As one gets older, more and more of one’s heroes tend to die. And even hero-adjacent figures. And, sometimes, people that you can’t exactly explain why they were important to you, and often you didn’t even realize they were that important to you until after they were gone. I distinctly remember my father being very upset when Del Shannon died. Now, you who are reading this very likely have no clue who that is. I knew who it was, of course: he was the guy that sang that one song. Not sure if he was a proper one-hit wonder by the strictest definition, but certainly I had never heard but one. I was a bit taken aback that his death was that impactful to my father: this was not a Beatle, not Elvis, nor even Carl Perkins. Any of those and I would (and did) understand that my dad probably saw it as a moment that represented the passing of part of his life, part of his culture. But ... Del Shannon? the “Runaway” guy? really?
But by this point in my life I’ve felt this way many times myself. I felt this way (and wrote about it) when John Perry Barlow died. Before he passed away, I’m not sure I could have come up with his name if you’d asked me about him; after he was gone, I understood what an impact he’d had on my life. And again when Neil Innes died; I remember it felt a bit unreal to think that the guy who wrote (and sang) about brave, brave, brave Sir Robin, who bravely ran away and hid, was just ... done. It shouldn’t have felt that way, I though
And now Jim Ward has died. Who the heck is Jim Ward, you ask? Another barely noticed influence on me, this time in the D&D world. Not one of the co-creators of the game: that would be Gary Gygax, who we lost in 2008, and Dave Arneson, who we lost the following year. But he was one of the first people to meet Gygax and play this new-fangled game that Arneson had conceived of and Gygax had put down (very complicated) rules for. He played (sometimes) a wizard named Drawmij (read that backwards if you don’t immediately get it), who became a big deal in the D&D world of Greyhawk: he was a member of the Circle of Eight (which included such other luminaries as Bigby, Rary, and Leomund) and bequeathed us enduring legacies, such as the spell Drawmij’s Instant Summons and the magic item Drawmij’s undersea apparatus. Meanwhile, in the real world, Ward himself became a very early employee of TSR, the company Gygax founded to produce D&D, and co-authored seminal D&D book Deities & Demigods, as well as designing Metamorphosis Alpha, commonly considered to be the first sci-fi TTRPG, and Gamma World, commonly considered to be the first post-apocalyptic TTRPG. In his later years, he wrote a series of columns for D&D site EN World called “Drawmij’s TSR”; for the most comprehensive view on him, his “who is Jim Ward” post is a great read, though I favor his very amusing takes on corporate mismanagement, such as the story of why I got cardboard chits instead of dice in my first D&D box set.
It’s a weird feeling when someone you didn’t really realize was important dies. You’re not quite sure how to feel. It’s mostly sadness, of course, and maybe a little bit of guilt that you didn’t appreciate them more when they were still around. and a little bit of nostalgia over what has been lost, and a little bit of dawning realization of your own mortality. It’s complicated, although that’s certainly part of what makes us human. The ability to feel conflicting emotions. The ability to think to yourself, it’s really a bummer that this person is gone, and at the same time I’m so joyful that they contributed so much. And, even though it didn’t seem like a lot at the time, and even if it may not seem like that much now, in the grand scheme of all the myriad experiences that make up my life, it was something impactful, something meaningful. So perhaps mostly gratitude. That you were touched, in however small a way, by someone who probably felt like they were just doing their job, but really they were making lives better. And that’s pretty awesome, and worth celebrating.