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Little things lost

I discovered something today that I wished I hadn't. I found out that a friend who I worked with for years had died in 2005. Well people die, that's what we do, so that's not all that unusual. What is unusual is that he died on the same day as my father died. Whats doubly unusual is what he died from.

2005 was the year my father died. Two months after he died, I developed a severe cough that simply would not go away. After a week of non-stop coughing, I began to cough up blood which got my attention, so off I went to my favorite medical facility for a round of specialized industrial care and medicine.

The cause of the blood in my sputum was easy enough to diagnose because with all my coughing I had ruptured my esophagus. A laser solved the immediate problem but left the question open as to the initial cause of the tear. A series of x-rays and a lot of time in the doctors office, a biopsy here and there and four weeks later I was given a clean bill of health. It was not the "big C". It was determined to be nothing more than a severe infection that lead to bigger things, but for a short time in the weeks directly after my fathers death, I was also dealing with the possibility of my annoying cough being something much worse.

The "much worse" was throat cancer which as it turns out, I did not have. Yet as it turns out, my friend and mentor, did, and died of it on the same day as my father. I knew nothing of his condition. We talked on the phone at the end of the year prior, he said nothing about his condition. Perhaps he didn't know at that time, but if he did, he didn't pass it on to me. Frankly it wasn't his style to do something like that. Where I was a "Kirk", he was a "Picard". He was gracious, classy and polite person. As engineers, we made a good team but we would have made an awful cop 'buddy" movie.

When we worked together in the 80's and 90's and his retirement plan back then was that at the end of his career he would cash in his 401k and buy a rock shop in the Oregon desert. It was never going to happen, but it used to make us laugh at the right time in meetings that had gone horribly bad. It always seemed like a great idea to me.

We had a shared background, we had grown up in roughly the same place in Sacramento, but 20 years apart. Here were two Sacramento valley kids working in a company of seriously deep Bay Area bit heads, so we stuck together. A couple of country hayseeds there amongst the cosmopolitan eggheads. We spoke each others language, the language with verbage based on a suspiciously raised eyebrow in a code review or a sigh that sounds like an air leak when someone in management says something patently stupid during a company meeting.

I hadn't heard from him in awhile, which wasn't all that unusual as the fraternity of our shared past life lives out there on a long orbit. We all come around from time to time, but not as often as we would like. All this time I assumed he had finally gone on to buy the rock shop out there in the Harney Desert. I hadn't heard from him in awhile, so I looked him up today and discovered in the process that he was no longer with us. There are times when a Google search can be like the 'angel of death' and this is one of them.

Now it seems my friend will never retire to the Harney desert and I should stop waiting for a call for lunch that will never come. And I now find myself four years late in grief to the man who once taught me the meaning of the word "crisp".

Posted @ January 26, 2009 09:51 PM | Current Affairs

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» "Four years late in grief " from Legacy Matters
You know those people you like but haven't heard from in awhile.  Varifrank writes I hadn't heard from him in awhile, so I looked him up today and discovered in the process that he was no longer with us.... [Read More]

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