I will miss you Marc...

When I got home from dinner tonight with friends, as I usually do, I quickly scanned my E-Mail and saw an E-Mail from Robert Scoble. He had referenced the link that related to the vigil that we had all been holding/watching over our dear friend Marc.  I clicked through hoping for some good news, and fearing for bad. My worst fears were confirmed. Marc had passed from this life earlier today.

The picture per this link was taken in my living room, Marc is holding is iPhone, the picture on it is of Sue and Marc. My legs are behind him and Sue’s are to the left.  We had driven all over Seattle, had a wonderful breakfast.

And it was only a moment ago.

The combination of numbness and tears, and a deep pain in my heart is with me now.  The words that I will post, will be so trivial as to quality of the life that Marc lived. His innate joy, kindness and generosity to me will be something that I will always recall and treasure.

I remember so clearly sitting in his kitchen in Albuquerque, and his explaining to me, how if I was going to live in Seattle, I needed to know how to really make good coffee, and then showing and explaining to me how to do so, as he had with so many other things, made really great coffee. 

Marc’s love for Sue, his pride and love for his children were the kinds of emotions that really made you feel good, and made you value him as a man and as a friend.

A week ago Friday morning I called Marc. We talked about a million things as we always did. He told me he was about to begin a consulting assignment with David Allen, and how excited he was to be working with really terrific people. I was so happy for him, and we talked about how he would be here on the just past Friday. We made plans for dinner with David and his team.

And then I heard on Sunday of his heart attack, and said to myself, surly this cannot have happened, there must be some mistake.  And now his wonderful life has ended.

Years ago I read a book entitled “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” by Rabbi Harold Kushner.

I recall reading the book because I was so angry about what I perceived to be God’s lack of judgment. I could not understand why death would come to a man as fine and wonderful as Marc, when others not deserving would continue to live and enjoy life. I don’t know that I recall much of the book, and have come to realize that it is not for me to question God’s decisions. I will grieve for Marc, and do all I can to help Sue and their children, and yet I will not understand how this could happen.

Years ago my dear Mother took a summer school course in poetry. I was a kid, clueless, and one day she left her text book on our kitchen counter. I thumbed through it, and found myself reading a poem by A.E. Housman,  “Ode to an Athlete Dying Young” …

 The time you won your town the race

  We chaired you through the market-place;

  Man and boy stood cheering by,

  And home we brought you shoulder-high.

 

  To-day, the road all runners come,

  Shoulder-high we bring you home,

  And set you at your threshold down,

  Townsman of a stiller town.

 

  Smart lad, to slip betimes away

  From fields where glory does not stay

  And early though the laurel grows

  It withers quicker than the rose.

 

  Eyes the shady night has shut

  Cannot see the record cut,

  And silence sounds no worse than cheers

  After earth has stopped the ears;

 

  Now you will not swell the rout

  Of lads that wore their honours out,

  Runners whom renown outran

  And the name died before the man.

 

  So set, before its echoes fade,

  The fleet foot on the sill of shade,

  And hold to the low lintel up

  The still-defended challenge-cup.

 

  And round that early-laurelled head

  Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

  And find unwithered on its curls

  The garland briefer than a girl's.

 

The verses that have stuck with me these many years…

Marc ‘s race is over, ours continues. His memory will remain a joy in my soul.

I shall miss you dear friend. 

Comments

[Lora]

Buzz, that was lovely. Thank you for sharing those memories.

[Robert Scoble]

I'll miss him too. He was a great person and one that I'd like to be more like.

[Joe Begalla]

Buzz: You introduced me to Marc over the phone almost three years ago. Since then, I have had 5 or 6 phone chats with him, and a number of Skype conversations. Marc was one of those life-enhancing individuals who was always available, was open and friendly, and was enormously helpful. Although I never met Marc personally, I felt that he was indeed my friend. I, too, will miss him...and I thank you for being the link that got me to know him as I did.

[Jim Bruggeman]

At the expense of seeming tendencious, Buzz's heartfelt eulogy points up something that Tony Judt in his article "The Wrecking Ball of Innovation" (New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 19 · December 6, 2007 - it's on the web) astutely illuminates. We are not just self-interested actors on the stage of free markets - whether for media technology or pork bellies - but rather tied together by a range of very human, warm and heartfelt, non-market relationships (and non-market institutions)that is being undermined by the market itself. Judt point it better than I ever could:

"The market requires norms, habits, and "sentiments" external to itself to hold it together, to ensure the very political stability that capitalism needs in order to thrive. But it also tends to corrode those same practices and sentiments. This much has long been clear.[10] The benign "invisible hand"—the unregulated free market—may have been a favorable inaugural condition for commercial societies. But it cannot reproduce the noncommercial institutions and relations—of cohesion, trust, custom, restraint, obligation, morality, authority—that it inherited and which the pursuit of individual economic self-interest tends to undermine rather than reinforce.[11] For similar reasons, the relationship between capitalism and democracy (or capitalism and political freedom) should not be taken for granted: see China, Russia, and perhaps even Singapore today. Efficiency, growth, and profit may not always be a precondition or even a consequence of democracy so much as a substitute for it.

If modern democracies are to survive the shock of Reich's [Judt's review is of Reich's new book] "supercapitalism," they need to be bound by something more than the pursuit of private economic advantage, particularly when the latter accrues to ever fewer beneficiaries: the idea of a society held together by pecuniary interests alone is, in Mill's words, "essentially repulsive." A civilized society requires more than self-interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative of purpose. "The greatest asset of public action is its ability to satisfy vaguely felt needs for higher purpose in the lives of men and women."

[Philip Ferris]

Thank you so much for what you have written, it shows the love and respect you had for Marc and captures succinctly much of what I have read elsewhere.

I only exchanged a few emails with Marc but I followed his podcasting and blogging and know how much he will be missed both as a human being and the most generous contributor to the Tech and productivity worlds.

[Bryan Zug]

Thanks for the thoughtful reflection on your friend, Buzz. I never had a chance to meet Marc, but the picture you share of your friendship with him is a gem of an image.