On July 11, Stellos drove up to the mountains to renew his marriage vows.  He did not show up at 
work the next day.  He was found by the police in the back of his pickup truck, where he and his 
wife had been sleeping.  The apparent cause of death was a leaking propane appliance in the 
camper shell with them.

I only learned about this last Wednesday.  It is still very hard for me to even face this, to come to 
grips with something so huge.  I feel as though something has been ripped out of my guts.  It 
seems impossible, and yet I must accept the reality of it.

I had known Stellos for over ten years.  We first met because of a BBS called K&S, brought 
together by an accidental posting of one of my stories by a member named Unicorn.  The story 
had my name and home address at the top, and I would have stripped that off had I known that it 
was going to be publically posted.  As it turned out, it was a lucky accident, because it introduced 
me to one of the most fascinating and creative people I've ever known.  We've been trading art, 
letters and stories ever since.

A large part of my artwork was inspired by him, if not directly, then at least by the fact that I knew 
that he would always be an appreciative audience, and would never be repelled by anything that I 
showed him.  In fact, he often embellished upon my ideas and took them farther than I dared, or 
offered suggestions and encouragement.

He was a well-read, intelligent man, with viewpoints that differed greatly from the mainstream, 
among whom I had not previously counted myself.  I enjoyed our long conversations about 
philosophy, the nature of life and existence.  I don't think I ever quite understood what he was 
trying to tell me, but I feel that I'm slightly more open-minded for having made the attempt.  I 
regret any frustration that he might have felt in trying to overcome my obstinance.

I fear that I am violating his wishes in posting an official notice like this.  He had often said that he 
didn't want any notice paid of him if anything happened to take him off this earth.  He wanted me 
to just tell everybody that he had decided to stop drawing, and had dropped out of the furry scene.  
I could almost sympathize with that. After all,  my chosen end would be to have this carcass 
dumped in the woods and return some food value to the planet that has sustained me.  But still ... 
to me, I felt that he was a friend, and I was torn up enough that I didn't find out until two weeks 
later that he was gone --that my last Email to him, was, in fact, over a day after he was gone.

Karno, with his usual admirable clarity of thought, put it into focus for me. "From my point of wiew, 
keeping me in ignorance would have been very cruel. Should I have believed my friend was still 
alive, but not willing to say a single word to me, anymore?"

I think that many people on this list felt that he was a friend, and for all those people whose lives 
he touched to not know why he no longer spoke to them would, I agree, be cruel.  He made much 
bigger emotional ripples in his life than he could ever have been aware.  His passing leaves a hole 
in my heart which will be with me until I follow him.

In going through some of the files I have from him, I found a note that seems appropriate.  I will 
leave you all, then, with this last thought from the man himself, written as an addendum to his will, 
almost a year ago, and I send this out, and the ripples of his death spread ever farther.  Goodbye, 
friend.  I hope you're right and I'm wrong about eternity.

===============================================
      Last Woids:

Mysteriously the dead and dying seem to be taken more seriously. So in case death magnifies 
whatever of my credibility remains, I have some suggestions.

Lighten up. Performance anxiety and taking things (especially one's self) too seriously do an awful 
lot to degrade quality of life. It seems little does as much to degrade life as desperate efforts to 
improve it. We may have more to fear than fear itself, but only rarely does anything do more 
damage than our fear.

Learn different paradigms. I don't mean the trivial "thinking outside the box" business culture buzz 
word. There are many fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. Everybody uses at 
least one, you don't consciously perceive without one. If you learn just one more paradigm you'll 
get a vastly expanded view of the world and an even more greatly expanded view of your self. I 
recommend looking at things with at least three paradigms, the more fundamentally different and 
mutually exclusive the better.

Try to avoid making other people unhappy. This goes with "lighten up." Understand that in the 
complementarity of consciousness, we share a continuum of consciousness as well as being 
particular individuals-- like a photon is wave and particle. (You can consider this literal or 
metaphorical.) Happiness that seems to come through making others unhappy will be less 
satisfying and shorter lived than that coming through making others happier. And that includes 
taking it easy on those that seem to be screwing things up. It's not appeasement to try to heal 
rather than punish.

I know these ideas are unoriginal and unimpressive. Too bad. The magic is in the application. I 
feel it is my responsibility to try to bring this to people's attention. Now I'm done. You're on your 
own.

      Killer Links:

Mercifully everything important I have to say seems already to have been said by others, and 
more compellingly than I could hope to achieve. So here are some cool links from beyond the 
grave. (Or hot links, if Christian dogma is correct.)

Alfie Kohn:  http://www.alfiekohn.org/
Institute of Noetic Sciences:  http://www.ions.org/
Rupert Sheldrake:  http://www.sheldrake.org/


So... bye! 
I'm going home.

Stellos -- (written November 2001)

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