David
It's been too long since I've posted. Most things that happen, Eric posts about and so I tend to feel pretty meh about getting around to writing about it from my point of view. What happened last Friday deserves my own post, though.
My friend David, the shaman Yablik in my guild, died.
I've known David for quite a while, since sometime during Cata. He whispered me on my auctioneer to talk about auction house stuff. We both sold glyphs and that's how he operated, by keeping good relations with his competitors. It was a brilliant move. While glyphs tended to be a worthless market on many servers, despite the high competition on such a populated server as Moon Guard, he persuaded people to act in their best interest and post glyphs at prices that would make it so all of us profited. When you read gold making blogs, you see all sorts of strategies that involve trying to drive people out of markets or keeping prices at a cutthroat rate just barely high enough that a great volume will provide profit. None of them talk about making friends with your competitors to keep prices high, but that's what he did, and he was successful with all but a few individuals.
As time went on, we chatted occasionally, and then I came to realize that our raid teams were progressing at a similar rate. We ended up by talking raid stuff too, strategies, problems we encountered, and so on. I didn't realize that he was their raid leader, but in retrospect it's obvious what with the whole discussing strategies bit. One night, after the split with Court of the Common and my formation of Comfortably Numb, I was looking for a couple of people so we could raid in Mogu'shan Vaults. His guild, Dedicated, wasn't raiding that week, and seeing my ad, he offered himself and one of his raiders. Thanks to him (and some recent nerfs), our first night encountering Elegon was a success.
After that, I would ask him on occasion if he was free when I needed a substitute. He wasn't often available, what with that whole leading his own raiding guild, but he took me up on it sometimes. One memorable time during Siege of Orgrimmar, he came in and dpsed (he always liked running with us as it gave him a chance to do that, where he was stuck healing in his own guild) and completely showed up the enhancement shaman we had in our guild at the time. The whining and sulking from Akrion was epic and I felt pretty cool that I had a friend that could provoke such a reaction.
Another memorable moment was the first time Invincible showed up on the Black Market Auction House on Moon Guard. We were hanging out there, bidding against each other, when he whispered me to find out how much I had to spend. Having recently made a large purchase, I didn't have much and told him whatever the amount was. He told me what he had, which was more than what I had, but not a lot, so I agreed to drop out. He made some more bids and then it became clear someone else was bidding as well. He asked if we could pool funds and that he would either pay me back if he won or give me back my money once he got outbid, but he wanted to make sure the person who won paid through the nose. I'd known him for a while at that point and after my various talks and raiding with him felt like it was worth the risk of trusting him, so I traded him something like 100k and he did indeed make the other party pay quite a bit more than they otherwise would have. He quickly got outbid and just as quickly paid me back, proving himself trustworthy.
At some point, I started talking to him about Dedicated's (his guild) plans for Warlords of Draenor. While both of our groups managed to progress into heroics to some point, the format change meant that going into the somewhat equivalent mythics in the future meant small ten mans like ours would have to double in size. It turned out that most of Dedicated was just done with the game. Almost everyone had quit or was going to quit. Naturally, I encouraged him and anyone who was left to come join us. He agreed to try it out once we started raiding again with the WoD pre-patch. He and his girlfriend eventually joined the guild, though shortly thereafter she quit the game.
He raided with us for a while without joining and there was always some distance there, but once I finally got him to actually join the guild, the distance faded. As he was used to being the raid and guild leader, he was pretty take charge. Over the course of the expansion, more and more I had the responsibility of fight explanations taken away from me. I'd frequently try, but he had a tendency to talk over me. When most of us knew a fight, I'd cut him off in turn, because he never would use one word when he could think of five to say instead, but new fights were mostly him. He told me at one point that I could tell him to be quiet, but I didn't want to hurt his feelings and I knew I would not do as well as he was if I'd used to be in charge and wasn't anymore, so I mostly let it be. As Naomi became a thing, both with pregnancy and after, and as I became more flaky due to it, his tendency became welcome.
