Those that loved Andrew

A few days ago, my friend died.

I had some drawings of him, and I thought I'd post them here for people who, like me, are missing him. Then I thought that the pictures needed some context, and so this ended up turning into a long blog post, much more than I was planning to write. Feel free to skim through, if you're just looking for pictures. I think this writing was as much for me - for my own need to make sense of things - as for anyone else.

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After you turn the page

You know when you finish a really good book, and you just don't want it to be over? You still want to live in that world, sharing the perils and triumphs of that hero or heroine you've come to love. You might have unanswered questions. You might want to find out what happened next - did they really live happily ever after?

How can you satisfy that longing for more? You might read, or even write, fan fiction. You might binge-watch the movie. You might join a book club where you can find like-minded readers of that story. You might go looking for other works by that same author, hoping for more glimpses of those beloved characters. But all that stuff is not the fix. The real thing is the original, irreplaceable story, and you know it. And it ends on the last page.

Upon learning of my friend's death, which was sudden and unexpected, I'm feeling like that: like a reader who just turned the page, and was astonished to discover that it was the last page. I wasn't ready for this story to be over.

I can read his old tweets and watch his Youtube videos. I can look through my old sketchbooks and find drawings of him. But that's all secondary to the real thing, the real story of the real Andrew.

The real story

It's not as though I actually know the real story, of course. I met Andrew around 2000, when both of us were floating around in the same coffee-shop-night-club scene that Calgary offered to kids like us with degrees in the humanities (English, me; philosophy, him) and jobs that had nothing to do with those subjects.

I put the oldNight Gallery in here, but places that I associate more with Andrew are Heartland Bakery (now Vendome), where he worked; and theHop In Brew, the gathering-place-for-friends where you could usually count on finding him. (It's still there!)

I don't remember the joke that caused the friend who introduced us, to call him Andrew Ross. (Something about a Scottish clan??) But he was introduced to me with that joking name, and I didn't actually find out what his real surname was, for a year or so. As a result, the name stuck (and I see that it's mentioned in a lot of these old pictures).

In 2002 I had this idea to draw thumbnails of all the people I knew and put the pictures up on a website with a brief update about them. (So, yes, I invented Facebook.) Here's the entry I made for Andrew.

We both thought about writing fiction back then. Here's a sketch of Andrew telling me about his "story of the 3000-year-old man." I think this was less of a real writing project and more of a way for him to document his reflections on history and the changing/unchanging nature of things.

I remember thinking of the 3000-year-old man when I read this tweet, written a long time after.

In recent years, Andrew's Twitter followers got to know and enjoy his #OTD tweets, in which he'd draw attention to a historical event of note that had happened "On This Date" in the past, and then suggest a present-day way to celebrate it.

I think these started out as a way to engage students with history, using digital technology - something that Andrew excelled at. Increasingly, though, he used his #OTD tweets to advance suggestions for political and social changes he was passionate about.

 He somehow still managed to make them funny.

The Scholemaster

Andrew was one of those rare people who not only dreamt about what he wanted to do, but actually did it. The other thing I learned about Andrew upon first meeting him (besides the wrong surname) was that he was "the Shakespeare guy." I wonder how many aspiring English scholars decide they'll be Shakespeare guys, too - after all, Shakespeare probably seems like a pretty safe bet as far as literary subjects go. But there's only so much demand for Shakespeare guys, and as Andrew found in his years as an adjunct prof, it's not a steady or predictable career path. But Andrew was and remained a Shakespeare guy, broadening his expertise along the way. What does it tell you about him, that I found a good summary of his publications/research on a website called "Whores of Yore?" (I always enjoyed his retweets fromthis account, by the way.)

He received his PhD from the University of Guelph in 2012, where his dissertation work was on the representation of the rapist on the early modern stage. He has published or presented on Elizabethan brothels, sexual identity in the early modern period, sexual violence and pedagogy, early modern prison writing, masculinity in film, Shakespeare on the radio, and digital approaches to teaching medieval and early modern literature.

