… Daffern’s funeral was my first encounter with the “At Least He Died Doing What He Loved” line of reasoning. I was too immature to give that one a straight yea or nea; it’s what people always say if someone dies doing a sport that they, umm, loved. It’s like the action sports version of “sorry” in a way; something you say when saying nothing seems rude. There’s no question that Neil loved snowboarding—hell, in Alberta, he’d pretty much invented it as far as I was concerned. He was the first person I ever saw who could truly carve a turn at speed like a ski racer, and he made boards that were light years ahead of their time, the sporting equivalent of Davinci’s helicopter sketches. All of Daffern’s boards had ridiculous names like The Falcon 5000 and the man was more MacGyver than Macgyver: he could make “snow chains”(that stayed on!) out of yellow nylon rope from the hardware store. At his funeral, I really started to pay attention to the importance of true character in the end. As all the older guys swapped these unbelievable-but-true Daffern stories while nibbling on cookies and brownies, I sat back wondering what it would be like if a tame homebody died instead of a trail-blazer like Neil Daffern. Would people invent these great anecdotes in the absence of character-causing stories to talk about? Would the death be as gut-wrenching if the person was less of a legend, less of an inspiration?
—excerpted from Colin Whyte’s essay Beloved of the Gods