It's been quite a few years since I've published anything on this blog, and I'm sure most of my loyal readers who used to read this have moved on a long, long, time ago. But I just wanted to write a little something about my best friend, who recently passed away on May 27, 2024.
For those who used to read this blog, or anyone who ever read any of my "Taiwan" or "Texas" non-fiction books, my friend David comes up quite a bit in those. He went with me to Taiwan, and while I left there in 2008, David remained there for the rest of his life. Whenever we would talk about him moving back to America, he seemed to have zero interest in it. Taiwan would be his final resting place.
I first met David in 7th grade, so this was about 1983. We were seated alphabetically in class, and his desk was right behind mine. I would often turn around and talk to him about pretty much everything. He was bullied a lot. I remember other kids in the class used to circle around him and point out the extremely bad dandruff he had (it might have even been lice). He grew up extremely poor and really had no strong parental figure in the house. His mother had left when he was just a baby, and his father was basically a lazy slob who did nothing to help raise them. His solution to quiet a noisy baby was to feed them Nyquil. So it's not surprising that David wasn't always clean, and thus became the butt of kids jokes in middle school. Yet I still became friends with him. Maybe it was originally out of pity, or just because we got along so well.
David and I remained friends throughout high school and through our first marriages. He married a woman named Suzanne, and I married Amber. Neither marriage would last, although my first lasted longer than his. David even married a second time, to a woman he shared an apartment with named Melissa. That marriage would last less than a year, and right until the end David would jokingly tell me that that marriage didn't really count.
David had a very abrasive personality. He was very sarcastic, and tended to speak his mind, regardless of who it might alienate or offend. Most of my friends didn't like him. My ex-wife didn't like him. My family didn't like him. I get it. He was a hard person to get to know and to like, but for some reason he made me laugh. A lot. I knew his sarcastic personality probably came from his harsh upbringing.
Even as far back as the 1990's, I was always concerned about David's health. The guy had the worst diet I had ever seen. In his apartment, he had cases upon cases of either Pepsi or Dr. Pepper. I'd ask him what he ate for breakfast, and he'd show me a can of Pepsi and say "you're looking at it." He'd drink soda constantly. He drank it so much, in fact, that he went into some sort of diabetic coma at one point. His landlord tried to reach him, knocked on the door, and eventually the police were called to break in, finding David unconscious. He was taken to the hospital, given fluids, and eventually he recovered. This was his first brush with death.
David never really seemed to have a great life in America. He couldn't seem to hold a job, or a marriage, for very long. He even dropped out of college after one semester, which he blamed on his father for not forwarding some important school paperwork to his new address. He never returned to college after that, probably because he was always in one bad financial situation after another. There was a time when things got so bad for him that he was homeless for a few months. He lived in a tent in public parks like Yosemite for weeks at a time. I let him stay with me for a while, but I only had a very small apartment with my wife at that time, so I knew that wouldn't work out. I called his brother, and his brother was nice enough to let David come to stay with him.
Shortly after I divorced my first wife, Amber, I decided to move to Taiwan, and I invited David to join me. He didn't have much to lose. He worked at a bowling alley and lived with his brother, so it wasn't a very difficult decision for him, although he did think the idea was crazy at the time. Although I already had an Associate's Degree in English and a TEFL certificate, David didn't have anything but a high school diploma, so he had to create a fake degree on his computer and pass it off as a real one to schools in Taiwan. I don't recommend or encourage this, but he did what he had to do.
Neither David nor I had too much trouble finding a job in Taiwan once we arrived. For David, he had to go to a small town named Lumpei that probably couldn't care less that he didn't have a real degree. They never checked, and he worked there for quite a while, making lots of money and traveling the world. It was during this time that both of us met the people who would change our lives. For me, it was my wife Chien Yu, and for David it was his wife Pi Chi.
David eventually moved to Kaohsiung with Pi Chi and they got married several years later, after I had already moved back to the US. He struggled to find work in Kaohsiung. Possibly because in the big cities, the background checks are a little more strict. So he took work doing tutoring and other odd jobs here and there.
I visited Taiwan several times after I moved back to the US. On one of my visits, I specifically talked to him about his health. I told him that at his age, he needed to be getting regular checkups, and in particular, a colonoscopy. I had recently had a colonoscopy, so that's why this topic came up. He kind of brushed it aside. Like a lot of people, getting a colonoscopy isn't something that's always at the forefront of peoples minds. If David had really listened to me at that time and had a colonoscopy, I think he'd be alive today.
I visited Taiwan in 2016, and was supposed to go again in 2020, but Covid prevented that from happening, so I didn't actually go back to Taiwan until the end of 2023 into 2024. By this time David was already very sick. He was diagnosed as having stage 3 colon cancer around April of 2023. The doctors advised chemotherapy to reduce the size of his tumor, so it would be easier to remove later. Unfortunately, the chemotherapy didn't help, and not only did the tumor not shrink, but his cancer spread to his lymph nodes, his prostate, and his liver. I saw him for the last time in January of 2024, while he was still stage 3, and he seemed hopeful that he would recover, but with a colostomy bag. I tried to reassure him that having a colostomy bag was not so bad, as my father also had one and still managed to live for 20-30 more years. When I saw David, he still seemed to be his normal self. Very talkative, still sarcastic, just weaker. I had no idea his health would drop so fast once I left. It was just a few short months later that I would get the news that he passed away on Monday, May 27th.
His wife gave him a very beautiful funeral service. I felt happy that David had people around him who loved him. I feel like Taiwan is the best place for him to be as his final resting place. It was the place where he felt the most happy. Whereas America was a place of mostly bad memories, Taiwan was the place of so many good memories.
I will miss David for the rest of my life. We had so many great conversations for hours at a time, even though we lived on the other side of the world from each other. We talked several times a year, and texted pretty frequently. I had hoped to one day retire in Taiwan and David and I were going to hang out as old men, complaining about our health problems. But alas, it wasn't meant to be.
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