Posted

Nov 10th 2009

Mood

Heartbroken

This journal is for anyone who ever visited the forum "Ciel Network". If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's okay. You don't have to know the person to understand the situation. Please read on and hear my words.

Just within the last hour of writing this journal, I recieved an email from someone I'd never heard of or met before. He said he was friends with someone I knew very well, and that he had something important to tell me. I responded quickly, and found out...

...my good friend, passed away yesterday morning after a long, hard battle with cancer. He was 23 years old.

Evan and I met on the Ciel Network forums. He was a spriter who wanted to tell his own story he'd invented, but he had very little support. I started talking to him on AIM sometime, and we had a lot of good times. We also had a lot of arguments, but that was typical of me several years ago. We didn't argue at all the last year, possibly two years. Things changed when I found out he had cancer. I wanted to help him with his story, and I helped give him some drawing lessons. He made quite a few cute little drawings when he finally got that Wacom Bamboo tablet... He wrote profiles for the story, fine-tuned the details of the setting, he did everything. I was going to draw for him. Unfortunately, I only handed him one design...

Thinking back on his diagnosis and treatment, the signs were so hard to miss. I don't know how any doctor could have missed it for as long as they did. People are only human, but... Evan had just completed (or almost completed, I don't remember by now) his last year of chef school and was looking forward to a promising career in the culinary industry, but something odd kept him out of the kitchen. He had asthma, and also strange sores on his heels. The cancer had gone undetected for nearly 3 years. By that time, it had spread down to his feet--the reason he got those sores. Then it was found in his lungs, and in the past year, his brain. He went on seizure medication, which helped control the effects of the brain tumor. He underwent harsh chemotherapy treatments, spent weeks at a time in the hospital, and through it all, he always remained positive about things.

I was so hopeful that he was going to make it. Sami (his real name) was a strong fighter. He was always positive and ready to go, ready to fight the cancer and win his life back. I wish so much that he had made it...but some things are simply impossible to beat. I thought I should make aware any friends and acquaintances he had here on Sheezy Art. He was my good friend--one of the best I ever had--and I miss him so much already. I don't know how I'm going to cope once it finally sinks in that I'll never see him again. All I know is that he isn't in pain anymore, and now he can be free of worry and fatigue. In closing, all I can think to say is...

goodbye, Sami. I loved you so much. You were an honest, loyal, courageous friend to the end. I hope you are at peace.