Random Note:

Could we import some more of these guys? The Viking blood’s getting a little thin in some quarters over here. Better yet, import their women. Adding good looking Euro babes, and improving the gene pool to boot. Who says I’m not visionary?

Moving on….

The funeral was… well, a funeral. Sad, funny, touching… the usual. Hardest part for me was to walk up to the coffin to pay my respects. Mark looked…. more natural than anyone had a right to, it seemed. I’ve attended way too many funerals for relatives, and every one of them, the effects of the embalming proceedure left the face looking wrong somehow. Mark, on the other hand, looked, honest to God, like he was asleep. (Edit: yes, I know it’s a cliche. It’s also true.) A little pale, but asleep. I usually try to spend a minute or two at the coffin, but I couldn’t do it this time. Had to get away and sit by myself a bit. Thankfully, everyone let me be. I hadn’t been back to the home town to visit the old gang in quite a while, and Mark always had a dry, deadpan (no pun) sense of humor. Looking at him, it just seemed to me he was about to pop one eye open and ask, “So. Is this what it takes for you to remember your friends?”

Mark and I weren’t real close, though we considered each other friends. Yet his death has me upset on many levels, especially emotionally. This is hard for me to write, and several times I’ve had to stop for a few minutes. It’s also disturbing for other reasons, not the least of which is that he was just over two months older than myself, with no history of heart trouble. Not that his life was entirely without problems. Mark was brilliant, but very inconsistant. He couldn’t budget, and had troubles holding a job. Or just going out to apply for one. He did great work, just…sometimes he stopped showing up, because of depression–which led to stress. The parallels with my own life are uncomfortable and worrisome. I knew he had problems 20 years ago, but hell, we were in college back then. Everyone was broke. And yet that’s the richest time of life, in memories we treasure later. So, of course, we all had a minor degree of “If only I had known” guilt, as well as my own “there, but for the grace of God” feelings. But we also know that life is that way. You don’t always know.

Of course, every funeral is a time for old friends and family to meet again, and hell, I knew all the pallbearers (the old gang from college or his high school), so it was also time for reminiscing, telling “Mark stories,” and so on. In our old AD&D campaigns, he was considered the best gamemaster in the group, when we could get him to do it. He put a lot of time and energy into his gaming, and every player felt like they were in a real world, in which their actions had very real consequences. As a result, he always brought out the best roleplaying among the group. I very much recall one time, I was playing a character from a Pellucidar-type underground society; one magically cursed to forget there was an “outside world.” I and another player spent several minutes roleplaying after the curse was lifted, as he tried to explain the outside world to my character. I really got into it, and failed to “grok” the whole concept. How did anyone on the outside of the world not fall off? Balls of rock and water that just hang in a limitless void? Clearly, these outsiders were insane. Once they took me outside, I developed agoraphobia, and refused to look up whenever I was outside a building… since the first thing the group had to do was build a raft to get off the island we were on, my character got tossed from a tiny world a few miles across, into a whole ocean. Seemed logical to me!

“What is that…line way out there? where the water meets the… the…” (shudder and stare at ground)
“That’s the horizon”
“Never… never mind.”

Sigh. Those were the days.

General consensus: No one in the group is to require a funeral in anything less than 20 years. I started to suggest that we kill them if it happens, but even I don’t have poor enough taste to make that joke.

Not out loud, anyway.

Then.

And of course, with a bunch of old gaming hands together, everyone who could stay did, and we broke out the dice and gaming books. I think it was fitting to celebrate Mark’s funeral with something he would have enjoyed immensely.

“He’s a filthy sorceror!”

“We don’t know that for sure. And we’ve taken his silver. That means we guard him until we reach our destination. Our word on it. After that, though, we’ll find a better employer.”

“If he starts casting magic. . .”

“Then kill him — if you can. Filthy sorceror.”

Godspeed, Mark.