As many of you have already heard, Bob Harrison died last week after a stroke.
Bob was on the site every day since before I joined The Caregiver Space in 2014. He worked with Jonah to organize live chats every day of the week. He worked with me as I set up (and later disbanded) the forums. He helped Adrienne and I decide what groups to set up on Facebook and took the reigns to turn them into a welcoming and open conversation. He wrote numerous posts.
So many of you were welcomed by Bob when you first joined. I think we all got advice from him, commiserated with him, and most often, shared a laugh and a story.
Adrienne and I don’t have a lot in common, but it’s self evident that we would click. Our personalities rhyme.
Bob and I, on the other hand, had no business being friends. We rarely agreed on anything.
Bob saw and accepted people for who they are, so it never mattered that we had different opinions. We just kept talking and listening until we came up with something we were both happy with, which was always better than what one of us would have thought up on our own.
That’s part of why Bob was so important, not only to The Caregiver Space, but in my life in general. Without Bob I’m left feeling off-kilter.
While Bob was spending sleepless nights answering every message, I was leaving emails to pile up while I surrounded myself with books. Or trying to figure out the back end of the website or cooking up a way to make a project work. I’m a lot more comfortable exploring concepts and tackling projects than cultivating the eternal conversation of a community. Bob, on the other hand, voluntarily read every comment in the groups and replied to most of them. Bob spent hours on the phone with people, listening and talking about life. He was there when people needed him most and in the little moments when it doesn’t seem like much is going on.
Bob and Annie in 1973.
Bob’s wife, Annie, got cancer. After her death he wrote Because of Annie. He donated all the proceeds of the book to cancer charities.
The page he created for her on Forever Missed has the most visits of any memorial they host, by far.
People say you can’t understand what it is to serve as a caregiver unless you’ve done it. In Because of Annie Bob shares what it was like for him to shift from husband to caregiving husband.
Can someone who hasn’t been a caregiver read it and understand? Can someone at the precipice read it and know what they’ll soon be called upon to do?
The power of Bob’s book is in it’s honesty. He tells you what it was like for him in the moment. To battle and to accept. To be an imperfect person trying to support an imperfect person in an imperfect world. To watch someone he loved more than he’d believed possible suffer and die. To experience the grueling labor of keeping someone alive until that labor was no longer enough. The story unfolds minute to minute, day to day, with the level of detail of a military man turned a business owner, of someone who knows how much a detail can change things.
It isn’t the polished morality tale of someone looking back on a long past experience. It’s the conversation you have when you meet someone coming from the trail you are embarking on, providing detailed information on the dangers ahead, promising that it will be beautiful, and confirming that it is the only way.
Guides for caregivers have neatly organized chapters. They speak in vague generalities. They are written by credentialed experts. They tell you what to do, or aspire to.
Bob didn’t have any distance. He didn’t write a guide you can flip through like a reference book. He doesn’t offer up vague advice based on best practices. He is there with you.
Yes, you will be lost. Yes, you will make mistakes. Yes, you will despair. Yes, there will be divine beauty. Yes, there will be great love. Yes, you can continue on.
So, that’s what we’re doing. We’re continuing on.
As an old millennial, whose social life has been conducted partially online since high school, it’s strange that this is the first time I’ve had an online community organizer die unexpectedly. I’ve had to navigate so many other online community changes — from having a non-profit transform into a for-profit and having a community organizer get attacked by a shark.
I was hoping that now, a week after his death, I’d have an idea of how to memorialize Bob. But I still don’t know. Maybe you have an idea.
If you’d like to share a message with Bob’s family, please leave a comment or reply and I’ll make sure it gets to them.
People have also been sharing thoughts and memories on his Facebook wall.
Officially, nothing is changing for our organization. But The Caregiver Space is going to be a different organization without Bob.
You may not remember or even ever knew this, but Bob went to many caregiver oriented sites and offered to write for them. He was TOO honest for their taste. Not that they expected him to sugar coat the experience, but because he was so raw and so real. When he found us and realized that he could be who he was with us, he found his home. For this I am eternally grateful. I too am trying to figure out how to properly memorialize him.