Colin Harvey
Aug. 16th, 2011 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceIt's not that you get complacent, exactly. You know that all your friends are mortal, and you have friends enough that every now and then, unpredictably, mortality will catch up with one or another of them. But outside special circumstances, you can't go through every day expecting it: coming home with that half-anticipation of the message, the letter, the phone-call to say that someone else has gone. I lived through a decade of special circumstances, and I know what damage it did, and I won't do it now. I won't choose anxiety and neurosis, that constant expectation.
Which means that every now and then, I get caught flat-footed, unready.
Colin Harvey was my friend, in that way that many of us are friends: we talked in blogs and e-mails, we met at cons and SF events, we drank in pubs or went for dinner when the chance arose.
Yesterday I heard that Colin had had a stroke - a major stroke, a massive stroke, those terms that people use to mean he's never going to be the same again - and I was worried, but even so. These days, you kind of expect people to recover. He was younger than me, for cryin' out loud. Get him to the hospital, he'll be okay. We'll sort it out. I'm not neurotic, and medicine is magic.
It's not that magic. Colin died. It's ... kind of brutal, actually. Even at this distance, this detached. For Kate and his family, it's a whole other world of hurt.
I actually don't have a neat ending for this one.
Which means that every now and then, I get caught flat-footed, unready.
Colin Harvey was my friend, in that way that many of us are friends: we talked in blogs and e-mails, we met at cons and SF events, we drank in pubs or went for dinner when the chance arose.
Yesterday I heard that Colin had had a stroke - a major stroke, a massive stroke, those terms that people use to mean he's never going to be the same again - and I was worried, but even so. These days, you kind of expect people to recover. He was younger than me, for cryin' out loud. Get him to the hospital, he'll be okay. We'll sort it out. I'm not neurotic, and medicine is magic.
It's not that magic. Colin died. It's ... kind of brutal, actually. Even at this distance, this detached. For Kate and his family, it's a whole other world of hurt.
I actually don't have a neat ending for this one.