To Absent Friends: Jerry and Anand

 

To absent friends...

I lost two friends last week. It has been difficult. If you might be so kind, dear reader, let me say a bit to honor these two absent friends, Jerry and Anand. 

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I was friends with Jerry for over 30 years. My friend Adam met him at our local game shop in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota called Great Goblin. I met him soon after, I think when I briefly joined a Lord of the Rings table-top role-playing game at the game store. This was sometime around 1992. Jerry was a little older than us, and much cooler. He had a car. Wow! 

I moved to Wisconsin soon after, but somehow stayed in touch with a small group of friends who played Dungeons & Dragons and other games. I’ve stayed in touch with that core group ever since, which considering how many different places I’ve lived in the last 30 years, is a feat in itself (plus 30 for friendship!). 

It would have been easy to lose touch with that group, as I have with so many other friends over the decades in all the various life-segments I’ve lived on the circuitous road of the academic life. I’m deeply grateful to the universe and my friends that we beat the odds and stayed in touch. 

I would often see Jerry over the last few decades at various games and events whenever I went back to the Twin Cities. I was always glad to see him. As my friend Adam said, Jerry was one of the few people who loved gaming as much as he does, which if you know Adam, is saying a lot. 

Jerry loved painting miniatures more than anybody I’ve ever known. He must’ve had several thousand miniatures. I’ve never had the hand-eye coordination, patience, or space for this hobby, but I always deeply admired Jerry’s lifelong dedication to the craft. 

Usually soft-spoken, Jerry was always good for a quip, often expressing annoyance, humor, or both and almost always after carefully waiting, intelligence brewing behind his eyes, for the perfect moment.

Sometime in the late 90’s Jerry, Adam, and other friends drove from Minnesota to Virginia to visit our friend Mike, who was stationed there in the Navy. That was my first really big road trip. I was working the graveyard shift at the time, so I volunteered to drive at night. I think Jerry stayed up the latest to talk to me as we plunged through the darkness of rural Ohio. 

Another fun trip took place in 2021. Adam was trying to get me to meet the group at GenCon in Indianapolis in 2020, which … well, you remember 2020, right? Even though COVID was still very much a thing in September 2021, we made a point to attend GenCon, where they had a reasonably strong mask policy. 

By this time Jerry was having some health issues, but since I was driving to Indianapolis anyway, I volunteered to rent a minivan so we could get Jerry’s scooter in the back as we drove from our AirBnB to the conference venue. We all had a great time, buying too much merch, playing games, and mostly just hanging out. Those were probably some of the best conversations I ever had with Jerry. 

But when you’re talking about a friendship of several decades what impacts you the most are maybe the little moments you remember the least. A couple years before the pandemic, we started an online weekday Pathfinder game in addition to the in-person weekend game I couldn’t join. So, I started seeing Jerry (online at least) more than the once or twice a year I manage to visit Minnesota in person. 

And then when our lives were disrupted in March 2020, the core gaming group moved all games totally online. And I was able to join. Once again, I was hanging out with some of my oldest friends, and a few new friends added to the group, like Jerry’s partner Lisa. 

And when Adam started a Mage campaign a couple years ago, I was able to join that, even as most of the Minnesotans returned to in-person gaming. I joined via Discord from Tennessee. And there was Jerry, sitting at the big table in a little window on my laptop screen. He was there just a few days before he passed away. 

The last time I saw Jerry in person in July, he looked better than he did the previous time I saw him. He seemed to be in good spirits, and he was getting around pretty well. He told me it was good to see me. And I said it was good to see him. And it always was. 

For the last 30+ years it has been my privilege to be Jerry’s friend. I will miss him. 

I encourage you to read more about Jerry here.

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I was friends with Anand for almost ten years, soon after I got my job here at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. We had some mutual friends, and he emailed me saying he wanted to meet me at a conference we were both planning to attend. 

We first met and bonded at that conference in 2015, where we drank whiskey and talked about philosophy in the hotel bar (a not uncommon occurrence that was reiterated several times at conferences around the world, most recently in San Francisco in the spring of 2023). 

