicker. This all absolutely sucked.

This especially sucked because Geoff was at heart a good, kind, and extremely creative individual.

I was the oldest and he was two years younger. As kids we were both very active but had different sets of friends. Geoff was definitely the sports kid of the family, and Dad held a lot of pride in his accomplishments. He grew up playing hockey, football, basketball, and baseball. Our two younger sisters played some as well, but he was definitely the maven. (I on the other hand was never good at sports or even interested; I attempted the community basketball league when I was around ten, and in two seasons I managed to score exactly one point, on two free throws after Geoff tackled me on the court. Lol.) In high school his interests shifted, though he always followed the local teams, and maintained a focus on fitness. He took up weightlifting for a few years after high school and participated in competitions in his twenties.

Geoff also had a great love for music and had a tremendous singing voice. Starting in his teens he took singing lessons from several folks and showed remarkable talent and dedication. In high school he performed in musical theater productions, and did community theater after that in his early twenties. He lived with my folks in Plymouth, Michigan and moved with them to Cape May, New Jersey in his mid-twenties, where his creative side really prospered. He became a member of the Cape Harmonaires singing group for several years. He started writing his own rock songs and was prepared to sing them for anyone at any time. And though he wasn’t really a reader of books, he wrote constantly – from high school well into his thirties he kept daily journals, filling over 80 notebooks with thoughts and activities. He also wrote poetry and short Christian fables. He stayed on with our parents but worked to pay some of his own way. He went through a great many jobs, many of which were food delivery, and though he eventually couldn’t get along with co-workers at any given place, apparently he was a favorite amongst many of his customers, reportedly greeting them often with great cheer and occasionally song.

He came into some money in his late twenties through a lawsuit against the church regarding the earlier abuse. After being arrested for driving with marijuana for the third time in New Jersey, he found himself facing jail time, which we all know would not have gone well. He was evaluated by a psych doctor and decided to admit to the trauma, which he’d recorded as it happened for years in his daily journals. The case was pretty airtight, but this was the early nineties, so the church followed its traditional strategy of paying him off for an NDA and shipping the priest to another state. Yes, that’s not just a myth. It happened all the time, including to Geoff.

This proved to be both a blessing and a curse, since he was handed a good chunk of change but wasn’t really capable of handling finances in any way. It really only lasted a couple of years. He did move into his own place, bought a black Corvette, and used the funds to start recording and videotaping his songs. He bought a Batman outfit and started entertaining at children’s parties, driving up in his Corvette and leaping out in full costume and cape, thrilling them all. He wrote a horror novel, which the parents asked me to critique for him. (It was very strange, but not in a readable way.) He made a Super-8 movie about the Jersey Devil. And he covered himself to his wrists in tattoos. I mainly remember a large lion’s head, an Elvis stamp covering one shoulder, and a lot of Playboy models, making his arms NSFW and dooming him to wearing long sleeves throughout the year. He put together a binder of his writing called Poems, Prayers, and Parables, which he distributed to family and friends. He eventually recorded dozens of songs with local musicians and produced two CDs, also sent to fam and friends under the name Tornado Elvis Flame and the Rising Stars.

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Which brings us to Geoff the Performer, because he didn’t just write and sing his songs, he performed them wildly and with gusto. He put some of his songs to videos by lip-synching to them in a local studio, and videoed a lot of pieces live, improvised, and a capella as well. Geoff wasn’t afraid to be audacious and outrageous and had a great time doing so. There’s the “Tornado” in his stage name I guess. But he was always serious about his creative work, and exceptionally talented. The “Elvis” in his stage name was not there by chance. He loved Elvis Presley’s songs and had the perfect range and pitch to sing them flawlessly, which he did numerous times on stage both in impersonation shows and just for kicks. And somewhere, lost to time, is a vhs recording of him standing in front of one of the old Cape May beachfront hotels singing a perfect a capella rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel”, and boy is it beautiful.

Living alone also brought out an unexpected side of Geoff, a deeply caring side. Without lasting relationships in the human world, he took on cats. He was an exceptional cat dad, and had a total of ten cats over the years, each of whom received tons of love and attention daily. He even had a series of stray cats he provided for on the porch of his last house for several years. The connections he couldn’t make with people definitely came out in his friendship and caring for his cats.

Geoff was hard to wrap your head around, being so troubled and so kind. He is survived by our mom Pat Loranger, myself, our sister Leigh and her husband Jeff, our sister Suzanne, her husband Rob, their daughters and Geoff’s two nieces Katie and Emily, as well as two great nephews, Isaiah and Brixton. He is also survived by his cats Sweetie, Bro, and Winky. We all miss him terribly, wish his life had taken a more well-lit path, and are deeply relieved that his suffering is finally over. Dad passed in 2017, and I know the two of them are sitting on a porch somewhere, relaxing with a glass of iced tea.

Geoff’s behavior unfortunately kept him from getting much of his creative work out anywhere. Yes, some of it was a bit inappropriate for some audiences, and a little strange, but much of it had merit on its own. To that end, I’ll be putting together a webpage for a bunch of his creative stuff, so that y’all can check it out whenever you like. It should be ready in a month or two, and I’ll make sure that everyone who’d like to see it knows about it.

I’ll leave you for the moment with one of his poems, this one from 1987.

WISDOM’S NOW

Calluses, blisters, little tongue twisters
Pass by me fast erasing the past
You say hello, I say goodbye

I live, I die, I laugh, I cry
And bygones are remembered
My status now begins to fly
In this deep and dark December

Deliver me through excellence
To decay on wisdom’s now
A brown and tattered earth remains
A pig, a grunt, a sow

Detest me not on my accord
For birds do fly unwillingly
I also must detain my stay
To jump the rope of eternity

Take care, bro! Catch you on the flipside!

With love,
Rich

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