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Last night I learned that a friend I had known for nearly 40 years died. Brian’s passing was a not a shock or a surprise but hurts just the same. Last year he was tragically struck with a degenerative neurological disease that robbed him of motor control and the ability to speak. Such diseases rarely allow for people live very long.

Brian was a good and close friend. We had played many a board and card game together, attended several science-fiction conventions, including the one where I met my sweetie-wife, and we even wrote together. Two feature film scripts, a thriller and a period adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Of course, the script went nowhere but I learned from them, and I learned from Brian. A piece of advice that he passed on I carry still in writing characters stricken with grief. People don’t cry, they try to not cry. That is so true so often and trying to capture that struggled of someone trying so hard to not cry and failing makes such moments more powerful.

He was a historian by education and without a doubt I learned so much from knowing him. Before he moved away and before the damned disease, we often went to movies together, though there was a run where every film he picked for us to go to turned out to be a stinker.  When I was laid up for two weeks in the 90s recovering from surgery, he came over every day with a fresh VHS tape and we watched them together,

He was not a perfect friend, no one is, and I learned all too early in life that in the end death comes for us all, but he will be missed.