How do you want to be remembered?
Reflections on friends I miss and judgments on celebrities I've never met
I spent the weekend helping one friend move, another friend gut the inside of his future guest house, and a significant amount of time thinking about the death of two close friends.
Two years ago today is when one of my closest friends, Greg Block, died. Cancer. Double myeloma. Fuck you, cancer.
Fourteen years and three days ago is when another close friend, Erik Lemoine, died. Cancer. Skin cancer. Seriously, fuck you cancer. Stop taking away my friends.
This is a post that will admittedly be all over the place. It’s about life and death, friends I miss, celebrities I’ve never met, how we choose to remember people, and how we want other people to remember us.
First, I want to tell you about my friends.
Depending on the occasion, we’d call him Greg, or Greggie, or Blocker, or Blockhead. Or Block! with an exclamation mark.
We met as student reporters at San Diego State’s campus newspaper, and even though the last time we lived in the same city was 1996, we saw each other at least once every year until his passing. Other than his wife Rachel, I’m pretty sure he slept with me more than anyone else. That’s because The Daily Aztec had an impressive travel budget to send multiple reporters to sporting events, but not big enough for different rooms.
Greg was a great writer, always hit deadline, and just important, he didn’t snore. He was the ideal traveling mate. Some college friends are good on the weekends when you want to let off some steam. Some are good on the weekdays when you need to focus on school. Greg was a great friend seven days a week.
After college, Greg went into Public Relations. Among his jobs, he was the Chief Communications Officer at SDSU, and later joined his wife at their firm, ThreeSixty Public Strategies. On my podcast for SDSU’s School of Journalism and Media Studies, almost all of my guests knew Greg in some way. When I see on their LinkedIn page they are a Connection, I ask to hear another story about my friend.
At Greg’s Celebration of Life, our college friends gathered, mourned, and made a pact to hang out more, not just wait until something terrible happened to one of us. I tried to bite my tongue and mostly did.
What mostly crossed my mind: that’s what made Greg so special. He didn’t wait until something terrible happened. He didn’t wait ‘until next time.’ That’s why I saw him so much and we didn’t drift apart, even when we lived thousands of miles away. He went there. He did that. He brought his family. He organized the tailgates. He showed up to life.
I’m proud to say, his friends have stayed true to the mission. We rallied back to San Diego for a football game last Fall to keep his memory alive and connect deeper. We descended upon Houston for the Final Four in the Spring and cried tears of jubilation when Lamont Butler sank the Shot Heard ’Round the Mesa.
I just wish Greg was there to cry with us.
Depending on the occasion, we’d call him Erik, or Erickss (making fun of his lisp), or Lemoine, or Chuck (his dad’s name), or Chuckie, or Radar. It takes a lot of personality to have that many names and he deserved them all.
We met as students at Foothill High, and truth be told, we didn’t become real friends until my senior year, and didn’t become really good friends until after we went away to separate colleges, hung out in summer and winter breaks, and reconnected back in the Bay as quasi adults.
Erik was an extremely talented soccer player. I didn’t play soccer, so we weren’t teammates, but I talked with him plenty about soccer. Like the budding reporter I became, I’d ask him about an upcoming big match, bringing up the other team’s record or what the playoff seeds were.
Erik’s response: “We’ll win.”
I freakin’ loved it. Not just that he said, but how he said it. It wasn’t a boast or a brag. He said it matter-of-factly, the way I’d say the sun will rise tomorrow.
Erik’s confidence wasn’t just about soccer. I recall a morning when he needed to drive me home, then needed to get back to his teaching job. [This was the late-1990s, long before Uber/Lyft was created.] The math seemed impossible for him arriving on time.
“We’ll make it,” he said, and yeah, quite a few cars honked at him, but he made it. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I heard Eric say something like that. Confidently. Calmly.
It could be “we’ll win” or “we’ll meet girls” or “we’ll have fun” or “we’ll make it” or “we’ll get in.” I always admired his confidence and wish it would rub off on me.
Erik wasn’t a great student in high school. He was diagnosed with ADHD in college and I recall him telling me that it was a relief. It made him understand why learning was so hard. He graduated from the University of San Francisco, where was a star soccer player, then became a high school teacher and soccer coach.
When he was diagnosed with cancer, he started a blog on Caring Bridge. I remember talking to him about writing and how much he enjoyed it. I never knew his athletic skills, but it was fun to share stories about the craft of writing with him.
Depending on the occasion, they’d call him Bob, or Bobby, or Coach Knight, or The General.
Longtime college basketball coach Bobby Knight died this past week. Two decades before, Knight used the occasion of Senior Day at Indiana University to tell a packed arena the following:
"When my time on Earth is gone, and my activities here are passed, I want [them] to bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my ass."
I wrote last week about my tricky relationship with Coaches over the years.
Bobby Knight is my textbook example of what I disdain. I know he won a lot of games and did plenty of nice things for people. But he was a bully. Period. He demanded complete and total discipline from his players, yet couldn’t control his own prodigious temper. He threw a chair across the court during a game. He said revolting things – on the record, no less – the most disturbing when he infamously told Connie Chung, “If rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”
At least, that’s the way I choose to remember Knight. He wasn’t complicated. He was a jerk. Even later in his life, after he was retired, there was no reflection or remorse about the way he treated people.
But here’s the thing about death. You might feel differently. Hundreds of his former players and thousands of his fans loved him. What I can’t forgive, you might dismiss. What I neglect to mention, you might celebrate.
If you want the full picture, longtime respected reporter Seth Davis wrote the definitive obituary about Knight. It’ll take you a long time to read it, so pour yourself a large cup of your favorite beverage, but it’s worth the time investment if you want help in deciding how to remember him.
Depending on the occasion, we called him Matthew, or Chandler Bing, or he might call himself Mattman because he loved Batman so much.
If Bobby Knight’s temper was legendary, so was the substance abuse addiction of actor Matthew Perry, the “Friends” star who died last weekend.
Perry estimated that he spent over $9 million in his decades-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction, going into rehab at least 15 times, and had 14 surgeries on his stomach. Perry died at the age of 54 and it’s remarkable that he lived that long.
All his trips to rehab surely had an impact on how he wanted to be remembered. He published a memoir about a year ago. It wasn’t ghost written. He wrote it himself. It wasn’t easy chronicling all the embarrassing details of his life. But as he told The New York Times, “whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t really want to share, I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going.”
Perry’s memoir allowed him to tell his famous cast members how he’ll remember them before he was gone:
Schwimmer, for making us stick together when he could have gone it alone and profited more than all the rest, and deciding we should be a team and getting us a million bucks a week.”
Lisa Kudrow—no woman has ever made me laugh that much.
Jenny, for letting me look at that face an extra two seconds every single day.
Courtney Cox, for making America think that someone so beautiful would marry a guy like me.
Matt LeBlanc, who took the only sort of stock character and turned him into the funniest character on the show.
I’ll remember Perry as the actor with perfect comedic timing as the insecure Chandler Bing, who then showed his dramatic acting chops as lawyer Joe Quincy as a recurring West Wing guest.
But that’s easy for me to say. I never met him. I’m sure Perry caused a lot of pain to a lot of people over the years, not just himself. Did you know that on the day they filmed the scene where Chandler marries Monica, a crew member drove Perry to rehab that night in the back of a pickup truck?
That’s the thing about addiction. Addiction is hardest on the people who love you, who want to not just sing it, but actually “be there for you.”
Anyway, that’s how I choose to remember two friends who I miss dearly, and two celebrities who I knew from TV.
How do you want to be remembered?