Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - 232: The Life and Loss of Ben, Our Other Best Friend | Ear Biscuits Ep. 232

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

An embodiment of mythicality and curiosity, the veil is fully lifted on the story of R&L's childhood friend Ben Greenwood. R&L look back on the trio's friendship from their adventurous childhood to their emotional parting on this episode of Ear Biscuits! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I'm Link. And I'm Rhett. This week at the Round Table of Dim Lighting, we are talking all about what we call our other best friend, the trio that was Rhett and Link and Ben, Ben Greenwood, our childhood friend, who we've talked about on and off from time to time. Yeah, he's come up a lot.

But we're gonna devote an entire episode to talking about Ben. Yeah, this is an important episode for us. I mean, maybe, I hope it will be for you too, listening, because I mean, whether it's a childhood friend or someone that you meet along the way in your life, I think that there are people that have an impact on your life and sometimes it's not until you look back

on all those shared experiences can you really piece together how deep that impact goes. So I'm looking forward to this episode. Over the, I was gonna say years, I guess over the years, there's been times when I've thought I wanna do what we're doing today. I wanna talk about our friendship with Ben and just pull it all together

just for the sake of taking away even more from it and appreciating even more. I hope that's what happens today. Yeah, because we've talked about, and we have as we're about to demonstrate, incorporated Ben into our work. We've also talked about, he was such an influence on us

and the way that we lived our lives as kids, which has translated into the way that we lived our lives as kids, which has translated into the way that we live our lives as adults, which I think is all about mythicality, such that. Absolutely, like, yeah, when we wrote our book of mythicality, which if you don't know, we wrote a book, it's part coffee table, part autobiography, lots of stories, lots of illustrations.

Get it for somebody. Get it for yourself. I didn't mean, get it for yourself if you don't have it. When illustrations. Get it for somebody. Get it for yourself. I didn't mean, get it for yourself if you don't have it. When you say get it for somebody, it makes it sound like only get it as a gift. I assume you are. Because you won't enjoy it. Yeah, when we set out to write this thing

and we defined what mythicality meant, which you know what, I'm gonna read it. The quality or state of being that embodies a synergistic coalescence of curiosity, creativity, and tomfoolery, sometimes referred to as curio-tomfoolery. I didn't even say that right. Sometimes referred to as curio-tom-foolivity. Mm-hmm, foolivity.

Ideally experienced in the context of friendship and intended to bring goodwill to the universe. Wow, we worked on that definition for quite some time. And we worked on this book for a long time. That's what we're about, y'all. If you wanna know what Rhett and Link's about, that's it. It's about Curio-Tom-Foolivity. Right.

And we dedicated this book in memory of Ben Greenwood. His friendship changed our lives but ended way too soon. And then there's a picture of the three of us together right there. So of course we dedicated the book to Ben because of how he embodied mythicality. And then I think we talked about him a little bit more in the book,

but the thing that we really did, the way we brought Ben to life in a character is the character of Ben in our novel, The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek. This isn't like a Rhett and Link book promo time. This is about Ben, but we have to do this to establish the context. But yes, we wrote a novel last year,

Lost Causes of Bleak Creek, and our favorite character, besides of course Rex and Leif. No, actually our actual favorite character in the book is Ben, who is based on Ben Greenwood. Yeah, read the acknowledgement in the back there. This isn't a long. Well, because this novel was dedicated to our kids. Right, dedicated to our kids.

But there's a long list of people that we acknowledged and thanked in the end. Our childhood friend, Ben Greenwood, for leading us into constant adventure and fearlessly embodying mythicality and all that life held for you. You gave us the tree, the rocks, and the river. And if you've read the book or heard us tell lots of stories about these things, you know what the tree, the rocks, and the river. And if you've read the book or heard us tell lots of stories

about these things, you know what the tree, the rocks, and the river are. One of the first stories that I think about is damming the creek. Yeah. So I'm interested in, if you remember the first time you met Ben, but I'd love to talk about this story first

because I think in a lot of ways, we have a lot of memories and we'll go through a lot of them, but that one, it really encapsulates who he was as a person. Yeah, I think I can talk about meeting Ben for the, I don't have a story about meeting Ben, but I can just tell you quickly

because he was in my class in third grade because you were in a different class in third grade that year. Miss Hood's class? Right? I think it might've been fourth grade then. We were in Miss Hood's class together. Oh, Everhart was the year that we weren't in the same class.

Fourth grade. But I don't know if. Is that when Ben moved to town? First year was third grade, Miss Hood's class. Okay yeah we were in that class together then. But because he lived pretty close to me. Yeah. But he lived inside of Keith Hills.

I lived right outside of Keith Hills. So I think I ended up kind of playing with him first. Yeah, yeah. But I just remember my impression of this guy, first of all, I've talked about this before, but unlike you at that age, I was very much like, I meet you and then that night, I ask if I can spend the night at your house.

Like I invited myself over to, and I'm more introverted now and would never do that, but as a kid, I got to know people and immediately invited myself. I was like, so can I spend the night at your house? It was pretty indiscriminatory. Yeah, and so that was what I did with Ben and I think as a new kid in town, he was like,

yeah, oh, I got a friend. And I just found this guy and his family to be so interesting. You know, they were from Oklahoma, they had moved from Oklahoma, and the way Ben talked about Oklahoma made me think that Oklahoma was a magical place. Land of milk and honey.

