Ode to a truly great person

The post just below this one was put up yesterday and is an overall look back at 2006 and a bit of a look forward. Some might say it is a bit more optimistic and upbeat. Anyway, I sent out the email yesterday to everyone BEFORE I had written this post.

2006 was not all about good times. A former colleague and friend, Bernd Feldmann passed away in 2006. Bernd was a work colleague of mine during my adidas days. He joined after I had already been there for four years. He is Austrian and lived in Munich with his girlfriend before taking the job with adidas and moving to Herzo. The circumstances that he joined us under were not ideal for making friends. No one really knew how he got the job, and it wasn't made clear if he was going to be our equal, or if our boss was adding a layer between the managers and himself. Suspicion and mistrust led the early whispers.
Bernd and I first job together came pretty quickly after he joined, with him joining me in Paris for the French Open. I was asked to show him event PR and introduce him to some of our global colleagues on site. I found out in a hurry that he was going to be good for the team. His hands on approach to helping out wherever necessary, regardless of the task was evident from day one.
Over time, he won the respect of most everyone in the organisation. We worked together on a couple of projects, he was my boss on a couple of others. He was always fair and always a friend.
Our biggest job together and our last job together was the 2004 Athens Olympics. Rach, who I would marry less than a year later came out to Athens at the start of the Olympics so that we could spend a couple of days together. Bernd somehow found her a ticket to the Opening Ceremony. He never said a word about it, that was just the way he was. Those four weeks in Athens are among my best memories from my adidas days, and they helped cement my belief that Bernd is a truly extraordinary person.
In my last days at adidas, in early 2005, Bernd got sick. It was diagnosed shortly thereafter that he had cancer. Things did not look good and he took a substantial amount of time off work. As fate would have it, Bernd was responsible for my reference letter after I left adidas. He could not have been nicer, or more true to what he had consistently been about the entire time I knew him. He was always fair and always looking for a way to help those around him. I heard from former work colleagues his health was not improving and that his days at work were fewer and more difficult as time went on.
Rach and I saw Bernd one last time, in December of 2005. We went to Nuremberg to see my former work colleagues and spend a weekend at the Christmas market. We organised an evening together and invited some friends to a restaurant one evening. We did not expect Bernd to make it, as we had heard that he was in bad shape and in a lot of pain. But, that was not Bernd's style. Bernd and his wife joined us shortly after the others had arrived. To any one who didn't know him, it was evident that his health was failing and that he was very sick. To me, I saw the friend and colleague whose sense of fairness and friendship far outweighed his own discomfort and pain. It was a night that Rach and I will never forget.
Early in 2006, Bernd offered to quit, feeling that he was no longer contributing. An amazing thing to do, as he must have known that he was not going to get better and that could have been signed off sick as long as he wanted with full pay. But that was not Bernd's style. I assume his sense of right and wrong wouldn't let him. Thankfully, key people at adidas wouldn't let him go and decided to show that extraordinary human quality of compassion. Their sense of fairness and understanding for his situation led them to find a way for him to spend his last days without having to worry about salary, benefits, health care or anything else but what really mattered.
Bernd died in 2006, his suffering finally over. As I look back at all the great moments in our lives in 2006, Bernd's death remains the one truly sad moment. He lived his life by a better set of standards and morals than most. He was a better person than most everyone I have ever met. Yet, he is the one to get cancer, suffer through a painful year, and then lose the fight in the end. It doesn't seem fair, he deserved better.
Bernd, Anne P., Tom Kennedy and I had lots of intense conversations about politics. Lets just say that the four of us were not all on the same side of the political fence! The discussions were heated, but always informative and entertaining! After one such conversation, we started talking about history. I must have expressed my love of history, because about a week later a book arrived on my desk from Amazon. It was a hardback, Signal and Noise, and it was exactly my taste. I read it during our summer holiday last year in Crete, about two years after Bernd gave it to me.
I think about Bernd quite often and know there are lots of others that do the same. He deserved more, he definitely earned a better ending.