(I wrote this in September, only posting it now)

I started blogging in late 2002. In May 2003 Rob Paterson popped up in my comments, based on Prince Edward Island, Canada. He was connected to other bloggers I had regular interactions with. From that first comment over the years a connection grew. The ‘real world’ neighbours of another blogging friend, Nancy White, dubbed her online connections as her ‘imaginary friends’ and when we showed up for her fiftieth birthday in 2008 we had a laugh about it together with them. Rob was one of my ‘imaginary’ friends I’ve made over the years. An extremely kind and gentle one. After connecting through our blogs, we met in Copenhagen in person, and later at his then home on Prince Edward Island in 2008. He picked us up at the PEI airport at midnight, because in his words “no one should come to PEI unmet”. Most recently we met in 2019.

I’m not sure how to explain how people can loom very large internally although you hardly interact and meet, but that’s how it is. Rob always felt near, from that very first comment on my blog. Around the time I went independent and quit my job, he shared advice that E and I have taken to heart ever since, a way of thinking which has helped secure our autonomy. He connected me to other people who became close, such as Peter, who since our first coincidental meet-up has become a dear friend, while being an ocean away as much as Rob. A weaver of connections, and regularly that is how I describe my own role and work, as weaving a network of connections. No small thing, as it’s the basket that carries humanity. It seems way more relevant in this day and age, although I suspect it has never been different and never will be.

Rob was diagnosed quite suddenly and unexpectedly as having mere weeks to live last summer. I am grateful we exchanged messages in the days before his death August 20th, to be able to express my gratitude for our connection over 22 years and vice versa. These past months saying goodbye and grief was my modus operandi, and Rob’s passing was not the main point of my attention this summer. That doesn’t change my feelings about it however.

Rob touched my life. In a good way. Taught me to be more forgiving, to judge less, without letting an absence of judgment erode drawing your own lines. To be more curious in an open way, like how Clarke described meeting Rob some years ago. Other blogging friends such as Chris Corrigan have phrased it well, and his daughter Hope did so beautifully.

Rob’s choices in the way he died and Frank‘s, my friend and business partner of 15 years, both around the same time, both through medical assistance, I look at as loving, humane, and dignified, as well as an expression of autonomy, something that is at the very top of values for myself. I am glad that such expression of autonomy, taking the direction of the end of your life into your own hands is legally supported here in the Netherlands, for physical medical reasons at least. Last week I signed a petition for that same autonomy for a self determined ‘completeness of life’. An elderly gentleman asked me to at Utrecht railway station and was handing out folders. I had already passed him by, before I realised what he said. I went back and accepted the information I needed to sign. Staying autonomous means taking action too.

Thank you Rob, for your gentle presence. Over the past 22 years, and, as I’m sure, moving forward too.

(I had written this last September, when my friend and business partner of 15 years Frank had just died, and Rob two weeks before that. It stayed in my drafts since then. Not because the text wasn’t ready: I made a few small edits before posting it now. Mostly because I wasn’t ready, I suppose, in the turmoil that early September and the summer before it meant. Rather than delete it, and leaving it unsaid in this space, I’m posting it 4 months delayed.)