Andy Mathews

We Miss You, Andy.

A quick note from Jack Butler:

Andy Mathews, the man who created and played Achilles, among others, and who was one of my dearest friends in all the world. When it came to the Butlerverse, he was an important part of it for me. Not just as a player, but as a critic, and a source of ideas, and as a source of community. He was one of the people who made the various campaigns feel like it was a bunch of friends and family getting together to have a good time.

He died suddenly on December 3, 2008.

So, what can I say about my good and dear friend Andy Mathews?

There's a wide, empty hole in my life where a man who I considered a brother used to be, and I'm still not quite done dealing with it. Time heals all wounds, they say, and I'm sure this one will too, eventually.

Andy and I talked constantly. Constantly. We talked about life, and faith in God (something we shared, though he was much more demonstrative about it), and rough childhoods, and barbecue sauce, and fatherhood, and food, and music, and politics, and comic books, and business, and being married, and children, and movies, and parents, and school, and technology, and pretty much everythign else.

Andy talked me down from a suicidal period, and talked me into getting help for my bipolar disorder. Its because of him I'm still alive. Its because of him that I can think straight.

So here's to Andy:

With you a part of me hath passed away;

For in the peopled forest of my mind

A tree made leafless by this wintry wind

Shall never don again its green array.

Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,

Have something of their friendliness resigned;

Another, if I would, I could not find,

And I am grown much older in a day.

But yet I treasure in my memory

Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease,

And the dear honour of your amity;

For these once mine, my life is rich with these.

And I scarce know which part may greater be,—

What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

-- George Santayana