I remember feeling really proud of him, as I listened to Andrew being interviewed on CBC's Ontario Today in the wake of the 2014 Jian Ghomeshi scandal. He advocated bravely for women's rights, long before the #MeToo movement entered the mainstream. He'd done the research, after all: he knew what he was talking about.

In a 2014 article, Andrew wrote about how an understanding of history and literature was relevant to an understanding of a contemporary culture of masculine sexual violence on university campuses. I love how he made a great case for the importance of studying old texts, from this angle. And, I also love that he pointed out that we have the power to do what we want with that knowledge: we can use it as a tool for reinforcing the way things are, or as a tool for change.

Sometimes I wondered if he was cynical, or hopeful, about the way things were going.

Ok, so that was a lot of scholarly stuff, but if that was boring and inaccessible, it doesn't do him justice. Andrew was an award-winning teacher, and one of his popular teaching tools was a video podcast series called The Scholemaster. The ones I like best are the short videos in which he answers questions from his students, about himself ("Do you like any sports?" "No"). But the other videos, full of historical and literary info for his students, are also wonderful, and the pop-culture references are sometimes hilarious. Here are two - the first one is about how the history of prostitution contributed to modern popular culture, and the second one is about why English teachers make students read Shakespeare.

My own (minor) academic pursuits owed a lot to Andrew's support. For me, too, he was a mentor. In 2006, he helped to organize the University of Calgary's Free Exchange Graduate Conference (of which I can no longer find anything online), and invited me to participate. I remember that my talk was called "Why Don't Grown-Up Books have Pictures?" and being able to present it was a giant confidence-builder for me. Later, when I wrote an actual scholarly paper which (of course) was accompanied by a comic (it's me, after all), I put Andrew in the comic (below). He was my go-to person for all questions academic. He read everything I sent him, checked my citations, and, as recently as this year, kept on looking up articles for me in that tantalizing secret database only university people get to use. That's a true friend.

A few pages from the drawing book

But strange as it may sound, although Andrew and I shared an interest in literature, that always felt secondary to the real reason we were friends, which was just because we were friends. Here's a 2005-ish sketch during a conversation in which Andrew was helping to boost my spirits at a time when I was feeling down.

But, of course, it wasn't all philosophy and art. We also just hung out. We went to movies, for example. Here are some other sketches I found from the early 2000's.

I remember drawing this last picture while we half-heartedly studied French at Higher Ground Cafe in Kensington (Andrew, as part of his M.A. coursework, I think... and me, for those dreaded Air Canada language tests I had to do, to keep my route language qualifications as a flight attendant). Reference to the "Galerie du Nuit" included here for old-time Calgarian scenesters (see beginning of this blog).

Back then, Andrew and I commiserated about our usually-single states. I remember we once spent an "Anti-Valentine's Day" together (2001, I think) - complete with roses, poetry and other silly stuff, to thumb our noses at society's expectations that we were supposed to be dating people. We laughed about it, but we also sighed about it. This picture mentioning the "club" we belonged to, was the "club" of singledom (or maybe, more honestly, it might have been the "no action" club...)

Here's something I had forgotten: One day, I'd planned to go for coffee at the Roasterie with some guy I'd met, and then walk over to Heartland Bakery to say hi to Andrew when he got off work. The guy and I talked and talked, left the Roasterie, walked down the street and kept talking, standing outside Heartland, not even noticing that the cafe had closed and everyone had gone. That guy later became my husband and Andrew forgave me for not showing up. 

Around the same time, Andrew met his future wife. So we dissolved our "club," but luckily we kept the good rapport and abiilty to really talk about relationship ups and downs - a connection I know I appreciated a lot, in our talks over the past year or so.

Andrew was the friend around whom the other friends gathered. He'd just call us up and we'd all congregate at the Hop In Brew or at someone's smoky apartment. As significant others appeared in all our lives, they all joined in and were made to feel welcome. I drew this comic about Andrew and Cindy's anniversary celebration (2005 or 2006, I think?) (I also posted this little story in a blog about Leonard Cohen, in 2016).

