In memory of Pogo...

I want to tell you about my friend Pogo.

He died.

It wasn't until after he died that I realized
I didn't know Pogo's age.
I didn't know if Pogo was White, Black, Brown, Red,
Yellow, or Rainbow.
I didn't know if Pogo's face was withered or smooth.
I didn't even know Pogo's real name.

Pogo was an Internet friend. I had never seen his face.
I had never heard his voice. But he was a dear and
trusted friend. I will miss him.

There will be a memorial service at the Friends (Quaker)
Meeting House in Palo Alto, Calif., tomorrow afternoon.

Most of Pogo's friends from cyberspace won't be there in
person Saturday. But each of us will mark it in our own way.
This is mine.

Carla, who lives somewhere in Northern California, said it for
us all, "Needless to say, I will be there in spirit only.
But I will light candles at that hour."

Wendy lives in Auckland, New Zealand. She said, "And I shall
get down to the harbour."

Peepers, a young mother in Alameda, Calif., has created a
web page in Pogo's memory.

Some will fly red balloons Saturday at 1 p.m. (PST) in Pogo's
memory.

Others have already planted cactus and named them Pogo.
"Strong, prickly," catcus, they say. And we all understand.

You see, Pogo touched us all -- from Wyoming, to Washington,
D.C., in his native California, and around the world to New
Zealand.

So, while I didn't know Pogo's face, his voice, or even his
name, I knew his soul -- it was an old one. And I knew his
heart -- it was a good one. He shared his pain. And he
accepted ours.

When word of Pogo's death came over the Internet Sunday
evening and his friends "out here" began reacting, and
mourning, Alan, who is an internist, practicing in Oakland,
said it well, "Anyone who ever thought that cyberspace was
an escape from reality should read this..."

Paz, who works in the San Francisco Chronicle Gate conference
area, where we all met, said on Tuesday, "Yesterday, I wore
black. No one asked. I couldn't really tell anyone, except
for Tex and Chris (who also "knew" Pogo through The Gate)
and I got a lump in my throat and wet eyes when I started to
speak.

"The connections that we make here are *very* real," Paz
continued. "And we must give ourselves permission to mourn
the loss of a comrade."

She added, "I too scrolled back a few weeks, and reading
Pogo's posts made it seem like he'd never left. He hasn't.
His mark here and in our hearts will remain."

Many of us who conference in The Gate found ourselves going
back and reading Pogo's posts from months past. Ragz said,
"Re-reading that post puts Pogo back in that empty
wheelchair I keep bumping into."

Pogo came to us in The Gate on Sunday morning, Aug. 10, 1997.
When I looked back, after his death, to see when he had
first registered, I was surprised to find we had only known
him for a little over five months.

Pogo came into The Gate as a sick man. Some days he was angry
at his condition. Some days he was accepting. But what ever
his physical/mental condition, he was always offering his
shoulder to the rest of us to cry upon.

In so far as I know, Pogo and I are/were the only active
Gaters confined to wheelchairs. He called himself
"crippled." I railed against that and we engaged in e-mail
arguments about the use of "the c-word." We never agreed.
But we agreed to disagree. We finally came to the point of
agreement that for me the wheelchair is a means of
transportation. For Pogo, the wheelchair was a prison.

Pogo obviously exchanged e-mail with many. His son, whose name
we will never know, informed Pogo's e-mail list of his
death. There were 126 names on that list -- all up and down
California, all across the United States, to Great Britain,
to New Zealand, to Zaire, at all levels of education and
government, to plain folks like my sister Linda and me --
people with whom Pogo had corresponded individually
and about whom he cared enough to add them to his personal
e-mail list, above and beyond those he "talked" with daily
in The Gate.

Oh, he could be ornery. Sometimes I think he said things just
to antagonize others. He'd start a fight and then skip out,
only to re-emerge somewhere else with a new, sometimes
strange, theory. I was often angry with him. But he made me
think.

As I say, Pogo and I e-mailed back and forth about the c-word.
Pogo said, "CT - You are a brat with this 'c' word thing.
Will you write me and help me to understand?" I wrote. And I
told him aspects of my life, probably unknown to any other
one person.

In the beginning, Pogo didn't understand that I had come to
the wheelchair only in the past couple of years, as a result
of breaks caused from falls caused by post-polio, polio
experienced as a college student. Before I explained, he
said, "So far, all I have felt from you on this (use of the
word 'crippled') matter is pushed down anger."

I think he came to understand that I have no anger. I accept
the hand that was dealt. But Pogo's emotion (anger, if you
will) came from a place unknown to me.

He wrote me, "Like you, I would guess, I knew the half mad fear
of mother and father sitting night after night, after night,
after night waiting. Killing temps, no help, no doc, no
hospital. And for us, there were few if any docs.

"I smell the smell of piss and vomit, the cooking flesh. I
smell the terror of the persons inside and out of the
'house.'

