Three weeks ago I logged on to the Well, my favorite online computer conferencing service, for a quick browse through my usual haunts: the "Media," "News," and "Weird" conferences. I was looking for a good time -- some gossip, some sophisticated debate, some downright foolery.
But I was brought up short. In the News conference, a man named Tom Mandel had opened up a topic entitled "My Turn." In it, he announced that his lung cancer, first diagnosed last October, had taken a serious turn for the worse. He did not know how long he had left to live, but feared his time would be brief. So he was saying good-bye.
Death is not new to the Well. If anything, over the past year, it has become a regular, if unwelcome, visitor. But death for Tom Mandel was inconceivable.
Mandel is the Well. One of its most prolific contributors, he is its history, its voice, its attitude. And when I joined the Well, a little more than a year ago, Tom Mandel was the first online personality to impress me as a real, live human being.
Though not a human being I felt attracted to in any way. Tom could
be tough on "newbies." And I was quite the blundering rookie, poking my
Bay Guardian trained nose into every ongoing discussion. Suddenly, I
couldn't avoid this guy whose name was
Acid-tongued, arrogant, condescending -- that was my first
impression of the dread Mandel. Don't Feed The Mandel, others advised me,
as they saw me explode from his provocations. One Well elder informed me I
was being hazed -- it felt to me more like getting scorched with an
acetylene torch. Man, did that guy piss me off.
Today, it's clear to me that
Partially because we both enjoyed exercising our idiosyncratic
insanities in the Weird conference. Weird is one of the stranger
neighborhoods on the Well, a place where the Well's collective id is
unleashed, a place to madly babble and be babbled. And in Weird, everyone
is equal. I made fun of
And then, a month ago, I met him, face to face. We had both been
invited to breakfast in Tiburon, to celebrate the visit of a Weird
stalwart from out of state.
He looked a bit worse for wear and tear, the way a man looks who
has undergone severe chemo- and radiation therapy treatments for several
months. But he gave me a big smile. He told me my baby daughter was cute.
His laugh was strong.
I didn't talk to him much -- we were at opposite ends of a long
table. But as we walked back to our cars after breakfast we exchanged some
delightfully snide remarks about some histrionics just then breaking out
in the Media conference. I marveled at how only a year ago I had alarmed
my wife and sister with the steam coming from my ears as I battled with
Such is the stuff of virtual community.
I'm certainly not the only one who felt that way. After Mandel
opened his "My Turn" topic, hundreds of other Well denizens responded with
their memories, their love, their exhortations. As time has passed on the
Well, this community has become unfortunately expert at crafting online
wakes. Now, their gathered messages were like strings of pearls, the
purest poetry, and Mandel's responses, ever fainter, ever more infrequent,
were missives from another world, full of an unexpected, and dazzling,
spirituality and grace.
And so I cried.
And then fled to "weird"-- where we played with even fiercer
passion than usual, where we said what could not be said, and denied what
could not be denied.
Eleven days after Tom Mandel opened "My Turn," he died in a
hospital bed, listening to Beethoven's 9th Symphony. He was 49 years old.
And even now, as I write these words, the Well pays its respects, laying
virtual flowers on his grave.
Tom, I hardly knew you, but I'll never forget you.
--Andrew Leonard