He was very gracious, both with the leading thing and otherwise, because we gave him so much crap. When his girlfriend stopped showing up because of quitting, it became the joke that he'd killed her and hid her body under a rock. It was something we harped on so much, she even joined in with the joking about it on the occasions she'd pop up again. The way we learned his real name was from one of the times she was raiding with us, he did something, and she squealed, "Daaaavvviiiiiddd!" That also became a joke in the guild. We'd say it like she did, it became one of the joke ranks in the guild, I changed his nickname to that in Discord, that sort of thing. It took a bit, but he eventually started teasing us in turn, which was when I knew he'd really integrated into the guild.
Not many could be said to know more about WoW, but David regularly informed me of things (and hey, there was plenty of it going the other way too). We were both stubborn and interested and could discuss things endlessly because of it. Just earlier last week, we had a long involved discussion in guild over whether it was possible a game mechanic could be working in a particular way. Later another guildie remarked that only the two of us could have gone back and forth on such a topic for an hour and a half the way we did. I don't know that we went on for quite that long and I don't know that it would have been memorable if it hadn't happened in the last few days of his life, but it stands out with how we had many similarities, to the point where we wouldn't let things go but could do so without getting angry at one another (a problem I sometimes have-people get mad when I won't let things go).
In MoP, a core group of me, Eric, and guildies Tay and Heavy, formed to do challenge modes. Our fifth rotated. We never really ended up with someone that worked with our schedules and met our standard of performance. When David joined in WoD, it quickly became clear that we wanted him as our fifth. We started doing challenge modes a few months before Naomi was due, as we wanted to get it done before then. He was invaluable. In Mists, we just kind of rammed our heads against things until we got gold. Occasionally we'd look up something if we were having particular trouble with it. David researched the dungeons before we did them and told us how to do it, letting us get gold after usually only a few tries. When mythic+ became a thing, Tay, Heavy, and I agreed we wanted David back in our group (poor Eric tends to get left out of such discussions). During the first couple of weeks when we were trying to gear up, Eric and I ended up in a different group in order to optimize the guild's ability to do things, but once the first raid and the mythic+ dungeons opened up a couple of weeks ago, we settled back into our usual group, quietly swapping voice channels and doing our thing in order to try to avoid hurt feelings from other people. We seemed to be getting into a habit of running one right after raid.
One night last year, I hadn't been able to sleep and was not fit for human company, so I skipped raid for the night lest I be a raging monster at everyone. Tay was technically raid lead that night, but given that David often yanked the reins away from me, there was no way Tay was holding onto them, and David was the one telling people what to do. Unfortunately, it was a night that, as I like to put it, everyone brought their idiot twins to raid rather than themselves. David was normally patient as could be, but that night, he actually lost it and yelled at people. It was totally traumatizing to the group with how he normally was (as opposed to me, everyone would have expected it from me), so it became the joke that if people were really bad, I would threaten to let David raid lead and/or yell at them.
Last Wednesday, David logged off right after raid. We'd just killed a boss for the first time and he always logs out for a few minutes in order to upload logs and the like anyway, so we didn't think much of it. But then he didn't come back and he didn't come back. We joked about how his girlfriend's spirit must have come back to haunt him and kill him and I even messaged him with that info. Eventually, scratching our heads, we got a pug and went and ran a dungeon. About 3:45 am, I was the only one still up and on, and suddenly he logged back in. While Tay, Heavy, and I are frequently, if not usually, up in the middle of the night, David never was. I asked him what was up and he told me he'd just gotten back from the hospital. He said he'd suddenly gotten so sick that it was all he could do to make it to the end of the last boss fight and then he immediately logged and went to the ER. He even laughed a bit about how in the logs he'd just uploaded, you could see exactly where things went wrong for him as his dps dropped dramatically. He said they couldn't figure out anything wrong and said he must have just had a virus. I told him to go to bed and rest and he logged out again for the night. He was very vague about whatever his symptoms were, so I figured it must have been something embarrassing and didn't push for details.