Back to the end of the story

When Andrew moved to Ontario, I realized how much he'd been the hub of our whole group, five or ten friends who didn't get together as often as we had. Luckily, he came back to Calgary once in a while, and even managed to appear at my wedding in 2008 (seen here in this very small piece of a photo).

During the last five  years or so, we stayed connected through Twitter. Andrew's tweets just sounded like Andrew.

I'm not a biographer, a colleague, a member of Andrew's family - I'm just a frend, and this is just a list of my memories about someone who was always nice to me, right up until the last time we met, in July of this year. These were the pictures I took of him, then (it may amuse you to learn that the person he was conversing with so expressively, was my 4-year-old).

Way back at the beginning, I wrote about the shock - the feeling of bereftness - that happens after you turn over the last page of a book you loved. I think that writing this essay or whatever you might call it, is my way of keeping those echoes of Andrew's life story around me, for as long as possible, after turning the page and discovering that I'd just finished the last chapter.

Now that I've compared his life to a book, I can't help wondering how Andrew, the scholar, would have analyzed that text - the text of his life? What would he have said about the fact that his readers weren't prepared for this unexpected and highly unsatisfactory ending to the story? Would he have told us that we should have been paying closer attention to the text? But Andrew was a theatre guy, perhaps before anything else. Drama - timing - the element of surprise - he had all this at his fingertips. Maybe the idea of a surprise ending was more in keeping with his philosophy, than anyone knew.

Let me just apologize for my flawed and foolish metaphor, comparing Andrew's life to a story in a book, or a play. It's dumb, I know. But, I also hope he might have got a kick out of it?

Here's the ending I'd expected: Andrew becomes an old, wise, cantankerous professor in an elbow-patched cardigan and a white beard, surrounded by old books and old friends (both animal and human). The elderly Andrew would have reflected, like Tennyson's Ulysses, on his own life - quoting aloud, perhaps, in that mock-affected, read-aloud, theatre-projection-style voice that he could just turn on:

"All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone..."

I know - I should have quoted some Early Modern poet, not Tennyson. I always think of Ulysses, mostly because it's the only poem I can ever remember well enough to quote anymore, these days... but also because I was thinking about how Andrew felt things deeply, and how much he enjoyed the physical experience of being alive. But when I read this quote now, I'm struck more by the phrase, "those that loved me." There are just so many of us - those of us that loved him. I'm looking at the online responses to the announcement of Andrew's death on Twitter, and at the comments on  the GoFundMe page where his family is raising money for a scholarship in his memory - and I'm finding so many of us: those that loved Andrew. Even the @Shakespeare Twitter account said as much, the day after Andrew's death:

Spending a lovely day with @Andrew__Bretz. Who loveth not Andrew?

— William Shakespeare (@Shakespeare) August 23, 2018

This comment on the GoFundMe page is another example of what made Andrew such a valuable mentor and friend. I love that this person took the time to share this story, and I hope she doesn't mind me re-posting it here:

Andrew smiled at me at the plenary talk of my first SAA. I was nervous to be at my first Shakespeare conference where I didn't know anyone and was extremely intimidated by all the people in the room. I tried to talk to him after the talk was over, but I lost him in the crowd. It may sound trivial, but at that moment I really appreciated the smile from a stranger, so much so that I remembered what he looked like to this day. I am saddened that I have only now learned his name. I send my sincerest condolences to Andrew's family and loved ones for their great loss. All I knew of Andrew in the briefest interaction I shared with him was that he seemed kind. Now I know him to have been greatly loved.

I feel like I love those people, too - these online friends of Andrew whom I've never met, the people I'm realizing I've been thinking about as "Those that loved Andrew." I want to write to them all, hug them all, thank them for having been there, being part of his story, so many parts I didn't even know about, so many people affirming what I also felt about him. That he was loved.

I hope he knew that, too.

And now: go to the scholarship fundraiser page. It's a perfect way to honour Andew.

#OTD in 2018, celebrate by making a donation and helping his story to continue beyond that last page.