A man on a spiritual quest built and rebuilt

DURHAM -- Construction and reconstruction -- that was Jim Mealey. For years, he laid flooring and pieced together houses, designing artful additions to existing homes. When the physical labor wore him down, he discovered the deep massage technique of Rolfing and embraced its quest to unlock the tensions of the human body. Starting over in his 50s, he became a practitioner -- a Rolfer -- and worked to realign bodies that had gone out of whack.

James George Mealey died a few months ago of mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos inhalation. He was 59. Years ago, he had worked briefly in a New Jersey asbestos factory and also spent time installing asbestos-containing flooring and tile.

Mealey was born in Camden, N.J., in 1949, the oldest of seven children in a family that had to scrape to get by.

After high school, he joined the U.S. Navy, serving in Maine, then met his first wife and moved to Florida with her. Raised Catholic, Mealey attended parochial schools but never quite fit in.

Attention deficit disorder, or ADD, was not really diagnosed then, but if it had been on doctors' radar screens, Mealey likely would have qualified, according to those who knew him. Far from the perfect student, he tangled with the nuns and priests. The experience shook his faith and left him doubting his self-worth.

Miracles everywhere

In Florida, he grew interested in New Age spirituality, absorbing the teachings of yogis. He also discovered A Course in Miracles, a Christian-based study group that preached empowerment and love. Miracles are everywhere, its Buddhist-inspired doctrine goes; it's all about how you choose to approach life.

"He was definitely on this spiritual quest," said his most recent wife, Tina Morgenstein.

His marital status reflected that. A romantic guy who liked being part of a couple, Mealey married five times, most recently last year.

Mealey moved to the Triangle with his fourth wife. He lived in Chapel Hill in the 1980s, working at a carpet store, then starting his own flooring business before tackling home renovations.

With no architectural background, Mealey was able to conceive and carry out a blueprint. Often, his designs took advantage of nature, with large windows to take in a view of a lake or capture the sun's rays.

Mealey's talent for design extended to fashion.

"He could pick out clothes for me that fit better than I could looking at a rack," Morgenstein said.

In the late 1990s, after several sessions with a practitioner, Mealey decided to study the deep muscle and connective tissue massage that characterizes Rolfing.

He became certified in Colorado at The Rolf Institute of Structural Integration and continued to spend one week of each month there seeing clients until he grew too weak.

"Just like he could look at a house and tell where the windows should be, he could look at a body and tell where it's misaligned and what was keeping it that way," said Janine Mealey, who was his fourth wife and remained a close friend.

In late 2004, Mealey met Morgenstein. A year later, he was diagnosed with cancer.

Spiritual surgeries

She was skeptical of the concept of marriage and its contractual bonds, but she recognized how important it was to him. Newlyweds, they had been married less than six months when he died.

After his diagnosis, Mealey pursued chemotherapy and radiation. When that didn't work, he turned to alternative treatments including heat therapy, acupuncture and herbal remedies.

Together, he and Morgenstein traveled to Brazil to consult a healer named John of God in a small village called Abadiania. "Jo 1/2o de Deus" performed spiritual surgeries, saying they sent healing energy Mealey's way and visualizing the physiological changes that needed to take place inside his cancer-ridden body.

At least half a dozen years before Mealey got sick, he finished writing a book, a kind of Peyton Place redux where everyone is consumed with everyone else's personal dramas. In the book, the main character, Michael Dellerman, gets cancer. In the end, he is cured.

The happy ending did not ring true for the book's author. But Morgenstein is doing what she can to try to at least get Mealey's book published, posthumously.

Jim Mealey is survived by his wife, Tina Morgenstein, a son, a daughter, a foster daughter and four grandchildren.

Life Stories