Eric Scott Gregory (1964-2024)

Originally written on October 7, 2024:

Many years ago, I took a dancing class, and learned an important lesson: The right dancing partner can make you feel like a better dancer than you really are. In the class, we would switch every couple of minutes from one partner to the next, and there was always that one partner who could dance far better than anyone else in the class, and who could, for those two minutes, make me feel as if I too could dance far better.

That kind of elevation can happen outside of dancing. In conversation, for example. Hanging around in a bar setting the world to right is no fun at all without two or more participants. And I have rarely in my life felt more alive than when I was hanging around in a bar talking with Eric Scott Gregory.

The evening would fade into night as six or seven people sat around a table at Aalto Lounge or the Conquistador, talking now about music, now about philosophy, now about politics, now just gossiping and laughing, with Eric always in the middle of it, fanning the flames of talk when they threatened to gutter out. The drinks would appear round after round. Sometimes he’d buy my drink. Sometimes I’d buy his. Piles of nachos would appear and slowly, steadily disappear.

But all good things come to an end. My attendance waned as my health failed, finally stopping altogether. In the years since, I have never stopped looking back on those nights as the best that life could ever be, as a peak I was lucky to stumble upon, as a Shangri-La I can’t expect to ever find again on my trek through the icy mountain range of life.

Eric died today at the age of 59, succumbing to pancreatic cancer. The partner of hundreds of intellectual dances will elevate an interlocutor no more, and as crushingly sad as I am for myself, I’m far more so for the people who have lost a chance to hang out in a bar with him in the years ahead. We thought there would be so many more years ahead. My heart breaks for Kim, who in her many ways was his perfect mate, foil, support, and partner in crime for 14 years. I can’t imagine one without the other.

Farewell, Eric. Your memory could never be as much of a blessing as your life was, but it will have to do now.