A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
Note: this is being published early, and I will not be around for comments right away; unfortunately, I have to go to work. I will gladly check comments and respond when I get home from work at about 2 am Eastern.
That having been said, it's time to meet Patrick.
There is going to be less grieving in this diary; I've done that enough. Today, on the first anniversary of Patrick's death, I'd rather celebrate.
So. Meet Patrick, my little brother. Here he is:
That was taken in March 2007, seven months before his death. He was 39 when he died, having been born in May of 1968. He died of esophageal cancer.
Patrick grew up in the North Shore of Boston suburbs. He was the middle child, with an older brother (that'd be me) and a younger sister. Being a middle child, he got all the shit, but dealt with it in his own inimitable way. Growing up, he was a champion of bugging the daylights out of me, then somehow convincing Mom that it was all my fault. In other words, typical little brother! This changed as we got older, and we got very close in our teenaged years. That remained for the rest of his life.
Patrick had a talent that became apparent very quickly in his life: drawing. Damn, was he good. A big collector of comic books in the teen years, that's where a lot of the drawing started. Patrick was a big XMen fan. Here's Wolverine:
There are tons of comic book drawings in the sketchbooks he left behind, but he branched out. Here's U2:
He drew people we knew, too. We both worked at McDonald's, and he drew lots of pics of our friends there, like these three guys (trust me, the resemblance is right on!):
Then there was Bobo. His real name was Bob, and he nicknamed himself Bobo for some bizarre reason :). Bobo was a friend of both of ours (he was the drummer in my first band). The nickname drove Patrick to draw "Rambobo" (again, a perfect likeness):
Keep in mind, all of these were done when he was in high school (the Wolverine one might have even been earlier). Patrick attended an academic high school (St. John's Prep in Danvers, MA, also my alma mater) without much of an art program. After a lost year at Boston College, he decided to transfer to an actual art school, the Maryland Institute College of Art (aka MICA) in Baltimore.
He loved it there. He majored in drawing, and I think back then he still had ideas of becoming a comic book artist. When he graduated, however, he accepted a job that took his career on a different path.
So, how many of you have heard of Microprose Software?
Located in Hunt Valley, just north of Baltimore, Microprose hired a lot of artists from MICA. Patrick was one of them. He worked on a bunch of minor projects while he was there, but one was important: he was the artist who converted the first DOS version of the first Civilization to a Windows version.
His big project? Game by the name of Darklands. He was the big artistic chief on that one. Many of you have not heard of Darklands. It was this big unweildy thing that was buggy from the start, and taxed the graphics cards of its day 15 years ago. However,it's a cult classic, and I've seen it referred to as "World of Warcraft 15 years before its time." It was ridiculously ambitious and Patrick joked that most of his grey hairs on that later picture of him were "from my kids, except for the old ones I got from Darklands!" However, he was proud of it.
From there, he did some sports games. He went to work for a Microprose offshoot where they teamed up with ABC/ESPN to do sports games. He worked on a game called ABC Monday Night Football. Again, ambitious, and one of the first sports games to use motion capture (he got to go out to the Pro Bowl and capture actual NFL players' motions). It was a good game, but it tanked, Madden having already eaten up the football videogame world.
After that, he got laid off, moved to California, did another football game (Jimmy Johnson Football...sorry, pal, Madden was even bigger), got laid off again, did contract work, spent a lot of time out of work, and watched the bottom fall out of the video game industry.
Just around the same time, he fell in love.
Patrick's my "example": you can find the love of your life on the internet! :) While living in Thousand Oaks, northwest of LA, he met a girl from the Bay Area in an 80s Music Chatroom. IM chats turned into phone calls turned into weekend visits up and down CA turned into Dawn moving to the LA area turned into marriage. And three kids.
After the last layoff, they moved up to the Bay Area, into a house that Patrick's inlaws owned in Hayward. And Patrick underwent another very welcome career change: he started teaching.
He taught video game design at the Art Institute of California at San Fransisco. He absolutely adored it. He told me, "I liked designing video games, but teaching is my absolute calling." And they loved him so much that they wanted to promote him to be the head of the department. Only one problem: he needed a master's degree for that, and he didn't have one. So, he decided to get one. He started his first course in the fall of 2006.
The cancer hit before he could take a second one.
He died a year ago today, October 20 2007. He left a loving wife, and three kids under the age of 8 (Amelia, the youngest, was 10 months; she was born less than a week after he was diagnosed). He also left a pile of students that adored him; his funeral was packed, mostly with students and fellow professors. He touched the lives of all his students, and all of us who were lucky to know him.
I miss the fuck out of him. When the Red Sox lost last night, part of me was still waiting for the damn phone call.
OK, so maybe I was wrong about this not being a grieving diary, a little bit.
One more pic. This is a self portrait that he drew in college. Instead of the usual photograph at the funeral and wake (closed casket), we used this. It's 20 years earlier than the photo above, so it has his old Elvis pompadour and not his beard, but you can still see it's him :) It was perfect:
One more story. Patrick was as much of a Liberal Dem as I am, but he knew I kept up more. So, sometime last spring or summer (had to be before August because that's when he really got sick), we were chatting on IM and he said, "So, what do you know about this Barack Obama guy?"
I told him a little about Obama, and he returned with, "Are you supporting him?"
"I'm leaning towards him. I've got some time to make up my mind, but my first choice, Russ Feingold, isn't running, and I think Obama's really got something."
"I don't know," Patrick said...and I knew exactly what was going through his mind. Patrick's children, you see, are mixed race. (His wife is Filipino.)
He quickly confirmed it. "I don't know," he repeated. "Do you really think this country is ready to elect a mixed race black man?"
"I don't know either," I told him. "But I know he won't be elected if we don't ignore that question."
"True," he agreed. "I'd love to see it."
"So would I," I told him. "We'll find out."
Well, Patrick, wherever you are, we're gonna find out in two weeks. I think we're gonna like the answer. Then Dawn can tell those mixed race kids of yours that, yes, they do live in a country where they can grow up to be president. Isn't that great?
So, now you've met Patrick. I wish you could've really met him. I'm glad I did.
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