Thursday, when I got up and got on my computer, I saw him playing Hearthstone and immediately whispered him to ask him how he was feeling. He said he was doing better, just felt mildly achy as if he was just a little bit sick instead of horrible whole body pain like he'd had the night before. I told him he should rest so his body could fight off whatever he had and he said that he couldn't sleep, so he might as well be up and at the computer as in bed. I told him he didn't need to worry about raid or anything if he didn't feel up to it and he noted that he'd drop if he was affecting the group negatively, but that he wanted to come.
Sure enough, when raid came, he was on and insisted on coming. He was doing fine, so the subject of him dropping didn't come up, but he did tell the ER story to the rest of the guild. After, we dawdled for a bit to take care of some things, then our usual group got together again to go run a mythic+. The pug the night before had been, ironically enough, an awesome enhancement shaman, so we had a Neltharion's Lair +5 stone. We went ahead and ran it and we rocked it. We finished with enough time remaining to get two chests and get the stone upgraded two levels to a +7 stone. When we were done, I believe around 12:00 or 12:30 am, we discussed whether we wanted to continue, but David said he was done for the night and logged off.
The next day, I was on an alt doing crafting stuff when I got a whisper from a guildie saying that David's girlfriend was asking after me and said it was urgent. I immediately whispered her, asking, "What's up? Something wrong with David?" We'd had very little interaction and given the recent ER visit, I couldn't imagine any reason for her to urgently need to talk to me other than him having ended up back in the hospital. I was right that it was related to David, but wrong on the news itself. She told me that he'd died. Over the next few days, we talked more than we ever had before. As she lives just outside NYC and was having visitors from the UK come, there was no way she could make it to the funeral, but we arranged for her to send me a package of stuff for it.
At some point over the weekend, his brother Garth logged onto his account and talked to us for a while. We learned some surprising things, like that he was quite a hermit and rather lonely IRL. Garth had originally owned the WoW account and had introduced David to the game, and given it to him when Garth got tired of playing in BC. He reassured us that we couldn't have done anything, that David had even gone to the ER without telling anyone that anything was wrong. Imagine his surprise when we told him that we'd known of the ER visit. He also talked about the timeline that, combined with the info we'd had that their dad had found David at the computer, indicated that he probably died shortly after logging out after we finished our dungeon. We were able to tell him what we knew from our end and reassure him that we'd just finished something that had made David happy before the end.
If I'd ever really thought about it, I'd have assumed that having one of my guild die would make me feel bad, but I never would have guessed I'd feel as bad as this. People come and go on the internet all the time and even close relationships can disappear in the blink of an eye. I'd known him for five or six years, though, and it's different when someone just disappears or quits with notice. You know then that they're still around. Now though, this friend who I talked to nearly daily, who I was on good terms with and was an integral part of my team, is gone and he won't be back. Last night, the first time we'd had raid since it happened, was disheartening. Over the past couple of years, David had become so key and I took all the stuff he did for granted. He called out a lot of stuff. He hit hero and aside from learning fights where we might occasionally try out different timing, I never, ever had to think about it or call for it. He just did it. Whenever we split into groups, he was the one I'd have designated for either the melee or the not-my-group to follow. He was the one this expansion that made things for us to change our talents with. He made food that I don't yet have the recipes for. He did a lot of enchanting for the raid. He was one of the top dps, the highest on most fights most consistently. He almost never missed from the start, just a few times when he had work, but once he changed jobs, he never missed ever. Those aren't the reasons I miss him, of course, but it was a constant jolt throughout the night, when we realized we hadn't used hero on a fight, or someone asked for a certain food or to change talents or whatever.
