Hey, everyone. This is a blog post I had hoped I would never have to write, and it’s surreal, bordering on unreality, that I’ve sat down to put these words together at all. I lost my best friend, Travis, less than a week ago at the time of this writing. Just writing that sentence feels like I’ve dipped my heart in liquid nitrogen and then shattered it against the floor.

His loss was shocking for the fact that it was so unexpected. He had been having some health issues the last little while, it’s true, but no one that knew him could have guessed that he was facing a life-endangering condition. But now he’s gone, and those who knew him are left in the wake of his passing — confused, heartbroken, and stricken.

I’ve written eulogies to people I’ve lost before on this blog, notably about my grandfather, my godmother, and my godfather. This is yet another in that series, but one that packs an emotional wallop the likes of which I’ve never been dealt before.

This post is an attempt to make sense of the world around me now. I won’t lie — this is going to be a rough one, but I hope you’ll stick with me on it. Travis is an essential part of my origin story, as you’ll see.

Who Was He?

I was an only child growing up. Thankfully, I had plenty of cousins on both sides of the family to fill that role. Travis was a cousin on my Dad’s side. He was six years my senior, and I looked up to him my entire childhood, and that never really stopped. He was a gentle person with the mind of an intellectual, the heart of a gamer, and the soul of a poet.

I admired all of those qualities about him, but others around us didn’t. We both grew up in the rural spaces of East Texas, and neither of us ever quite fit the country mold or mentality. We were eternally the puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit the space we were granted. We loved comics and philosophy, history and science fiction/epic fantasy, literature and gaming, both of the tabletop variety and video games. The Venn diagram of our interests was very nearly a circle.

Those interests did not make us very popular with our peers at the time, however, but it didn’t matter because we were around each other enough that we knew we had a fellow geek and nerd in the other. We would sit in the backroom of our great-grandmother’s house, a place known as the Boys’ Room, and talk for hours about everything that was on our minds.

The irony is that most people who knew Travis would likely describe him as quiet, but let me tell you that some of the longest and most engaging conversations that I’ve ever had were with him. He had a rapier wit and no small amount of snark that he injected in these conversations that often left me laughing until my sides hurt. So, yeah, he was easily one of my favorite people on this green Earth. When I say that he’s the closest thing to a brother that I have, I want you to understand my meaning.

But even the word brother doesn’t quite cover it. I’ve known plenty of people who have actual blood siblings who were not as close as we were. We were not only a family by blood but also by choice. I was lucky enough to maintain that bond right up until the end.

Processing his loss is not going to come soon, nor will it come easily. He occupied a unique and irreplaceable role in my life. His death is a major landmark. There will always be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ time.

The truth is that the tapestry of our lives was interwoven, and having him ripped away, stitch and seam, leaves me as ragged around the edges as the metaphor implies.

A Fanboy Education

I’ve had a lifelong love of superheroes. My first impressions of DC were shaped by Super Friends, just as my first foray into Marvel was through Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. I watched those shows before I could read, and even though he was older than I was, Travis always watched those with me when we were together.

While the concept of superheroes was not something he introduced me to, per se, he did spark my interest in comic books. He was the first comic collector I ever met, the first to bag and board his comics, and the one who introduced me to the deep ocean of lore that made up the DC and Marvel universes. Some of the very first comics I ever owned came from Travis. My access to comics as a kid was pretty limited, and often Travis would be the one to bring issues that I had missed when we would meet up in the Boys’ Room.

I was fortunate enough to see nearly all of the MCU movies with him. I believe the last one we saw together was Deadpool and Wolverine before some of his health issues started to take their toll, making him adverse to going to the movie theater. Streaming helped with that somewhat, and we still got to watch a number of good flicks. The last one we watched together was The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron, just a few weeks ago. 

While the MCU has been a bit hit-or-miss the last few years, both of us were really looking forward to seeing Avengers: Doomsday. Seeing it this December is going to be really weird without him. 

All the Lasts

When someone I care about dies, I start to think about the ‘lasts’ with that person. When was the last time that I saw them, talked to them, went to dinner with them, those sorts of things. I’ve mentioned a few of them already, but here are some of the lasts with Travis:

• Last text: A short message telling me to check with his roommate on some things related to Travis going into the hospital.
• Last email: a listing of different doctors appointments he had in the works.
• Last phone call: I had accidentally dialed him. He called me back to make sure everything was okay.
• Last dinner: A trip to Longhorn Steak House after the last session of his Forgotten Realms campaign.
• The list goes on, and on, and on…

The last in-depth conversation we had was about Firefly. The news that there might be an animated Firefly series in the works, with the original actors reprising their roles, made us both excited for a potential comeback. So, I had gone back to revisit the series, even introducing my young son to it in the process.

