I lost a friend last week...

...to prostate cancer. He was the sort of friend that makes it difficult to find the right adjective to say what sort of friend he was. He certainly wasn't always "good" but he was always interesting. I live in North Carolina and he commuted between Florida and California so he wasn't "close" either. There were times I wouldn't talk with him for months at a time. But that was OK; I was saving up stuff to talk about next time we got together. Then I heard he was sick and, next thing I knew, I heard he had died. He didn't like to talk about his illness but my spies reported that he had been diagnosed late with multiple metastases and was receiving chemo. I figured he would follow the usual course -- a couple of years to castrate resistance and after that his oncologist would need to get creative. But instead, he died. How annoying. I have a number of things queued up to discuss with him. Most of the topics would violate the politics/religion rules for the forum but there are two that seem OK.

The first thing was to straighten him out on Scotch. I'm not sure he knew how and when to add a few drops of water to open up the flavor of high-proof drams. Oh well, if (as I hope) he has gone on to a better place then they must have Scotch there.

The second thing was a G. K. Chesterton quote he showed me once. It was Chesterton making fun of H. G. Wells and I just couldn't find it. Brad had showed it to me in one of my own books over a decade ago and I couldn't remember which book it was in and I couldn't quite remember the exact wording well enough for Google to help me. From time to time I would think about the quote and make a mental note to ask him about it next time I got a chance.

I never got that chance.

But... Oddly enough, shortly after he passed I tried Google one last time and there it was. It was in Maisie Ward's biography. It came from a bit of satire where Chesterton imagined interviewing various figures about recent scientific evidence of a prehistoric flood that might have inspired the biblical flood story.

In Chesterton's imagined interview, Wells said...
I am interested in the Flood of the future: not in any of these little local floods that may have taken place in the past. I want a broader, larger, more complete and co-ordinated sort of flood: a Flood that will really cover the whole ground. I want to get people to understand that in the future we shall not divide water, in this petty way, into potty little ponds and lakes and rivers: it will be one big satisfying thing, the same everywhere.

So I found the quote but I am still bummed about the Scotch.

Nice eulogy, sorry for your loss. about the scotch, I pour it over a bit of ice so that it melts a bit and so the water is added.

Peter -

Sincere condolences on the loss of your friend. Losing a friend, even a "distant" one, is never easy.

Unfortunately, I have been having the same experience lately, when a friend would say to me concerning a mutual friend, "Say, did you hear about Bob? He died."

Of course the image I had had of Bob, whom I hadn't seen in some time but still considered a friend, was of a much younger person, the one I remembered from our much younger days, so that his passing did come as a shock to me, in spite of my failure to recall his true age.

The problem in my case is that I, and most of my friends, are now at the age when we are starting to go, and the announcements that the Bobs I have known are departing are becoming uncomfortably routine.

Something else. For some reason your story has for me the feel to it of an Irish wake. Yes, really. As you were telling it and I was reading it, I could almost imagine you there among the attendees at the wake for your friend, sitting there beside your friend now laid out on the bier, with your Scotch in your hand, pleasantly telling all those present stories about the good times you and he had had together.

Which makes it sound like you and he really were pretty good friends after all, despite the distances.

Again, sincere condolences.

Sorry PDA. Another reminder that PCa ain't the "good" cancer.

CJS10 I am so sorry to hear the words Scotch and ice in the same sentence except in a usage such as "I like to drink Scotch when there is ice on the lake".

Sorry for your loss, F8

Sad news.