The funeral is on Friday. The small silver lining in all of this is that he was down in Provo, so Eric and I are able to attend. Cyger, another one of our guild, is flying up from Arizona to attend as well, so we'll have him here for a couple of nights. I don't remember how the idea came up, but we decided we should get flowers from the guild, and naturally I coordinated that. I started looking at flowers a couple of days ago and was shocked at how much they cost. I didn't exactly have a lot of experience buying flowers from a florist in the first place, and I haven't bought any from anything but the grocery store since my wedding (which we got deeply discounted from an aunt of Eric's who is a florist as our wedding present from her). So I hoped that I would be able to get enough from the guild so that we wouldn't have to cover most or all of the cheapest $50-ish arrangements on our own. One of the guild, one who has only been around a few months mind, began to ask me for details about stuff, and when I told him what I was seeing as far as prices, he said he wanted us to get a nice arrangement around $100 and would contribute $25 towards that. Naturally, I was touched, especially since he hadn't even known David for long. Monday, another guildie whispered me, I told him about the suggested price goal and what the other guy had pledged, and he said he'd also do $25 and sent it to me right there and then (once he figured out Paypal-several in my guild were unfamiliar with it. Apparently the group about a decade younger than me don't use it for anything). So last night during raid, I hit people up for more money, told them what we had and what we needed to get to reach the goal. I knew not everyone could contribute and not everyone did, but those that did were super generous. No one gave less than $15 and one person gave $50. Where I had hoped to get enough that Eric and I weren't paying for a small $50 arrangement by ourselves, we got $180 so I was able to get a very nice, large arrangement ordered. We're also going to provide a card and insert notes from everyone that submits them and take that to the funeral.
This is a first for me in many ways. Sure, I've known people who have died and I've been to funerals, but they've been family, people who were old and/or sick, neighbors, just acquaintances, that sort of thing. I've never had a peer who was a friend and who was such a frequent presence in my life die. I know this is only the start, but I didn't truly expect it to start this soon (though I guess I've gotten off lucky-one of the younger guys in the guild had his best friend's new wife die earlier in September at age 24). David was only a couple of years younger than me. We'd never actually known his age, but the way he talked and lived always had me figuring he was in his thirties (no school, steady career, had a mortgage, etc). It's just different seeing this as opposed to Bruce dying of cancer, or grandparents dying of old age, or that sort of thing. It's also spurred me to make sure things are taken care of. When Enoch was born, I got some will maker software, but we never got around to making either of ours official. Now I've got a new one printed up and ready to go, I just need to figure out who to get to witness and sign it. I also need to get a list of various accounts made up as well so if something ever does happen to me, whoever has to deal with stuff after has the information they need. I already had life insurance, so at least that is taken care of.
My friend David, the shaman Yablik in my guild, died.
I've known David for quite a while, since sometime during Cata. He whispered me on my auctioneer to talk about auction house stuff. We both sold glyphs and that's how he operated, by keeping good relations with his competitors. It was a brilliant move. While glyphs tended to be a worthless market on many servers, despite the high competition on such a populated server as Moon Guard, he persuaded people to act in their best interest and post glyphs at prices that would make it so all of us profited. When you read gold making blogs, you see all sorts of strategies that involve trying to drive people out of markets or keeping prices at a cutthroat rate just barely high enough that a great volume will provide profit. None of them talk about making friends with your competitors to keep prices high, but that's what he did, and he was successful with all but a few individuals.
As time went on, we chatted occasionally, and then I came to realize that our raid teams were progressing at a similar rate. We ended up by talking raid stuff too, strategies, problems we encountered, and so on. I didn't realize that he was their raid leader, but in retrospect it's obvious what with the whole discussing strategies bit. One night, after the split with Court of the Common and my formation of Comfortably Numb, I was looking for a couple of people so we could raid in Mogu'shan Vaults. His guild, Dedicated, wasn't raiding that week, and seeing my ad, he offered himself and one of his raiders. Thanks to him (and some recent nerfs), our first night encountering Elegon was a success.
After that, I would ask him on occasion if he was free when I needed a substitute. He wasn't often available, what with that whole leading his own raiding guild, but he took me up on it sometimes. One memorable time during Siege of Orgrimmar, he came in and dpsed (he always liked running with us as it gave him a chance to do that, where he was stuck healing in his own guild) and completely showed up the enhancement shaman we had in our guild at the time. The whining and sulking from Akrion was epic and I felt pretty cool that I had a friend that could provoke such a reaction.