He invited me to give a talk at San Jose State University in 2015, where he taught since 2005. Anand was a specialist in areas that some academic philosophers would consider “core areas” of the discipline: epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic, and so on within the “analytic tradition” of philosophy. 

Anand and I disagreed to some extent about whether “analytic philosophy” is necessarily continuous with “Western philosophy.” I tend to think that association runs deep in ways that most analytic philosophers don’t recognize (due to their antipathy toward history of philosophy), but Anand always thought that if you take philosophical analysis as a method, you find that method (or something like it) in many philosophical traditions. He was especially interested in South Asian (Indian) philosophy, which is my academic specialization. But he also inspired me and many others to take other traditions seriously, like Mesoamerican, Maori, Native American, Islamic, African, and other traditions. 

Non-philosophers might think it rude to discuss our disagreement while honoring Anand. But if you knew Anand (or most philosophers, really!) disagreement and debate are the best ways to honor and respect philosophers. And Anand was one of the purest examples of this. 

He loved to talk about philosophy, which he always did without the slightest shred of egoistic attachment to his own ideas or animosity toward the ideas of others. With Anand, it was always about the ideas themselves. He had a pure love for philosophy that the vicissitudes of academia dim in the rest of us.

Anand was probably the most supportive colleague I’ve ever had. I could talk about how he organized a whole panel on my book at a major conference in 2019, or how he encouraged me to submit my work in venues I consider above my station in the rigid hierarchies of academia. I could talk about he encouraged me, along with his wife Manju, to cofound the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society, a society I hope to carry on in his honor with more events in the future. 

I could talk about all that. But I wouldn’t be the only one. I’ve always known he was super supportive of others, but in the few days since his passing, I’ve discovered that he was as supportive for many others as he was for me. 

The incentive structures of academia tend not to reward such supportive and collaborative action, but Anand was always trying to reach out and forge bridges between different colleagues and areas of philosophy. He often talked about how much he wished his colleagues in all areas of philosophy would walk across the hall at conferences and attend each other’s talks and engage with each other’s work. 

About a year ago Anand told me about his cancer. The last time I talked to him on the phone in July (a couple weeks before I last saw Jerry in person), Anand sounded optimistic despite the seriousness of his diagnosis. He was under no illusion about his odds, but he was still making plans, including sending an abstract for a volume on comparative epistemology that I’m co-editing. 

His cancer treatment left him unable to travel, which was a major blow. He was one of the best traveled academics I’ve ever known. He was always rushing off to India, New Zealand, Europe, etc. to give talks that no doubt stimulated audiences everywhere. 

Last Thursday I was lucky, with the invitation of Manju, to send him a brief video message. I thanked him for being such a supportive colleague, a great philosopher, and above all an excellent friend and human being. 

I encourage you to read more about Anand here.

And here’s an essay on terminal illness and transformative experience he published a few months ago.

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It has been a hard week. I found out about Jerry on Wednesday. I learned that Anand was dying the next day. And he died on Friday. Two friends two days apart. 

I’ll end with a bit of reflection if you might be so kind as to indulge me. 

None of us are in this life forever. We all know this at some level, but how often do we really think about it? Even for philosophers, for whom thoughts about mortality are an occupational hazard, maybe not often enough. 

Death is hard. It can be deeply depressing. I don’t underestimate that, least of all when my heart is as heavy as it has been since last Wednesday. I spend a lot of time with Buddhist philosophy, so discussing the realities of suffering, sickness, old age, and death is literally part of my day job. 

But what brings some tincture of gladness to my grieving heart is how beautiful and wondrous it is when our lives intertwine as fleetingly and as impermanently as they do. How magnificent it is that we tiny bubbles in the effervescence of reality have the privilege to exist at all, to find joy in gaming, in philosophy, and most of all, in friendship. 

None of this makes the rending suffering of grief any easier. Of course not. 

But can we perhaps find whatever meaning there is to be had in this life in the very recognition of the precious impermanence of our connections to each other? 

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I like to imagine Jerry contemplating it and responding with a quip and Anand forming a devastatingly brilliant argument in response. 

Please do me a favor, dear reader, and honor my absent friends—and your own—by being a friend.