Tommy Osmers’s behavior at the benefit function thrown for him last Sunday night belied the dire state of his health. He cruised the party, chatting, joking and checking out the women. He danced, played a little boogie woogie piano, and even used the occasion to give a little talk on the state of the marine environment.

“I was charged right up,” he said a few days later. “I don’t think I looked a sick man.”

Indeed he did not, at least not nearly as sick as the doctors tell him he is. Thinner, for sure, but still possessed of the same passion which has always marked the philosopher fisherman, the same mixture of intensity and irreverence.

As he worked the room, he asked person after person the same question, poignant and funny: had they ever been to a “kick the bucket” party before?

No doubt many had; benefit nights for people in desperate straits are a part of community life here. But they probably had never been to a bigger, better, less somber one.

Put it down to the sort of friends Tommy has. People who know how to fish and farm and cook and play music and enjoy themselves. Generous people, eclectic people, people who care about environment and community, like the man himself.

Bring several hundred of them together in the Agricultural Hall and you have the potluck party to end them all.

“When I got back from Mass General, where I had the biopsy, the diagnosis that it was a terminal, inoperable cancer, they told me that they made the arrangements to have this benefit thing,” he recalled this week.

“I was against it initially. I felt like I was begging out of the public, and I wasn’t dead yet,” he said.

Yet he saw, too, that he needed help to cover his expenses.

“I realized it was going to put some strain on my whole existence here, not to be able to maintain my independent life here at the house and keep things going. I was already unable to work. I’d just been hanging on.

“And I started to think of it as a party, a kick the bucket party, and once I started thinking in those humorous terms, the idea grew on me.

“And it worked out great.

“More people came than I ever could have imagined. It really was touching, enough to make you cry.

“The greatest crew were there, every one of them were the kind who, when you see them, it makes you smile. Everyone kept saying to me ‘Wow, Tommy, what a gang, what a mix of Island influences and people.’

“All the greatest friends and people of my life, really. Tons of beautiful women, great musicians. Bushels of shellfish,” he said, though for once he was not the one opening them. “Everything was tremendous.”

“I just want to say thanks to the community at large.”

In particular, he wanted to thank the girls who did most of the work.

“Indaia Whitcombe, who was one of those ‘Send a Blonde to Africa’ people,” he said, referring to a running feature of the radio show he does with Willy Mason on WVVY, the Friday night Farm and Fishing Report. “She was in the midst of her voluntary teaching program in Namibia, and she was four months into her tour and she came home to take care of me.

“I fished with her last summer. The other one was Laura Kealty, who’s a part-time teacher at the [Martha’s Vineyard Public} Charter School.

“And Sarah Hibler and Krishana Collins — she’s a farmer here on Old County Road and a nurse, and she’s been accompanying me to the radiation treatments.

“Alex Karalekis was the one who organized the music. Ballyhoo and Johnny Hoy and Nina Violet and all of them.

“But so many people helped. Everyone helped.”

And it has only strengthened his determination to continue to fight the tumor he has nicknamed hideous maximus and to continue to live his life, as much as possible, as he did before.

“I intend to paint the boat and get ready to try to fish, even if they’ve got to carry me down there,” he said.

He went fishing last Wednesday.

“I just got my appetite back in the past week and I’m building up strength for the next round of treatments,” he said.

And he has continued to produce his weekly local radio show, with its mix of music and news, focusing on issues to do with farming, fishing and the environment.

“We haven’t missed one Farm and Fishing Report, even though I was throwing up in the control room,” he said.

“And I’m still one of the directors of the Martha’s Vineyard Dukes County Fishermen’s Association. We just a had a big boost from the Edey Foundation, which approved our request for grant funding.

“Now we’re trying to ensure future access rights [to the Island’s fishing resources] for the Island community. Since they’ve limited access permits, if people retire and sell their permits elsewhere, the community loses its access to the oceans.

“So I’m working toward helping form a permit bank of some kind so we keep access rights that can be used by the young Island people.

“I still have maintained my permits and it’s my intention not to let those permits leave the Island. One strange irony of it all is, it may be my permits that first go in to form the permit bank.”

To the extent that Mr. Osmers shows sadness, it is about the way his illness threatens his activism on behalf of his causes. That regret was on display when he addressed the crowd on Sunday night.

“I talked about the fish,” he recalled. “I don’t remember exactly what I said, except I apologized, said I was really sorry to be challenged in this way by this threat of mortality when I had just kind of gotten my wings in the much under-appreciated field of artistic endeavor known as fish oratory.

“Finally we’ve got organization now. We’ve got a group, we’ve got funding, we’re actually moving ahead toward a future which keeps alive our fishing community here.

“It was a bit of a pep talk.”

And he keeps on giving the same pep talk.

“I’m very positive,” he said. “I ain’t dead yet, and I’m not discouraged. I’m positive about our hopes for the future and improving our understanding of the marine ecosystem.

“When the fishing is good and the water is clean and we’ve got shellfish and the complete chain of life, that’s the sign of good stewardship of the land, of your Island.

“I said, I say, ‘Get up and do it! Be part of it! Volunteer! Vote!’

“I said, we have enough people here to alter the course of the events of history.

“So I’m hopeful. This is not a down time.”

He still holds hope that he won’t kick the bucket. He’s still getting treatment; he’s also trying alternative therapies.

But if it doesn’t work, he will have the fresh memory of the hundreds of folks who gathered last Sunday night and showed how much they care for him, how much they care in general.

“I got to talk about hopes for the future, not about sorrows,” he said.

“I felt the support of the community. No other place could I imagine it happening like that.

“There’s no greater place in the world to get cancer and croak than the Vineyard,” said Tommy Osmers.