Remembering Bouge: CBC host reflects on friendship with man killed in Yellowknife fire

Gone too damn soon, that Andrew Debogorski.

He still had precious time to be a dad and to be a husband. My first thoughts are with his wife Myriam Paquin, their young son, their family. Andrew is gone. Their house burned down.

What must this week have been like for them, I wonder. Drifting between the shocking, overwhelming sense of loss and the practical challenges of looking after a young family without a homebase, without your stuff.

I have also smiled this week, thinking about Andrew. Bouge, as many of his friends called him. What an incredible guy.

His young daughter, Nyah, was the apple of Andrew's eye.

The first time I really hung out with him one-on-one was to do a CBC story on him as a homebrewer. I tasted his beers. I did thorough story research, you could say.

Andrew and I ended up sitting in his parked truck listening to his music. Bouge the rapper. I remembered his mom and dad telling me that, of their 11 kids, Andrew was born to be the family's poet.

His dad, Alex, jokingly claimed that he didn't see poetry in Bouge's music. But of course it's there. Andrew was a poet.

By the end of that day, I was laying on Andrew's couch, drinking his beer, talking about books. I left his place with a bunch of books he loaned me under my arm and in a cab, marooning the CBC vehicle.

That was the beginning of a good friendship, but one that I sure as hell wish I'd put more into in the last year or so.

Confronting ALS

Andrew was dealt a tough hand these last few years: ALS, a neurological disease.

A huge part of Andrew's legacy in my life will be how I saw him confront a terminal, vicious illness. I'll ponder that and carry that with me as long as I live. He was brave, vulnerable, open, resistant, funny: himself.

While he confronted death, he lived fully. True love and family making — that's what I saw. He was living as an example for the rest of us.

The morning after Andrew died, I watched a broomball fight from 2009 on Youtube over and over. It's Andrew fighting a guy named Ian. In some ways, when we're fighting we're not at our best. But it's part of the fabric of how I know Andrew. And I love him for it.

He showed me the fight online one day when I visited him. His body was quitting on him. At that point, he could still walk a bit and could slowly, awkwardly use his hands to navigate a laptop. In the video, Andrew and Ian both go for it: emotion, haymakers, solid chins.

Andrew told me that Ian had made contact with him when he heard he was sick. They had connected over the memory of the scrap and their respect for each other. At the end of the video, a graphic comes up that says: "What happens on the ice, stays on the ice."

Wonderful ... and depraved

Hanging out at Andrew's house in the early days — as he lost the ability to do things like cook and care for himself — was a lesson in family, friendship and community.

People were constantly coming and going. Siblings dropping in to clean, to dress him, to shuttle him to appointments. A friend who cooked for a living at night came over every morning to cook meals for Andrew and whoever else was around. Murphy the dog had the run of the place. And his young daughter, Nyah, was the apple of Andrew's eye. A lot of souls and a lot of soul.

As Andrew's care needs got more complex and expensive, the community held a fundraising event and I got to emcee.

He had pondered death more deeply and deliberately than most of us ever will.

Andrew said he'd had a lifelong dream of doing stand-up comedy, but his body had deteriorated past the point where he could do it. So he asked me if I would do stand-up, and deliver his jokes. Honoured, I said of course.

And then he sent me his list of jokes.

If you knew him, you know he was a wonderful person and also a depraved morbid pervert.

There was wit and depth in every joke. But I couldn't picture myself delivering many of his jokes, the dark humour he could find in the inevitability of his death.

Luckily, he also included material about how ALS had gifted him a new level of orgasmic sensation when he had sex.

He wondered, specifically, if ALS had given him the gift of experiencing orgasms the way women do: 10,000 angels doing wild things to nerve endings all over his body, yada, yada.

This became the heart of Andrew's proxy stand-up routine. I will forever remember the pleasure he took watching his mom Louise writhing in awkward laughter as she found it both disturbing and hilarious to hear the details of her son's out of control orgasmic ecstasy.

Breaking free

Andrew has taught me and will continue to teach me an incredible amount about how to live and how to confront death.

I talked to one of his brothers and he said he was relieved at the image of Andrew breaking free of his failing body, but that he was troubled by the image of suffering at the end.

No one can know what the end was like for Andrew. It is painful to think about. But I know that he had pondered death more deeply and deliberately than most of us ever will, and that he was grateful for his family, new and old.

I also know that Andrew was deeply faithful. So, I think there are many roads that we can go down, that eventually lead to a sense of peace for Andrew. Peaceful rest, as they say. And rest in power.

For sure, this is a moment for our community to hold a family. My heart goes out to the whole Debogorski and Paquin clans and, especially, to Andrew's wife and their kids.

Andrew was a dad, a husband, a son, a brother, an uncle, a poet, a warrior, a friend, a comedian, and an example to us all.