Reflection

I’ve started this post a dozen times over the last ten days as I’ve tried to put together a personal reflection on the life of my friend Bastian Hauck. If you’re in the #dedoc° or broader diabetes community, you will undoubtedly have seen some truly beautiful messages and tributes. What more can I say that hasn’t already been said?

What I really want to write about is my friendship with Bastian in all its glory, which to be honest wasn’t always glorious. He referred to me as his sparring partner because I was the one who challenged him and pushed him to think in different ways. I was the one who asked him to stop and take a beat before making a decision. I was the one who told him when I thought he was out of line. I was the one who asked him to listen and try to see others’ perspectives.

When we’d speak, regardless of who called, the first thing I’d hear from him was a question. ‘Renza?’ he’d say. I don’t know who else he was expecting, but the inflection in his voice rose. Making sure I could hear him. ‘I’m here,’ I’d say. And we’d talk.

Our ‘quick chat?’ messages that preceded calls were lies. It became a habit to send each other a message as soon as we eventually hung up with the minute count of our call. ‘58 minutes!’ I’d write. ‘Why can’t we have quick calls?’ ‘Let’s not change that,’ he once replied.

Bastian was one of my closest friends. Despite living on opposite sides of the world, I spoke to him more than any of my friends nearby. Thanks to crazy travel schedules, we’d see each other four or five times a year. But it was in between those in-person catch ups that we’d spend hours talking about #dedoc°. I can’t count the number of times we’d talk each other of ledges after some particularly annoying incident. He’d explode over an encounter with someone and want to start an all out war with them. ‘Don’t give it air, Bastian,’ I’d urge him. He’d rant and rage and tell me in detail what he intended to do to make the situation right and confront them. I’d ask if it were really worth the effort. Eventually, he’d calm down. Just in time for me to blow up at the nastiness of online interactions, and then it would be my turn to rant and rave. And he’d tell me not to worry about them and remind me of my advice to him: ‘Don’t give them air’.

One of the last messages I sent him asked ‘How have we managed to do this for so long and just get things done?’ What I didn’t add was: ‘How do I keep getting things done now?’

A year after he met, he came to Melbourne for the 2013 IDF Congress, and had dinner at our home with a group of global advocates. He spoke frequently about that dinner, mostly because the following day he was taken to the outer suburbs of Melbourne to see kangaroos. Monique Hanley, if you’re reading this, you were a hero to him for organising that trip!

That was one of the things about Bastian. He held on to those sorts of memories and shared them over and over. Kangaroos? Just jumping around the place? And he got to see them? Amazing! I can’t tell you the number of times I heard him say ‘And the next day after dinner at your house that wonderful woman Monique took us to see Kangaroos’. ‘I know, Bastian’, I’d say. ‘I was at the dinner. At my house. I introduced you.’

Our stories in the diabetes world have been so intertwined. This week people keep sending me photos of us on stage at different conferences, the #dedoc° logo behind us. ‘Bastian, make sure the #dedoc° branding is there. Bright. We want people to know it’s #dedoc°,’ I’d say. ‘We want people to hear the stories, Renza,’ he’d reply. ‘Yes…but also that #dedoc° made that possible’. My comms hat is never far from planted firmly on my head. It annoyed the crap out of him. I didn’t care.

And people have sent me videos and recordings of interviews and podcasts we did together. I snapped those shut before they started. Because how is it possible that Bastian’s voice – that voice I’d hear three or four times every week at the end of the phone – is now only there in old recordings?

I regret every time I told Bastian to talk less. ‘You don’t need to go over that again,’ I’d say as we were prepping for a #dedoc° symposium at one conference or another. ‘Get off the stage and let the speakers speak!’ But he just wanted to yell from the rooftops about the #dedoc° community and how far we’d come. And the allies who helped us there. And mostly the incredibly #dedoc° voices who were family. He couldn’t stop talking about it!

We’d do EASD TV each year and when we finished our interview he’d always ask me ‘How do you do that soundbite thing?’, referring to the succinct way I’d answer a question, with grabs that I knew would make it to the promo for the video. I’d laugh and tell him, ‘By saying as few words as possible, but making those words count. Fewer words, Bastian. Say less!’ Now I wish I’d let him ramble on and on.

The last time I saw Bastian was in Vienna last year at EASD. It was not an easy conference. We were managing a difficult situation at #dedoc°. He and I disagreed on how to deal with it, and I returned home feeling frustrated, angry and exhausted. ‘Renza, you need to step back from this one,’ he said. I knew he needed to feel in control of something – anything – at a time when so much of what was going on in his life was big and scary and way beyond his control.

And so I did. I stepped back. And there were a couple of months where when spoke and sent messages there was, undeniably, a discomfort in our words. It didn’t last long. He recognised the tension. He apologised, I did too. I think we both knew that we couldn’t waste time being wary around each other. There was too much to do. There was not going to be enough time. We were trying to steer #dedoc° to safe waters.

And there’s a sailing analogy, because there always are in conversations with Bastian. He wound in the fact that he was a sailor into every conversation he could. ‘When I was on the big boat last summer in Copenhagen…’ he would begin. And I’d try not to laugh because it wasn’t enough for him to mention he had a boat. He had to mention that he had a big boat, suggesting (rightly) the existence of a small boat. God forbid he said it out loud at a conference or in a room with our beautiful friend Amin. He and I would glance at each other, or send a message, desperately trying to not laugh. Amin…one of Bastian’s closest friends. My heart breaks for him too right now.

It was the weekend before last that I spoke with Bastian for the last time. ‘It will be a quick conversation.’ I was told by his friend who was organising the call. ‘I understand,’ I said, thinking that perhaps we would actually have a short call. Maybe now was the time we changed things.

But Bastian had things he needed to say to make sure I understood what he wanted for #dedoc°. ‘Bastian,’ I interrupted. ‘You’ve done enough’. ‘Shut up, Renza,’ he pushed back. Now’s not the time to tell him to watch himself, I thought, so I listened. I listened to his voice and his words and took notes, interjecting only to promise to follow up.

And then it was time. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you,’ I said. He said he was too. I know he really wanted us to say goodbye in person. I couldn’t make it work. And I think that, selfishly, I didn’t know that I could face everything.

Instead, just as we had done countless times before, we said goodbye to each other on a phone call. ‘Thank you for everything’. I said. Or did he say that? Perhaps we both did.

And then I sat there, looking at the timer on my phone. Forty minutes. Our quick call, on the day he died, went for 40 minutes. I smiled through my tears. I guess we didn’t change it after all.