"I smell the dust of the street, the weariness of mothers,
grandmothers, great grandmothers, coming home from the
fields, the canneries. The 150 pound sacks of 'what can we
find?' of the frame of a 115 pound woman.

"I smell the stink of the pain of the men as they come home.
The smell is fear. The smell is hunger. The smell is shame."

I told Pogo, "No," I didn't know that smell, that fear, that
terror. I told Pogo, "I grew up in Norman Rockwell Land...we
come to the word 'crippled' from different places."

Yet, from that eloquent post, I knew Pogo -- even though he
came from a place I never knew.

Pogo shared a lot of himself with me in that post, even if I
could never understand. Never wanted to understand.

And he shared something else. In The Gate, he listed one, very
generic, e-mail address. He sent me another address to use
in our correspondence. This was one which was very
personalized and contained the substance of Pogo's problem
and the cause of his death -- COPD --
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

And in one, just one, of those exchanges, he told me his "real
name." It was Bob.

Why did he have the Username of Pogo? There was a clue to that
in his e-mail standard "signature." He included a quote from
our swamp possum friend Pogo, "We have met the enemy and it
is us!"

Pogo could be his own worst enemy at times. And his thinking
on that was perhaps revealed last November, following a
particularly hard time for him. Discussion in The Gate had
turned to the subject of quitting smoking.

Pogo said, "I have been getting more and more p.... off the
more I hear from the 'what I did 30 years ago big mouths.'
Know what helped me? Having my right lung so full of trash
it was a solid mass, pain so bad I wished I was dead and
patches with a doc that would not let the nurse help me to
the john because my blood gasses were so filled up and I was
still sneaking out onto the balcony of the damned hospital."

If nothing else, that could be a testimony to Pogo's life,
and death.

He ebbed. He rallied. He lived with, and took care of his
aging grandmother.

In January, we worried on-line about him. Pogo came back with
"Better. I think I am almost alive. By the way," added,
"Does anyone have a spare set of teeth? I have been looking
for Grams for a week now."


Pain was Pogo's constant companion. But he found joy.

In November, Ann in Arizona, after Pogo asked for the day's happy
thoughts, responded, saying that her elbow didn't hurt..
Pogo reacted by saying, "Yesterday I had reason to be
glad. Today I will be glad that Ann has an elbow that does
not hurt...Yesterday I managed to get all wet all over and
have a total scrub up for the first time in a week. If you
have been camping or very ill, you know that feeling as well
as anyone can. Yesterday, I was able to eat enough to keep
my gut from being eaten by my meds. This is good stuff
folks."

Then Sunday Jan. 25, as we watched the Super Bowl, the sad
news came over the e-mail for many of us -- Pogo was dead.

I looked back to find his last posting. It was made at 8:40 p.m.
Saturday, Jan. 17, barely a week before his death. It said only,
"Very ill. LP"

We all knew that "LP" meant "Love Pogo." He was too ill, in
too much pain to type more than that. But "LP" said it all
-- Pogo loved us. We loved Pogo.

The tributes to Pogo have filled The Gate for nearly two
weeks, memories, stories of how he helped various people
through rough times including one friend from the Midwest
who took his laptop to the hospital as he sat at the bedside
of his dying father. Pogo encouraged the son, wept with him.
Farf, who also never actually met Pogo, said of his
cyberspace friend, "This is a man who offered help, yet was
helpless. He was *strong* !! loving and feisty as a soaked
rooster. I'll love him 'til the day I die."

Since his death, we have come to know a little more about the
shell that contained Pogo. His first name was Robert. His
middle name was Bruce. Ironic, since those are the names of
the two men in my home. We will never know Pogo's last name.
I can't think of him as "Robert," "Bob," or "Bruce" (which
is apparently the name his family called him.) No, to me he
is and will be "Pogo."

Among the tributes to Pogo, Chessi created a black rose in
Ascii -- a picture from typewriter characters.

The rose has become an expression of our love for Pogo
and his memory.

Loonie, a young ex-Marine in California, reflected "I think
that a death of a Net friend is sometimes harder than the
death of a person you know, who is around you. The reason?
You can not go to the funeral for a sort of closing of the
friendship." But he added, "I will try to be there." Others
will join him, meeting for the first time in "reality."

Yet, some us will remain in "virtual reality."

Lillian, who was helped through her own serious illness by
Pogo's encouragement, suggested "I would love to plant a new
rose bush for him in my rose garden. Maybe we (those in the
Bay area) could plant it together. I would love that. Or
even a tree on the open space of Mount Bourdell."

From Chessi's black rose, there will grow yet another rose.

Karen, who lives in the Los Angeles area,visited on the phone with
Pogo's ex-wife, talking to her at length. It was from this, we all
learned his name and a bit more about him. Cyberscape
being what it is, we might never have known.

Karen learned that Pogo was 49 years old and had four
children, two sons and two daughters.

And Karen shared the wishes of the Gate folks to plant
something in Pogo's memory. His family agreed.

It will be a pale yellow rose with pink tips.

It is a "Peace Rose."

Peace, Pogo.