The Death Thread

[Elspode]

Yes, I know. We have the Dead Pool. We have the famous dead celebrities threads. I'm sure there's more that evade me. What we don't have is a thread devoted to the deaths of people we were close to; a thread devoted to mourning and reminiscence.

I'm sure that I must often seem morbid to many of my fellow Dwellars; I must seem to be overly fixated on the passing of people who meant something to me, and that probably seems depressive or unhealthy to at least some of you.

I see it as the exact opposite. In memorializing or reminiscing, I feel that I am working out the inner demons that might otherwise consume me. I feel as though I am extending, if not the actual presence of an individual on this plane, the energy of that person... the essence of them, the fabric of their souls, so to speak.

It is in that sense that I wish to speak briefly on the passing of my friend Jamie McKim, aka Puck, a 40 year old sprite of a guy who never failed to bring a smile, a sense of welcoming and good humor, a true sense of love and acceptance everywhere he went. I will never forget the first time I met him at the 30th birthday party of a mutual friend. Being a Pagan function, there was much ribald game playing using things that could only be described as phallic, and with bodily positions and rules that would cause most upright Baptists to change the channel if they saw it on TV, despite the fully clothed status of the participants.

Jamie threw in with the best of them that night, being not only the most perverse of all of us there, but the least pottentially threatening as well. That's a delicate balance for most. For Jamie, it was absolutely effortless. He had no guile. Five minutes in his presence, and I knew I had a new lifelong friend.

Jamie never met a stranger in his life. I cannot recall ever hearing a single bad thing said by him about another person, nor do I recall ever having known of a serious disagreement between him and another person.

Jamie suffered from Type I diabetes his entire life. It could be said that he probably did not treat this condition with the seriousness that it deserved at all times, and as a result, his health became increasingly unmanageable over the past decade. The past two years saw him hospitalized some five or six times, the last one with him in a coma for several days. But he always pulled through, and came back to his community, seemingly none the worse for wear.

Friday night, that string of comebacks ended, and Puck died in his sleep, just a little bit past the age of 40. He leaves behind no children, but he does leave his life partner Kathy without her mate, and his community without one of it's beacons of joy and light.

RIP my brother. You will be so very, very much missed.