This Richard Earnshaw is an historian and a war veteran from South Carolina, across in Belgium to help his daughter and surviving grandchild to recover from a car smash (t-boned by an idiot). Richard has always been very helpful and careful, a very effective moderator-without-authority on Baen’s Bar and a producer of typically interesting and detailed posts on anything historical. He’s also a father and grandfather, both biological and adoptive, and his good character shines through in all of his children. There’s much more depth to Richard than you can squeeze into less than a book, but it should be enough to say that I’ve known him on-line for years and it feels like I’ve lost a beloved uncle or someone equally close.
Richard dropped in to a clinic for a routine blood test about three weeks ago, was told that there were some warning signs there and he should get a liver biopsy done, went in to do that six days ago and found himself on a table having his spleen and parts of his colon lopped out. His liver was such a mess that the only reasonable hope was a partial transplant from a compatible donor, but on Friday he went into a coma and his other organs started shutting down. He died peacefully early this morning, our time.
Richard’s been shot up and blown up and generally been given a hard time for most of his life, yet he faced every kind of trial and injustice with a careful, cheerful, unquenchable determination. I’ll be one of literally hundreds bidding him farewell.
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