To sleep, perchance to game…

I woke up this morning to a sad bit of news. Dawn and I have been fans of a YouTube channel called Neebs Gaming for some time and today they announced one of their members had passed on. Tony Schnur, aka Thick44, had finally succumbed to the big sleep after a long battle with brain cancer.

I can’t remember where I heard it but there was some bit of fiction where a man drolly described the kind of cancer he had as “the kind you don’t get better from.” That’s almost all you need to know, right? But brain cancer, that’s a particularly nasty strain because it seems like doctors won’t just write you off when you have it, and that very hope becomes problematic.

You see, listening to Schnur’s situation over the past several years felt like déjà vu to me. If I turn the clock back about 25 years to the late ’90s, I picture my friend Roger. Roger had his own place while most of my local friend circle were still living with our parents, and so we would often gather there to play Dungeons & Dragons, or Warhammer 40k, or Magic: The Gathering, or whatever other nerdy pastime was our fancy of the moment. He was a few years older, he had a steady job working as an electrician, and while sometimes gruff in demeanor was an excellent and generous host and lots of fun as both a player and game master. Many good times were had at Casa de Roger.

But Roger also had something else none of us had, and that was a shunt in his head to drain cranial fluid. Roger at one point had developed a brain tumor, but they operated on him to take it out, and shunt aside he seemed fine after.

Then the tumor came back. So they operated again. This time he was out of it for a few weeks, but seemed to recover again. Same old Roger. Gaming and general good feelings could resume.

And then it started growing back a third time. Or was it the fourth? And this time around, while the operation was a success, they scooped out something important. Roger lived for several more years but he couldn’t talk or move, a prisoner in his own body. You just weren’t even sure how clued in he was to the world around him any more. I know that I eventually hoped that he wasn’t, because I couldn’t imagine a constant state of being fully aware but also completely unable to move or even communicate.

As far as I know that last didn’t happen in Schnur’s case, and if it did it would have been mercifully short since he was still playing games and recording videos with the crew as of a few months ago — but the rest of the cycle of repeated tumor operations, followed by the hope that this time the surgeons had cured the problem and everything would go back to normal, was all too familiar.

If there is any sort of decent afterlife to imagine, I would hope that Roger and Tony are able to game again. And we’ll just have to see where this leaves Neebs Gaming, though I would guess that they were preparing themselves for the possibility that one day Thick44’s nameplate would no longer grace their actual play videos. In regards to my own experience I’m still more or less in touch with those folks that hung out at Casa de Roger but losing a locus like that, a central gathering spot and for that matter a friend who made it happen, was definitely the end of an era. Cherish those moments, for you never know when they may never come again.