Travis and I talked about what the characters and setting meant to us while we waited in the doctor’s office. I told him that we had finished “Objects in Space,” the last episode of the regular series, and that we would watch Serenity soon. We weren’t sure how my son would react to the untimely deaths of Shepherd Book and Wash.

We finished up at the doctor’s office and I drove him home. I ate lunch at his house, though his stomach was not feeling well, so he didn’t join me. The last thing he said to me was that he really appreciated all my help.

That’s the problem with lasts; most of the time you don’t realize it was the last time you’ll do something. So, the last geeky conversation we had, out of the many thousands we’ve had over the years, was about a show that was gone too soon, and forever missed by those who loved it. Fitting, no?

Travis went into the hospital the very next day, and into the ICU that night. He never fully regained lucidity in the days before he died. One of the nights that I came home from sitting vigil at the hospital, we watched Serenity. When the movie came out all those years ago, the two of us had attended a sneak-peak of it, and loved it, of course.

Watching it now, I’m struck by Zoe and Mal’s last interaction in the movie. After the death of her husband, and the near dismembering of Serenity, Mal asks about the ship, but is really asking about how Zoe is grieving.

Think she’ll hold together?

To that, Zoe replies:

She’s torn up plenty, but she’ll fly true.

All the Firsts

As bittersweet as it is to remember my last interactions with Travis, I now face a universe of ‘firsts’ that happen without him present. His first birthday after he’s left us. My first birthday without him. The first holiday season without him here. That’s just the immediate stuff. The future holds all sorts of milestones, like graduations, weddings, and, yes, even funerals, where I will wish like hell that he was still here to be there for them. My first major book launch is in a little over a month, and now I won’t be able to share it with him.

Those thoughts are nearly unbearable. At times, they weigh down on me like I’m Atlas from myth, but a version of him that doesn’t have super strength, being crushed beneath the unimaginable weight.  

It’s going to be a long while, and maybe never, before I see or do something cool and don’t immediately think to let Travis know about it.

While it might be a very writer-y thing to throw into the mix here, one of the things that’s really damaging my calm is now referring to Travis in the past tense. I thought we had a good twenty or thirty years left to us. We were supposed to both go to a retirement home where we could spend our twilight years gaming without having to worry about any of the rest of it.

This wasn’t how our story was supposed to end.

The Games We Played

Speaking of stories, we made a fair few ourselves. Tabletop role-playing games, or TTRPGs, are a wonderful engine for those creating characters, stories, worldbuilding, and the like. I use those skills all the time in my books, and Travis was there as I developed them. The two of us had many grand adventures together, from the streets of Waterdeep and sands of Netheril, to the Siege of Kalaman, and the last stand at the High Clerist’s Tower, as well as so many other battles, adventures, and shining moments. He was an inventive and strategic player, whose characters often found ways to punch way above their weight.

He told me once that the first character he ever rolled up was a fighter in the Rolemaster system named Aelfred. This is when he was in college. If you’ve never played Rolemaster, it is far and away the most complicated tabletop RPG I’ve ever encountered. It does have one of the coolest skill systems that I’ve since adapted to other games. Suffice to say, if Travis could cut his teeth on that system, he was fearless at running other games.

The last character he played was a cleric named Gazpacho for a D&D 5e campaign. I was not involved in that game, unfortunately, but I was in plenty of others over the years, both as a fellow player and as a GM/DM. 

Here’s a litany of the characters that were in games that I played in or ran myself:

Francis Greenleaf and Malik the Reaver (Forgotten Realms), Korranderaythe “Kor” von Cristalvasser (Dragonlance), Laeryn Chanis, Gwaelon, the Rune Magus, and Phillipe “Flit” Ballantine (Valeriand), Alfon the Blade (RPG to Go), Jasper (Greyhawk), the Mimic (Reverse Dungeon), Faustindintal Krinkledoom the Gnome Beserker (One Shot), Tiny the Pygmy Storm Giant (One Shot), Rick Derris (Traveller), Sour Ron (7^th Sea), Chuck Wagon (Werewolf the Apocalypse), Adam Adamant and Sebastian Vandergriffin (Glorantha), Gruhn and Hawk (Iron Kingdoms), Quarantine (AEOS-17), Councilor Trip (Fallout), President McKenna (Far Beyond the Stars), Derek Calderon (Star Wars), and Nevarre Nightshade (Shadow of the Dragon Queen).

