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Late to this thread John. Semi retirement and summer vacations from my computer

Don't have a brother I grew up with to lose but loss is definitely on our common life stage agendas. We don't get to choose how we die, but we can choose how to live

Sounds like Bob lived as he wanted and went satisfied with his life and you both embraced music as a way to make your living.

Two brothers' lives well lived. One has to survive and cherish the memories.

I have been touring around then just came back from a 10 day stay at a bucolic pastoral cabin back of a farm on the hillside of a beautiful valley where you see kilometres (many .621371 miles) into the distance
We are there a couple of times a year. Wrote a song there last September for a client who had passed.

Found out the morning we were leaving for the place and in the evening out on that hillside I told it to the first bee I saw that Stu had passed.

The significance of telling it to the bees lies in Celtic lore that has the bees told of significant events like deaths of their bee keepers because of Celtic belief about bees.

In Stu's case he had that background. He was also a successful entrepreneur taking a technology startup that wrote printer drivers for mainframes to providing the means to access data silos and assemble requested documents "as and when and primarily in pdf format. By that time it was a public company that has ultimately found its way into Open Text.

When Stu sold out he bought a farm and after a trial of hops and beer turned his attention non bees and colony collapse disorder, and together with his daughter, a phd, studied the matter and glycophosphates and such.

Now another thing about Stu is that he considered himself an epicurean which to him meant embracing his intellectual curiosity and regularly gathering people around him who fed that and who were actually interested in the same thing...sharing interesting ideas. I am lucky enough to be a regular attendee as was a woman who actually keeps bees on top of a marque hotel in Toronto. So when I first read about it I was able to talk to her and we decided we would tell it to the bees when he passed.

It inspired a wonderful lyric and song that has gotten better and better as I play it and is a wonderful memory of his life.