Another memorable moment was the first time Invincible showed up on the Black Market Auction House on Moon Guard. We were hanging out there, bidding against each other, when he whispered me to find out how much I had to spend. Having recently made a large purchase, I didn't have much and told him whatever the amount was. He told me what he had, which was more than what I had, but not a lot, so I agreed to drop out. He made some more bids and then it became clear someone else was bidding as well. He asked if we could pool funds and that he would either pay me back if he won or give me back my money once he got outbid, but he wanted to make sure the person who won paid through the nose. I'd known him for a while at that point and after my various talks and raiding with him felt like it was worth the risk of trusting him, so I traded him something like 100k and he did indeed make the other party pay quite a bit more than they otherwise would have. He quickly got outbid and just as quickly paid me back, proving himself trustworthy.
At some point, I started talking to him about Dedicated's (his guild) plans for Warlords of Draenor. While both of our groups managed to progress into heroics to some point, the format change meant that going into the somewhat equivalent mythics in the future meant small ten mans like ours would have to double in size. It turned out that most of Dedicated was just done with the game. Almost everyone had quit or was going to quit. Naturally, I encouraged him and anyone who was left to come join us. He agreed to try it out once we started raiding again with the WoD pre-patch. He and his girlfriend eventually joined the guild, though shortly thereafter she quit the game.
He raided with us for a while without joining and there was always some distance there, but once I finally got him to actually join the guild, the distance faded. As he was used to being the raid and guild leader, he was pretty take charge. Over the course of the expansion, more and more I had the responsibility of fight explanations taken away from me. I'd frequently try, but he had a tendency to talk over me. When most of us knew a fight, I'd cut him off in turn, because he never would use one word when he could think of five to say instead, but new fights were mostly him. He told me at one point that I could tell him to be quiet, but I didn't want to hurt his feelings and I knew I would not do as well as he was if I'd used to be in charge and wasn't anymore, so I mostly let it be. As Naomi became a thing, both with pregnancy and after, and as I became more flaky due to it, his tendency became welcome.
He was very gracious, both with the leading thing and otherwise, because we gave him so much crap. When his girlfriend stopped showing up because of quitting, it became the joke that he'd killed her and hid her body under a rock. It was something we harped on so much, she even joined in with the joking about it on the occasions she'd pop up again. The way we learned his real name was from one of the times she was raiding with us, he did something, and she squealed, "Daaaavvviiiiiddd!" That also became a joke in the guild. We'd say it like she did, it became one of the joke ranks in the guild, I changed his nickname to that in Discord, that sort of thing. It took a bit, but he eventually started teasing us in turn, which was when I knew he'd really integrated into the guild.
Not many could be said to know more about WoW, but David regularly informed me of things (and hey, there was plenty of it going the other way too). We were both stubborn and interested and could discuss things endlessly because of it. Just earlier last week, we had a long involved discussion in guild over whether it was possible a game mechanic could be working in a particular way. Later another guildie remarked that only the two of us could have gone back and forth on such a topic for an hour and a half the way we did. I don't know that we went on for quite that long and I don't know that it would have been memorable if it hadn't happened in the last few days of his life, but it stands out with how we had many similarities, to the point where we wouldn't let things go but could do so without getting angry at one another (a problem I sometimes have-people get mad when I won't let things go).
In MoP, a core group of me, Eric, and guildies Tay and Heavy, formed to do challenge modes. Our fifth rotated. We never really ended up with someone that worked with our schedules and met our standard of performance. When David joined in WoD, it quickly became clear that we wanted him as our fifth. We started doing challenge modes a few months before Naomi was due, as we wanted to get it done before then. He was invaluable. In Mists, we just kind of rammed our heads against things until we got gold. Occasionally we'd look up something if we were having particular trouble with it. David researched the dungeons before we did them and told us how to do it, letting us get gold after usually only a few tries. When mythic+ became a thing, Tay, Heavy, and I agreed we wanted David back in our group (poor Eric tends to get left out of such discussions). During the first couple of weeks when we were trying to gear up, Eric and I ended up in a different group in order to optimize the guild's ability to do things, but once the first raid and the mythic+ dungeons opened up a couple of weeks ago, we settled back into our usual group, quietly swapping voice channels and doing our thing in order to try to avoid hurt feelings from other people. We seemed to be getting into a habit of running one right after raid.
