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Friday, February 09, 2018

Eric Bulmer

A message pops up from an old friend from my Peace Corps days:

"Rob, Say a prayer for Eric today. He passed last night. All are in shock. Unexpected. Think it was the heart."

Eric and I spent almost no time together in Nepal. I think I can count the conversations we had on both hands, likely leaving enough fingers for a double Bronx salute. We were in the same Peace Corps cohort in Nepal, which lasted for just over two years. Eric stayed on for a third, married a Nepali woman, and later moved back to Rhode Island.

One of my last conversations with him in Nepal involved me implying that he was signing on for another year of hell while the rest of us were escaping. Which is pretty much how I felt at the time.

This is the point in the story where I am supposed to tell you that I never apologized, and now it's too late, and I regret leaving things the way they were. I am then supposed to go on to tell you to reach out to someone before it's too late, apologize, and make the best of the time you have left.

That's not my story. Not this time, anyway.

In 2008, almost 10 years after leaving Nepal, we got sort of bumped back together on Facebook. When I look back on our official Facebook history, there are seven posts. That's it. Less than one per year, and all him posting on my timeline, because I kind of suck at Facebook. What it doesn't show is the numerous times he and I hijacked someone else's post with the kind of conversations that are usually reserved for the wee hours of the morning when both parties are short on sleep but long on words.

But the real evidence of how our relationship changed is in Messenger. There are conversations about movies based on comic books, of course. But there are a couple of very serious conversations as well, including one in which we both apologize for how we treated each other back in the day. It's not a lengthy apology on either end, but it is warm, and real, and proof that sometimes the internet improves relationships rather than merely attaching bells and whistles and a light coating of fecal matter. I'm grateful for the record, and sad that we had not added more to it.

He died from a heart attack. Went home feeling sick on Friday, Saturday night his heart gave up. He was so full of energy and life. The kind of energy that says, "One more year of mountain hiking to get anywhere, occasional parasites and food poisoning, and dirt-road slalom busses? Count me in!"

All of my photos from Nepal are boxed up in my parents' basement, but I'm pretty sure there are none of just Eric and me. We didn't do much together outside of larger groups. In the past ten years I figured that on one of our trips to the States we would get to Rhode Island and get that picture. Our wives could compare notes, our daughters could hang out, and I would get to see his "Pow Science!" store.

I got the message at about one a.m.  Horyon was working and the kids were in bed. Horyon heard my sobs of grief and was sure that a relative had died. She was relieved to find it was someone she had never met.

And never will.

So mend relationships when you are able. Get together while you still can.

Love before it's too late.

A Brief Introduction

Roblog is my writing lab. It is my goal to not let seven days pass without a new post. I welcome your criticism, as I cannot improve on my own.

Here is a link to my cung post, which remains the only word which I have ever invented, and which has not, as far as I know, caught on. Yet.