Stages of Grief
I was planning on recounting the events of my first night on the town in San Francisco this weekend.
A phone call from Don this evening changed all that.
One of my closest friends had been living with kidney trouble this past year. Dialysis twice a week, and all the pain that entails. He’d been steadily losing weight every time I’d seen him (which was infrequently, ever since I left UPLB).
Tonight I find out that he’s suffered kidney failure this Saturday evening, and he’s being buried this Tuesday (tomorrow evening for me).
So.
Shock.
A few months ago, we were playing MU Online. We’d just leveled him up, and we were tearing through the mutants of the Tarkans plains together. He was happy, smiling. He was always smiling.
Denial.
Some miscommunication in the phone calls between Los Banos, LA, and here? No, I quickly dismissed that. Somehow I was expecting this, ever since I found out they’d increased his dialysis sessions to three times a week.
Bargaining.
No, that’s no good. He’s not coming back, and nothing I or any earthly power can do anything to change that.
Guilt.
He’d seemed depressed ever since the three of us, Jon and me parted ways. The three of us had been together forever - friends, officemates, drinking buddies, partymates, wingmen, teammates, occasional opponents - online and off. Through the catacombs of Tristram, hundreds of levels of Hell, on Big Game Hunters and de_dust, Davias and Atlans, there was no computer-controlled foe we couldn’t take down together. Overnight gaming sessions and weekends at the office. Billiards and beer.
Work - the three of us were the core of the Networking and Data Communications Division. Glorified name for the guys who pulled cable and fixed computers. Benj was always there for me to bounce ideas off of, whether it’s yet another of my unworkable schemes to load balance web traffic by inducing controlled cache failures, or when hard-swapping SCSI IDs on the peak-two disk chain. He’d remind me of things I’d overlooked, like if a particular Asus motherboard didn’t work with that particular clock speed, or when I’d forgotten to reset the IRQ before slotting in the third 3Com ISA card in the router.
And when Jon resigned last April to take that IRRI job, and when I left last December for La Salle, every time we’d meet up after that, I had the feeling he got a little bit more depressed. Maybe that depression was the little push that kept his treatments from working, that kept him from getting better. Maybe if I’d stayed on, took a lecturer position instead of accepting my non-renewal, he’d been a little bit happier, and he’d hung on a little while longer.
Anger.
No, that doesn’t work either. I can’t be angry at anybody. Not even God. Nobody’s fault, really. Things just turned out that way. He wasn’t even the first one to die of this - one of the techs in Chemistry I hear died in exactly the same fashion.
Depression.
Hell yeah. In spades. Although I’m not fully out of shock yet, so I have no idea how depressed I’m going to be over the next few days. I was so looking forward to buying him his own World of Warcraft account so Klynskyn and Dalmor could roam Azeroth together. No more getting together when I eventually get some vacation time back home. God-fuckin’-dammit.
Acceptance.
No, not yet. Not by a long shot.
Although it’s comforting to believe that somewhere, he’s sitting at a keyboard with a big smile on his face. No worries about pain or work or money, just an unlimited ‘net connection and all the games he wants.
All the games he wants. And it’s comforting to believe that someday, we’ll be there beside him, throwing the LAN party to end all LAN parties.
In Heaven there’s no games to play on Sunday
Doom is Doomed, right down to Pick-Up-Sticks
Cause if they let you sit and play, even on the seventh day,
How would you know you was in Heaven on the other six?
- (c)1996 Z Burroughs, happypuppy.com
August 9th, 2005 at 4:56 am
well said. maybe a get together LAN game on his 1st death anniv. WoW or MU probably