Travis was also a prolific GM/DM. Here’s a similar list of campaigns that he ran where I was a participant:

Shadow World (Rolemaster), Memphis By Midnight (World of Darkness), Age of Netheril (Forgotten Realms), Angels and Devils (Forgotten Realms), Silverymoon/The North (Forgotten Realms), Game of Thrones – Past Lens (Rolemaster), Malkaziel’s Cataract (Forgotten Realms/Tenede)

In all this, I have to include this story. One of my first attempts to run a game was when I was in junior high. I created a super-simple RPG system that used only six-sided dice. It was really meant for us to play while on road trips where most of it was handled through just talking it out.

A couple of my cousins had made up characters and played for a while. They had levelled a bit and found some great magic items. At this point, I hadn’t figured out that if you introduce a new character into the party that you should start them out relatively equal to the other party members. When Travis came down from college during the summer, he made up a character named Alfon the Blade, a thief/rogue character who, rather unfortunately, only had one hit point. Travis didn’t mind, however. He was adept at playing oddball characters.

After getting kicked out of the town square for plinking on an out-of-tune harp that only had one string, I introduced him to our cousin Michael’s character, an extremely dangerous Dwarven assassin named Viper. Viper had made a reputation for himself by clearing out the local forest of several gangs of bandits singlehandedly. Understand that Michael was maybe 10-years-old at the time. Travis was 19 or 20.

So, when Viper met Alfon for the first time, Viper gave his future companion the immortal greeting of: “Why don’t you come with me to kill thieves, because thieves are easy. And if you don’t, I’ll kill you.”

I really wish I had a picture of Travis’s face in that moment. Considering that Alfon was one of those aforementioned thieves, who only had one hit point, Travis quickly agreed to join forces with Viper.

Travis told me later that Viper really knew how to make a sales pitch, the proverbial offer you couldn’t refuse.

Priceless.

The Good of the One

I cannot count the number of hours that I’ve spent talking with Travis about various intricacies and nuances of fantasy and sci-fi stories. Game of Thrones, Babylon 5, Star Wars, lots of Lord of the Rings, Dragonlance, The Avengers, Watchmen, Transformers, Dune, you name it. A love of Star Trek, however, is something that we both had in our blood even from an early age.

Spock’s axiom that “the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one” is a philosophy that Travis put into practice daily. He continually put the needs of everyone else around him before his own, almost to a fault. He did not seek recognition or self-aggrandizement, but preferred to fly under the radar and be left alone.

When he went to the hospital for the last time, we saw Kirk’s reversal of that philosophy that “the good of the one outweighs the good of the many” on display. A number of folks dropped what they were doing to come and show their support for him and the family. Even more called, sent texts, or showed support through various social media. This continued even after Travis left us, and I don’t imagine it will let up anytime soon, and I’m thankful for it.

I can’t imagine trying to mourn a loss this unthinkable without the community around me. I know I will be leaning on them in the days, months, and years ahead. But to put that loss into perspective, now I know something of what Kirk would have felt when Spock died at the end of The Wrath of Khan, helpless to do anything but watch as the other one slipped away, and dumbstruck at not knowing how to process that his friend was gone.

When Leonard Nimoy passed back in 2015, a YouTuber named Melodysheep put together what I think is one of the most moving tributes to the character of Spock and by extension his relationship with Kirk. It’s also just a really good song that I will embed here. It’s worth taking a look/listen.

I definitely don’t want to paint Travis as being purely logical and without emotion, because he definitely wasn’t like that. But I was always the impulsive one, the one who rushed in where angels feared to tread. He was the cautious one, always advising me to look before I would leap, and to not make important decisions when emotions were running hot.

I’m glad I took some of those lessons to heart, but I’m not done learning from Travis yet.

On Farewells

A character flaw of mine, one which I’m very well aware of, is that I absolutely hate change. Once I get something where I like it, I want it to maintain indefinitely, but of course it never does. We live in a world that is constantly in flux. Almost always those are changes that we can do nothing about.

Losing someone I care about is the ultimate kind of change that I didn’t ask for or want. Again, I can do nothing about it now. I’m not sure what the shape of my life will look like now that he’s gone, and I’m not looking forward to finding out.

Words don’t usually fail me, but they do in this case. As raw as this account has been, it can never really do the man justice. I shall not look upon his like again.

But here I am in in the aftermath. All I can do is try to move forward, though it is tearing the heart right out of me, and try to live a life worthy of his memory and legacy. So, that’s what I’m going to do. I will honor him and the many debts that will now remain eternally in arrears.

In closing, I’d like to share a bit of poetry with you. As I said, Travis had the soul of a poet. One of his favorites was The Noble Nature, which is a poem about the brevity of life and beauty. I’ll leave you with the last two lines of it, which were the last lines of the last email he ever sent me.

In small proportions we just beauties see.

And in short measures life may perfect be.      

                             —Ben Jonson. (1572-1637)