Yeah so my dad’s best friend died on Wednesday.  Here’s how it happened:

He was diagnosed with cancer about 3 weeks ago.  He tried for two weeks to get a Dr.’s appointment to see how bad it really was.  He couldn’t even get a returned phone call.

Now all my days get mixed up here, but I think it was on Wednesday he finally got in and they took a CAT Scan.  He had tumors from his bladder to his lungs but the Dr. seemed to think it was treatable with chemotherapy.  But he had to go see yet another Dr.

So on Thursday he was in so much pain he went to the hospital and they immediately admitted him and started doing tests.  On Sunday his wife came to church alone and that was the first time I cried.  I went to hug her to tell her we loved her and we both just started sobbing.  On Monday they took a biopsy of his liver and for 6hrs they couldn’t get it to stop bleeding.  When it did stop, it was dead.  They put him on dialysis.

Tuesday he was having trouble breathing so they sedated him and put breathing tubes down his throat.  On Tuesday night, his heart stopped twice and on Wednesday, at 5:30 am, they called his wife and said he wasn’t going to make it.  She called my mom and dad and they got there at about 6 am.

When my mom called me at 8 and told me, in the back of my mind I thought she was being dramatic.  I think, originally, she kind of did too.  She didn’t really think they meant it.  But when they got to the hospital they found out that the Dr.’s were just waiting for everyone to get there to take him off the machines.  He was really already dead.

They unplugged him and my mom and dad, his wife and two kids, my pastor and his wife, and two other couples they are good friends with, held hands and prayed around his bed until he took his last breath 45 min. later.

So that’s what happened.  At this point, I’m sad and angry and I really don’t have a lot to say about it, and for me, that’s rare….

So, this is my first blog!  I’m just gonna skip the intro and get right into it.

A double-decker pink bus roams the playa at Burning Man in Black Rock Desert, Nevada, playing music and dispatching dancers

It is truly my belief that all Anthropologists, old, new and aspiring, should be required to take the bus for 1 year. (And by the bus, just to clarify, I mean the public transportation system.  The pink bus pictured above is just awesome.)  It is simply not enough to just sit in the class room and learn about human diversity and human variation.  One must go out there and live it to truly understand it.  An idea which inspired most of late 19th century Anthropology to be sure.  But it is now such a commonly understood element of cultural Anthropology, that most students learn and recite it with the same fervor that many Americans say, pay taxes…

You can’t exactly go out into the field while you’re in school.  You have to pay your dues.  Spend your hours on homework and sit through the exact amount of lecture hours deemed appropriate by some college administrator 100 years ago.  But riding the bus is exactly how you can go directly into the field every day right before and after class!

I have met some of the most remarkable and interesting people on the bus!  Today alone I met a Buddhist who taught me about the different sects of Buddhism, a homeless man who used to be a champion boxer, a teachers assistant from one of my classes and a drunk man who kept trying to share his liquor with the obviously 18 yr old student next to him.  (He prudently kept refusing).  Each one of them was a story in and of itself.

The Buddhist man was a citizen of Turkey and grew up in a very Islamic community.  He told me about the temple he attends and how they are considered secular for a Buddhist temple.  They don’t tell you to believe anything they say with out proof.  They say that if you live the laws of Buddhism the truth will become apparent to you.  Honestly not far from what I have heard in Christian churches.  The idea that if you follow the rules laid out in the Bible, you will see the truth.  Although I have also heard that you should just believe because God said so.

We discussed how every religion, even Buddhism, has people who preach that way.  He told me about his Buddhist school and going on a month long meditation with his class.  A month with no distractions!  He said it was intense because when you have nothing to distract you, a lot of stuff comes up and you realize how alone we all really are.  Probably something I’ll get all philosophical about in another blog, but I often think about how we are so connected all the time in this day and age, sometime we completely forget that in the end we all die alone.  Not being sad or self pitying just self aware.

The homeless man who used to be a boxer was quirky and interesting for a while.  He wanted to sit in the very back row, one behind where I was in order to drink his cold beer.  He talked loudly with everyone about hotels you can get for $35 a night and churches downtown who are always helping him out.  He talked about why he didn’t go Pro with this boxing even though he was great.  They wanted him to “sign his life away” and his life was his!  He wasn’t gonna “give it to no one for no reason”.  I believe he meant “any” reason but the accentuation that made that clear are  impossible to translate into the digital realm.  He randomly borrowed cell phones from people to call up girls to see if they wanted to party with him and talked to everyone about how he was 58 and had lived all over the country.  He was quite amusing until he stood up to put his bag into the over head storage and drunkenly elbowed me in the head…

The girl who was a TA in one of my classes and the drunk man had much less to say, but were none the less very interesting.  The girl and I talked about Anthropology and the department and school.  All things I find relevant and interesting, but something I dare say, you would not.

The drunk man just kept offering his booze to the poor kid who let him, and the other homeless man from before, use his cell phone.  Everything that anyone said, the drunk man’s response was always “It is what it is”.  Which, while sitting next to the Buddhist, I interpreted as being at peace with the world.  After the Buddhist man left, and as the drunk man became more drunk, it began to sound like apathy and hopelessness.  Amazing how our own environment can so profoundly change how we interpret others.

Even the poor kid who was practically smothered by these two men and their eccentric behaviors, had a story.  While the homeless man talked about living all over the world, the boy said, (with a remarkable amount of loathing I might add) that he had been born and raise here all his life.  He knew well all the locations the man spoke of, but had never even been outside the state.

“So many beautiful stories”, I thought.  What life circumstances lead the drunk man to be on the bus, here at this moment?  What was the ex-boxer asked to sign away that made him decide to never go pro?  How did the Buddhist man from Turkey end up here?  What life struggles does my TA wear beneath her mask?  Why was the boys family unable or unwilling to ever take him beyond the state boarders?  I wanted to spend hours with each of them.  Listening to tales and writing down all their stories.  All with their fair share of good and bad times, but that is the human existence and one of the most exciting things in all the world to me.