One night last year, I hadn't been able to sleep and was not fit for human company, so I skipped raid for the night lest I be a raging monster at everyone. Tay was technically raid lead that night, but given that David often yanked the reins away from me, there was no way Tay was holding onto them, and David was the one telling people what to do. Unfortunately, it was a night that, as I like to put it, everyone brought their idiot twins to raid rather than themselves. David was normally patient as could be, but that night, he actually lost it and yelled at people. It was totally traumatizing to the group with how he normally was (as opposed to me, everyone would have expected it from me), so it became the joke that if people were really bad, I would threaten to let David raid lead and/or yell at them.
Last Wednesday, David logged off right after raid. We'd just killed a boss for the first time and he always logs out for a few minutes in order to upload logs and the like anyway, so we didn't think much of it. But then he didn't come back and he didn't come back. We joked about how his girlfriend's spirit must have come back to haunt him and kill him and I even messaged him with that info. Eventually, scratching our heads, we got a pug and went and ran a dungeon. About 3:45 am, I was the only one still up and on, and suddenly he logged back in. While Tay, Heavy, and I are frequently, if not usually, up in the middle of the night, David never was. I asked him what was up and he told me he'd just gotten back from the hospital. He said he'd suddenly gotten so sick that it was all he could do to make it to the end of the last boss fight and then he immediately logged and went to the ER. He even laughed a bit about how in the logs he'd just uploaded, you could see exactly where things went wrong for him as his dps dropped dramatically. He said they couldn't figure out anything wrong and said he must have just had a virus. I told him to go to bed and rest and he logged out again for the night. He was very vague about whatever his symptoms were, so I figured it must have been something embarrassing and didn't push for details.
Thursday, when I got up and got on my computer, I saw him playing Hearthstone and immediately whispered him to ask him how he was feeling. He said he was doing better, just felt mildly achy as if he was just a little bit sick instead of horrible whole body pain like he'd had the night before. I told him he should rest so his body could fight off whatever he had and he said that he couldn't sleep, so he might as well be up and at the computer as in bed. I told him he didn't need to worry about raid or anything if he didn't feel up to it and he noted that he'd drop if he was affecting the group negatively, but that he wanted to come.
Sure enough, when raid came, he was on and insisted on coming. He was doing fine, so the subject of him dropping didn't come up, but he did tell the ER story to the rest of the guild. After, we dawdled for a bit to take care of some things, then our usual group got together again to go run a mythic+. The pug the night before had been, ironically enough, an awesome enhancement shaman, so we had a Neltharion's Lair +5 stone. We went ahead and ran it and we rocked it. We finished with enough time remaining to get two chests and get the stone upgraded two levels to a +7 stone. When we were done, I believe around 12:00 or 12:30 am, we discussed whether we wanted to continue, but David said he was done for the night and logged off.
The next day, I was on an alt doing crafting stuff when I got a whisper from a guildie saying that David's girlfriend was asking after me and said it was urgent. I immediately whispered her, asking, "What's up? Something wrong with David?" We'd had very little interaction and given the recent ER visit, I couldn't imagine any reason for her to urgently need to talk to me other than him having ended up back in the hospital. I was right that it was related to David, but wrong on the news itself. She told me that he'd died. Over the next few days, we talked more than we ever had before. As she lives just outside NYC and was having visitors from the UK come, there was no way she could make it to the funeral, but we arranged for her to send me a package of stuff for it.
At some point over the weekend, his brother Garth logged onto his account and talked to us for a while. We learned some surprising things, like that he was quite a hermit and rather lonely IRL. Garth had originally owned the WoW account and had introduced David to the game, and given it to him when Garth got tired of playing in BC. He reassured us that we couldn't have done anything, that David had even gone to the ER without telling anyone that anything was wrong. Imagine his surprise when we told him that we'd known of the ER visit. He also talked about the timeline that, combined with the info we'd had that their dad had found David at the computer, indicated that he probably died shortly after logging out after we finished our dungeon. We were able to tell him what we knew from our end and reassure him that we'd just finished something that had made David happy before the end.
