My friend Stirge

Eric Sturgeon, one of my oldest and dearest friends, died this week of complications from what I'm fairly certain was non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

It was not entirely unexpected. He'd been getting progressively worse over the past six months. But at the same time there's no way to expect this sort of hole in my life.

I've known Stirge for twenty-five years, more than half of my life. We were both in college when we first met on Usenet in 1993 in the rec.arts.comics.* hierarchy, where Stirge was the one with the insane pull list and the canonical knowledge of the Marvel Universe. We have been friends ever since: part of on-line fiction groups, IRC channels, and free-form role-playing groups. He's been my friend through school and graduation, through every step of my career, through four generations of console systems, through two moves for me and maybe a dozen for him, through a difficult job change... through my entire adult life.

For more than fifteen years, he's been spending a day or a week or two, several times a year, sitting on my couch and playing video games. Usually he played and I navigated, researching FAQs and walkthroughs. Twitch was immediately obvious to me the moment I discovered it existed; it's the experience I'd had with Stirge for years before that. I don't know what video games are without his thoughts on them.

Stirge rarely was able to put his ideas into stories he could share with other people. He admired other people's art deeply, but wasn't an artist himself. But he loved fictional worlds, loved their depth and complexity and lore, and was deeply and passionately creative. He knew the stories he played and read and watched, and he knew the characters he played, particularly in World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic. His characters had depth and emotions, histories, independent viewpoints, and stories that I got to hear. Stirge wrote stories the way that I do: in our heads, shared with a small number of people if anyone, not crafted for external consumption, not polished, not always coherent, but deeply important to our thoughts and our emotions and our lives. He's one of the very few people in the world I was able to share that with, who understood what that was like.

He was the friend who I could not see for six months, a year, and then pick up a conversation with as if we'd seen each other yesterday.

After my dad had a heart attack and emergency surgery to embed a pacemaker while we were on vacation in Oregon, I was worrying about how we would manage to get him back home. Stirge immediately volunteered to drive down from Seattle to drive us. He had a crappy job with no vacation, and if he'd done that he almost certainly would have gotten fired, and I knew with absolute certainty that he would have done it anyway.

I didn't take him up on the offer (probably to his vast relief). When I told him years later how much it meant to me, he didn't feel like it should have counted, since he didn't do anything. But he did. In one of the worst moments of my life, he said exactly the right thing to make me feel like I wasn't alone, that I wasn't bearing the burden of figuring everything out by myself, that I could call on help if I needed it. To this day I start crying every time I think about it. It's one of the best things that anyone has ever done for me.

Stirge confided in me, the last time he visited me, that he didn't think he was the sort of person anyone thought about when he wasn't around. That people might enjoy him well enough when he was there, but that he'd quickly fade from memory, with perhaps a vague wonder about what happened to that guy. But it wasn't true, not for me, not ever. I tried to convince him of that while he was alive, and I'm so very glad that I did.

The last time I talked to him, he explained the Marvel Cinematic Universe to me in detail, and gave me a rundown of the relative strength of every movie, the ones to watch and the ones that weren't as good, and then did the same thing for the DC movies. He got to see Star Wars before he died. He would have loved Black Panther.

There were so many games we never finished, and so many games we never started.

I will miss you, my friend. More than I think you would ever have believed.