I’d like to tell you about Bruce. He’s my mentor at work.
Old dude. Loud. Colorful. Gravitational. He walks through the machine shop and
people with work problems flock to him because Bruce solves problems with a
strange alchemy of wit and brute force.
He’s proud of his memory. Rightfully so. “There may be snow
on the hills, but the fire’s still burning.” Facts and figures and stories from
decades past flow from him, rivers of knowledge waiting to be tapped.
He’ll often pull out his pen with a flourish, as if he were wielding
some strange combination of wand and light saber while saying, “I can fix that.
I have the technology.”
I remember the day it happened. I was the stand-in boss of
my work group. I got the call. I called a meeting. And I stood there in front
of my friends, friends who were laughing and telling jokes and completely
unaware that the emotional core of the group was dead. So I told them. I did
not want to, but someone needed to.
“Bruce is dead.”
And just like that, the room went gray, the laughter
stopped, and the echoed stillness of death filled that conference room. Death
does that. Sucks the joy from a room.
It doesn’t stop, either. Death, I mean. Example: Bruce left
a coffee plant in my office. For nine years, it has been my last living
reminder of Bruce. A few months ago, that plant died. We, my coworkers and I,
let it sit in the pot hoping that it would come back. That it would sprout anew
and that the legacy of Bruce would continue. In retrospect, carrying the legacy
of a man is probably too much to ask of a potted plant. But people are silly
when it comes to sentiment.
I took the plant home with me, placed it in my fireplace,
and lit it on fire. Like a Viking funeral. It took to the flame instantly,
crackled and roared and popped and filled my fireplace with one last rushing,
burning, vivid, and violent show of life. I sat cross legged in front of the
fireplace like an acolyte. It smelled like pipe smoke and incense. And then it
was over. The flames faded. The plant was consumed. Embers glowed and smoke
hovered and the flame was gone.
It’s easy to look at death like that. Like an end. Like
pain. It is accurate, but it is incomplete.
In a very real sense, Bruce is still alive. I used the
present tense in the first paragraphs of this post because Bruce still does
those things. He taught me. I learned from him. I learned how to walk slowly in
the shop to allow time for people to find me. Learned that coffee is a time for
emotional connection, and that the emotional connection is what breathes life
into the work place. Learned that a skillfully wielded pen is a powerful tool.
I try to teach others those things. Try to make sure that
the gifts that Bruce gave me do not stop with me. That they are handed down to
others. It doesn’t matter that those people didn’t know him. Didn’t know how a
room would light up with his smile. Didn’t know how his booming voice could
fill a room. Knowingly or unknowingly, their lives are affected by the life of
a man who stopped breathing nearly ten years ago.
There is this parallel unendingness of life that walks side
by side with the unendingness of death. When I am touched by his absence, I am also
touched by his presence. His death hurts because his life mattered to me. But
he enriched me. I am more for knowing him. The loss of him does not remove that
increase.
His obituary is still online. The internet is great at
keeping things. The obituary is standard stuff. Read the comments. See the
reflections of a life in other lives. See the ripples of life touching life.
Bruce died around nine years ago. His coffee plant died this
year. But Bruce still lives because the ripples of his life, the impact of his
living, still spread across the oceans of time.
Fair winds and following seas, Bruce.
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