If I'd ever really thought about it, I'd have assumed that having one of my guild die would make me feel bad, but I never would have guessed I'd feel as bad as this. People come and go on the internet all the time and even close relationships can disappear in the blink of an eye. I'd known him for five or six years, though, and it's different when someone just disappears or quits with notice. You know then that they're still around. Now though, this friend who I talked to nearly daily, who I was on good terms with and was an integral part of my team, is gone and he won't be back. Last night, the first time we'd had raid since it happened, was disheartening. Over the past couple of years, David had become so key and I took all the stuff he did for granted. He called out a lot of stuff. He hit hero and aside from learning fights where we might occasionally try out different timing, I never, ever had to think about it or call for it. He just did it. Whenever we split into groups, he was the one I'd have designated for either the melee or the not-my-group to follow. He was the one this expansion that made things for us to change our talents with. He made food that I don't yet have the recipes for. He did a lot of enchanting for the raid. He was one of the top dps, the highest on most fights most consistently. He almost never missed from the start, just a few times when he had work, but once he changed jobs, he never missed ever. Those aren't the reasons I miss him, of course, but it was a constant jolt throughout the night, when we realized we hadn't used hero on a fight, or someone asked for a certain food or to change talents or whatever.
The funeral is on Friday. The small silver lining in all of this is that he was down in Provo, so Eric and I are able to attend. Cyger, another one of our guild, is flying up from Arizona to attend as well, so we'll have him here for a couple of nights. I don't remember how the idea came up, but we decided we should get flowers from the guild, and naturally I coordinated that. I started looking at flowers a couple of days ago and was shocked at how much they cost. I didn't exactly have a lot of experience buying flowers from a florist in the first place, and I haven't bought any from anything but the grocery store since my wedding (which we got deeply discounted from an aunt of Eric's who is a florist as our wedding present from her). So I hoped that I would be able to get enough from the guild so that we wouldn't have to cover most or all of the cheapest $50-ish arrangements on our own. One of the guild, one who has only been around a few months mind, began to ask me for details about stuff, and when I told him what I was seeing as far as prices, he said he wanted us to get a nice arrangement around $100 and would contribute $25 towards that. Naturally, I was touched, especially since he hadn't even known David for long. Monday, another guildie whispered me, I told him about the suggested price goal and what the other guy had pledged, and he said he'd also do $25 and sent it to me right there and then (once he figured out Paypal-several in my guild were unfamiliar with it. Apparently the group about a decade younger than me don't use it for anything). So last night during raid, I hit people up for more money, told them what we had and what we needed to get to reach the goal. I knew not everyone could contribute and not everyone did, but those that did were super generous. No one gave less than $15 and one person gave $50. Where I had hoped to get enough that Eric and I weren't paying for a small $50 arrangement by ourselves, we got $180 so I was able to get a very nice, large arrangement ordered. We're also going to provide a card and insert notes from everyone that submits them and take that to the funeral.
This is a first for me in many ways. Sure, I've known people who have died and I've been to funerals, but they've been family, people who were old and/or sick, neighbors, just acquaintances, that sort of thing. I've never had a peer who was a friend and who was such a frequent presence in my life die. I know this is only the start, but I didn't truly expect it to start this soon (though I guess I've gotten off lucky-one of the younger guys in the guild had his best friend's new wife die earlier in September at age 24). David was only a couple of years younger than me. We'd never actually known his age, but the way he talked and lived always had me figuring he was in his thirties (no school, steady career, had a mortgage, etc). It's just different seeing this as opposed to Bruce dying of cancer, or grandparents dying of old age, or that sort of thing. It's also spurred me to make sure things are taken care of. When Enoch was born, I got some will maker software, but we never got around to making either of ours official. Now I've got a new one printed up and ready to go, I just need to figure out who to get to witness and sign it. I also need to get a list of various accounts made up as well so if something ever does happen to me, whoever has to deal with stuff after has the information they need. I already had life insurance, so at least that is taken care of.