Something like a memorial.

A ramble in memory of Daniel Wolf roemele or Life is Short, Get a Helmet.

I was lucky enough to get to tell my friend Dan I loved him in the weeks before he died. According to our chat, it was January 21^st and he was, by his own words, not well, my dude. He would be gone by February. Work was being even more work than usual, he was stressed and tired. He was always stressed and tired because he slept a scant handful of hours a day, and because depression and anxiety and stress are exhausting, so the snake eats its tail forever.

Unlike many of his friends, I do not remember our initial meeting. I do not have a good story about how he came into my life, no punchline to share. Was it at a movie, maybe Mars Attacks? Was it roleplaying in a mutual friend’s game of D&D, my first foray into ttrpgs? Which friend facilitated the introduction? It can be one of only two people, forming a tenuous social bridge between Avonworth and Quaker Valley high schools that would become a path many people crossed.

I can’t really remember because that happens when you have friends from high school and you’re nearly fifty and you’re still friends. When you’re a kid you don’t think hey, I’m meeting someone who will one day, decades later, be one of my closest friends, so maybe I ought to try to remember this. Mostly this is because kids are stupid and short sighted, but some of it is the fallibility of human memory.

This was a friendship that I was lucky enough to burnish over long years of shared experience and human connection, each memory pressed paper thin like a towering crepe stack of history that’s all just sort of smashed up cake at the bottom.

Life in a small town city means that it is possible for many friend groups to overlap in ways you could never expect, a whirling puzzle of people. At Dan’s celebration of life we talked about making a social family tree showing how everyone knew him. It would be a confusing tangle of overlapping circles - most would have some kind of game as its central point.

The man loved games and gaming, ttrpgs, board games, whatever, he was down to try it.

I don’t think Dan was my first GM but he was my longest GM. He was also the best GM. Dan did voices and accents for his npcs, he made huge ship diagrams for such notable spacecraft as The Sickly Kitten, The Potato and her runabout, the Tater. He loved a complication for his player characters, he loved manipulating us into more and more dangerous endeavors.

Our characters faced consequences and repercussions for our actions, even when we tried to do the right thing the game would change and we found ourselves doing something bad. Once, I tried to lay down some suppressing fire to warn the townsfolk to stay away from our ship and I accidentally killed a few dozen of them. They did not like that and like so many other instances we had to flee for our lives.

These characters in his hands were never heroes, always in trouble and on the run. Dan was forever subtly pitting us against each other with what sounded like reasonable plans and possible outcomes. We had in game meetings about ship maintenance, about our lack of funds, about the on board doctor who was out to kill us.

He built unique versions of common properties, Star Wars came with no Jedi or with purple passion stormtroopers with custom painted armor long before the animated show Rebels gave us a color forward Mandalorian. Fantasy settings had a sci fi flare, magic had tech.

He built these worlds for us to play in because he loved to build worlds. Left to his own devices he would simply tinker with new societies, new continents, new magic systems, new political structures, and in the process not do the actual work of writing. Worldbuilder’s Disease.

Dan read a little something from every fiction I’ve ever written, which to be fair is not a lot - but he was my writing buddy for so long I cannot envision the process without him, without his feedback. He kept me accountable to doing the work, he was always urging me to finish what I started even though he and I rarely did. We even talked of writing something together at some point but I was too shy, too green, to unsure of how to handle his frequent blunt criticism.

The man was a granular editor, considering every word, every comma, every nuance and implication, always demanding more, better. When he learned that the copious red ink bummed me out a little, he changed to magenta instead but kept the expansive feedback. He was my biggest cheerleader and harshest critic, usually in the same breath. He was like that, generous and ornery, soft spoken and outspoken, opinionated and always right. Dan always knew better, to the very end when he wasn’t feeling well and knew that we were worried about him.

His advice was always the same, for my characters at least, he said make it worse. For him, worse was always more interesting. Well, life without Dan is definitely worse than the alternative but time will tell if it somehow becomes more interesting.

Dan was a segmented onion of a person, he had compartmentalized layers of differing thickness for different people based on an esoteric calculus. He factored how honest he could be about certain matters, how dark he could be about his unchecked mental health struggles, about how candid he felt he could be about his many situations.

I mostly have his words on a screen to go on, we had not seen each other live and in person for years, but as stated he was not well at the end, on like a lot of levels. Over work was grinding him down to a nubbin of the person I remember. He’d slipped and fallen on some ice and been terribly shaken by it. He was, as always, clinically depressed and unwilling to do anything about it. There was some kind of sickness at the end, a cold or flu or something unknown and then he was short of breath and then he was gone, just like that.

We talked via google chat nearly every day, enough that it was force of habit to check the chat for new comments a dozen times a day. We exchanged FB messages, saw and heard each other on Discord but with less of all that near the end.

He was sick and he was tired and his body gave up and now the light of the collective universe is dimmer.

I see a question, “Who was the real Dan?” as we all had different versions of that human chimera. Not everyone knew he loved kids and was a baby whisperer. Only some people were the recipient of random gifts from Amazon with no note of provenance. I have a stack of such books next to my bed that I’ll be working my way through now, wishing I could talk to him about them that I know he enjoyed or wanted to share. For years I thought he lived like a monk, toiling in a his apartment, loveless and celibate, but that wasn’t the full story. He hated horror movies, they upset him, but he loved Jaws which, let’s face it, is at minimum a horror thriller.

He was a different person to almost everyone, a different concentration of whatever substance it was that made Dan so ineffably Dan - a man whose psyche was filtrated through thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of pages read, each volume a varying degree of quality pulled from nearly every sub-genre of sci fi and fantasy, even the ones you’ve never heard of.

He was a voracious reader until he wasn’t, when he was taken by the ill humors that haunted his whole life and he couldn’t read for pleasure. As a youth, he would take milk crates of books to the used book store on a regular basis and would exchange them all for an all new pile to read. I don’t know what the last book he got to finish reading was. Did he even have the energy to read in those final days? I won’t ever know.

Life, they say, carries on - even when it seems obscene to keep doing the things that admittedly need to be done, like generally persisting in the face of grief. I find myself looking at our google chat and wondering what to do with it, should I keep talking to him as if he were still around? Would it be therapeutic to tell him I will miss him and that I am mad he is gone and that I am mad at him for literally ghosting me? I will be haunted by him for the rest of my life but I guess that’s my problem, not his.

Thinking about the future I am sad there are books he preordered that will be delivered posthumously, Amazon packages that might never be opened. I think of all the things he loved that he won’t get to see to the end; he will never read Winds of Winter, see the new episodes of MST3K with Mike Nelson and the bots, never finish writing a novel and be published. And I think selfishly of all the things we will never get a chance to do together, games we will never play again, new systems and stories we will not dissect and discuss.

Live your life however you want to, dear reader, but maybe listen to your friends when they suggest it might be time to seek medical attention. Even if you are a stubborn mule of a person.

Love you, buddy.