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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1099094" data-attributes="member: 99">I feel stunned and numb right now so I hope you'll forgive me if what I post is rambling and disjointed.A friend of mine and a fellow ENWorld member is dead.  His handle on the boards was The Lone Corndog.  His name was Ted.  He was 33.  I've known him for 20 years.I don't know exactly when he died and I'm not certain of precisely how but odds are very strong that it was the result of massive heart failure.  His girlfriend found him tonight at around 9:00 and I guess he had been dead for some time.  My wife just left to go and comfort her.  I'm at home with our child who is fast asleep upstairs, doing my best to come to grips with this.I feel strange and somehow crass posting this here.  There are still friends of his who don't know.  Lots of other people who know him dont know this has happened.  And here I am posting about it at ENWorld.  Somehow it seems a little wrong.And yet, I was just bragging in the "What does ENWorld mean to you?" thread about how this place, to me anyway, feels more like a family than the average messagboard.  And Ted was a gamer and most of the times I saw him these days were when he came to play in our weekly game at my house.  Maybe the fact that I interacted with him primarily during our game sessions for the last few years is what compelled me to post about this.  Maybe it's just the fact that I am utterly powerless to do anything useful right now and I know that it will be many hours (if at all) before I can get to sleep tonight.I met Ted on the first day of Junior High School.  Another guy I knew from our neighborhood offered for me to walk to school with him and Ted.  Ted and I hit it off right away and it took almost no time for us to discover that a common interest of ours was D&D.  He lived right down the street from me and in no time we were hanging out with each other almost constantly.We spent countless hours gaming together on weekends and after school and when summer came, it was heaven on earth.  I could literally pedal my bicycle a half dozen times going down my driveway and less than a minute later, I'd coast into Ted's driveway.  I'd let myself in the back door and settle down in front of his television.  An hour or so later he would stagger out of bed (the lazy bastard always was a late-sleeper).  We'd lounge around the house for a couple more hours talking about whatever we talked about when we were 13.  Then we'd take a dip in the pool, have some lunch and get down to the serious gaming in the afternoon.  We'd break for pizza or some other junk food around seven or eight and resume gaming until sometime after midnight.We stayed great friends along with a couple other guys (one of whom also posts here as Speaks With Stone) for the rest of our school careers.  There are dozens of pictures of the four of us together doing all sorts of stuff throughout high school.  Ted was a year ahead of us in school and went off to college without us.My contact with him was reduced to the Christmas holidays and the occasional odd weekend for the next few years.  But we still found time for a one-off game once a year or so.  Eventually he graduated college and moved back near home and he and I wound up sharing an apartment together.  Boy was he a slob.  He made a mean pot of chilli though (he'd then proceed to leave the leftovers on the counter for a few days).Our lease came up and I was getting married.  A female friend of ours was looking for a place and they decided to keep sharing the apartment.  Somewhere along the way, they became more than just roomates and had been dating off and on ever since.  Until tonight.Ted stood beside me and my other close friends when we got married, but he never did take the plunge himself.  He dipped his toe in the pool of cohabitation with his girlfriend but never seemed very inclined to actually get married.  But that was Ted in a nutshell.  He was just casual about everything, gaming included.For myself and the other members of our gaming group, this was the source of many irritated conversations over the years about why Ted never seemed to invest more interest in the game.  He never engaged in the barrage of e-mails that flew back and forth between sessions.  His characters seemed to have been thrown together somewhat haphazardly, often with little in the way of backstory and they sure as hell weren't optimized for combat or survival.  Since we started playing 3E, he's had more characters die than anybody in the group.But that all changed recently.  After reading Robin Laws' "Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering", I finally understood that his style was valid.  He was getting what he wanted out of the game and all really wanted  was to be there with the rest of us who had been his friends for so long.  It was very liberating and I was greatly looking forward to running my next campaign knowing that I wasn't going to be looking for him to become something that he wasn't.And now that just isn't going to happen.I don't know exactly how things are going to shape up in the next few days.  This has happened very suddenly.  We did have a warning shot across the bow when, earlier this year, it was discovered that he had severe arterial clogging thanks to his unhealthy lifestyle (smoking and fatty, salty foods, combined with a fairly sedentary lifestyle) and his extremely crappy genetics (his father died of heart disease at a relatively young age).  But he seemed to be recovering well and, while he still failed to avoid the occasional cigarette, his diet seemed to be much improved and he was getting more exercise.  But I guess it was too little too late.Right now, I feel empty and powerless.  I sort of thought that I'd burst into tears after I first heard the news.  But it hasn't happened yet.  Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I know when it is going to happen.My two year old daughter is in that phase that every kid goes through where she asks the same sort of question over and over.  Her particular question is "Where did X go?" where X is anything you can possibly imagine.  Sometime in the next day or so, she's going to ask "Where did Uncle Ted go?"  And that's when I'm going to lose it.  Because, while I don't know where he went, I know he isn't coming back.Thanks for listening.</blockquote>

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