It turns out that Veteran's Day is not just a time to pay tribute to veterans. Don't get me wrong, I thank all of you veterans for protecting America and am truly grateful for your service, even if I don't always agree with the leaders who put you where you go and why. But that is not why I'm writing now.

I'm writing cause sometimes bad things happen... and sometimes they happen at really bad times. I happened to have had a pretty crappy week as it was, topped off with a little falling out with a friend that has still yet to be resolved. While I don't keep in touch with friends as often as I would like, anyone who knows me knows that I care DEEPLY for my friends, so it is still very hard to take. So I was already in a pretty confused, lonely place when yesterday morning I received a call from my co-worker. A co-worker, in fact, who is leaving the job in 1 week for a better job and is my last real buddy where I currently work (hence more loneliness and disappointment).

Anyway, my co-worker asks if I'm home (which I am, cause it's Veteran's Day, celebrated). She wants to make sure I'm not driving because, um, well... Gregg... died. I work with only about 7 people, not like a few of my last jobs with hundreds that I may or may not know. Just 7. Gregg was my counterpart at work, the two of us were in charge from our main employer with the contractors, me on the administrative side, Gregg on the technical side. Gregg had called in sick on Wednesday. I spoke to him about 3 times on Wednesday. He thought he had the flu, but he was still hoping to feel better enough to come in Thursday for his field shoot. Each time I spoke to him, he sounded progressively worse, the last time confirming that he was quite certain he would not be well enough to come in Thursday either. I told him to take care, rest, and feel better. That was the last time I'll ever talk to him.

I'm glad I ended with some nice words, because the previous week, Gregg had pissed me off. And I wrote to an ex-co-worker to bitch about it. And while, looking back, he still did piss me off, I'll let you know right now that if you're thinking something bad about someone and they die, you'll feel even more like shit than you did when they did whatever it is to piss you off. Gregg was a miracle. A literal miracle. He was supposed to die about 5 or 10 years ago, and he was proud of his story, to tell that he was a survivor. He was the kind of guy that told you anything was possible, because if he could survive cancer, you could survive whatever was being thrown at you. Not just any cancer, though I couldn't tell you specifically what he had. But he was terminal. He was given about a month to live and was taken to a special experimental program at the National Institute of Health (where he lived for I think about 2 years). He was the teaching case of someone who definitely WAS going to die, a pretty horrible death, and soon. He even told me that he thought he knew where he got the cancer, though he could never be sure or prove it. In the early 80's, he was a reporter called to report on an oil well that was gushing (or something like that... it may have been an electrical fluid leak of some sort... I wish I remembered better). He stood with this carcinogenic fluid falling on him for about 5 or 6 hours. He never bothered to check with other reporters from that time to see if there was a higher-than-average instance of cancer among them. Fact is, if they got what he did, they're probably not around any more either.

He was on all the experimental stuff, stuff that didn't work for about 95% of his roommates. But it worked on him. He got a bone marrow transplant from his sister, and had to take leave from work every so often for blood tranfusions and dentist appointments, since his teeth were quite a mess from all the chemo he had gone through. And he was doing really well. So well that it was one of the last things he talked about to the last colleague that left, about how great he was doing. He told me that every once in a while, for teaching cases, they'd still call him in as part of a "line-up" where they had patients at various stages showing "worst case" to "best case" scenario outcomes for treatment. He was proud to be brought in as a "best case" example.

So, he called in with the flu, and we had to grab a tape off his desk while he was out, and joked about how we'd have to wash our hands not to catch the germs in his office. And we decided to let him rest on Thursday, not to bug him. And apparently on Friday morning, he felt so bad that he drove himself to the NIH, where they treated him for what they thought was pneumonia. While working on him, he stopped breathing. They resusitated him, but he died. My co-worker got the phone call, because they were randomly going through his cell phone trying to reach someone he worked with. And just like that, Gregg is gone.

While Gregg was supposed to die a while ago, it was no longer expected or imminent. Needless to say, it was a shock to all of us. I know, because I spent yesterday calling the rest of my colleagues to break the news. Gregg wasn't a friend, or even my favorite guy at work. But he was a good person who was hanging in there to put his daughter (a high school senior) through college. He had a distinctive, resonating voice and an enormously large skill set... and he will be missed. And he left me with the attitude of live for today. And he made me realize how life is short, and anger is wasted, and fall-outs with friends are stupid. I am still lonely and confused for many reasons, even without the passing of my colleague. Once I recover from the shock, I hope I can use it to set things in motion that have been stagnant for too long. I hope.