He talked about giant catfish that could eat children. And then he talked about his grandfather. And this is something that now I've kind of seen children and then he would talk, he talked about his grandfather and he was, this is something that now I've kind of seen multiple kids do in different movies and stuff but the way he talked about his grandfather was as if his grandfather was the biggest, baddest, badass in town who could beat up anybody including his own dad

and just, he was like, he would just talk about his grandfather like his grandfather was this larger than life guy who knew everything and was incredibly strong, like the strength of Ben's grandfather was something that was legendary. And I was like, and you know, this is before the age of information. Like the internet was just kinda get cut.

You couldn't Google his grandfather to validate these claims. You couldn't Google Oklahoma and be like, oh Oklahoma's just a state above Texas that's shaped like a pot. Right. You know, nothing against Oklahoma, but it's just another state.

It's as magical as any other state, but it's pretty flat. He had a way of making. Yes, his imagination was incredible. Everything magical. Yeah, I was immediately captivated and I was like, I wanna be around this kid. His family was interesting because his dad

was a professor at Campbell, just like your dad, right? He was a biology professor, am I right? I think he was in the pharmacy school maybe, or maybe biology. I think they all had the same building. He was in the scientific discipline of some sort, yes. Okay. He was in the scientific discipline of some sort, yes. Okay.

But behind his house was a whole stretch of woods and Ben would always go out into the woods and I remember when the three of us started hanging out, about every, I don't know, I got the impression that about every three to five times that you guys would hang out, I would also be there, because I had farther to come and you know.

Right. And you were a little scared of things at that time. Just at that time. Yeah, you've always been a little bit scared of things. Ben was not scared of anything. He wasn't scared of anything. I mean, he was always gallivanting through the woods and if you go deep enough into the woods,

there was a creek that ran, and actually, it was Buies Creek. It was Buies Creek, yeah. That ran back there. And just like all the other times, there was something crazy that we embarked upon. It was most likely Ben's idea at this point to build a dam, to dam the creek in order to what?

Make a little pond that then- Put fish in it. Put fish, stock it with fish. To stock a pond and also to build a raft, to raft throughout our pond. So we did all three of these things. At different places at different times. But so we went back there and we dedicated an entire day.

Like beavers, man. Just taking rocks, taking logs, taking everything we could scrounge up in the woods. Well we found a plot, you know, to give you an idea. To throw into the creek. Like Buies Creek, when it was just typically flowing, this is one of those creeks that's probably like 10 feet across, you know, maybe 20 feet in some places,

maybe five feet in other places. But in the middle of the summer, it's not flowing. You can basically walk across it. If you find a good spot, you can walk across on some rocks without getting wet. Maybe a couple of feet deep at the deepest point. But if you find one of those places that like a log is already kind of across the creek and there's some rocks,

you're like, oh, I can add a little bit to this and we could be beavers and build our own dam. It's just, you know, my kids don't know what to do today. Yeah, they're not damming any creeks a day that much. This day and age. It's like, well, if they're not on, you know, I don't wanna get into that. If kids go out and dam a creek now,

it's like, oh, they're're not on, you know, I don't wanna get into that. If kids go out and dam a creek now, it's like, oh, they're on the news. Three teens dam creek. We spent like sunup to sundown in this endeavor. And we dammed the creek. Yep. For like a few minutes. No, okay, in my recollection, we went and caught fish from the pond

and brought them down. Hey, you might have done that on another day, but because I do remember that it didn't hold. Well, I think that maybe the first time when we did it with you, we revisited the plan because yeah, eventually it was just like, we're not beavers, you know what I'm saying? As much as I wanna be a beaver sometimes, I'm not a beaver and I don't understand the dam math,

you know, which is the math of dams and the physics of dams maybe and the whole thing just collapsed. But there was a time in which we dammed it, went down to the creek, caught some like crappie, remember we would catch all kinds of crappie down there. He fished a lot. There were a lot of, I mean, the creek emptied into

a series of ponds that. Basically man-made ponds for the golf course. Yeah, for the Keyfields Golf Course. And we fished down there all the time. You can catch some bass, some brim, and some crappie. We got some crappie, put them in a bucket, brought them up, put them in there, they swam around for a little bit, and then the dam broke again

because that's what happens to dams. I wasn't much of a fisherman, so I kinda. Yeah, a lot of my time spent with Ben was fishing, because, okay. He was an outdoorsman. He was. Because we also, we cut, you know, we've talked about this, about how we would just find a tree and cut it down. Sometimes just going and finding a tree,

just selecting a tree in the woods, and spending all day with an ax trading off, cutting down this giant tree, which is incredibly dangerous, not to mention, not really environmentally responsible because we were just timbering one tree for nothing. But he owned an ax. Yeah. And he sharpened his ax.

And he invited us to trudge into the woods, pick the perfect tree, and it was a big one. Again, this was an all day endeavor, taking, trading off, chopping this thing down. It was absolutely exhausting. Right, and after a while, there would be hours of not talking. Yeah. Just chopping.

But we learned, like, we learned like, oh, if you wanna cut down a tree, like, you just don't, you gotta like, you gotta like come in from the top at an angle, you gotta go in from the bottom at an angle. Like we kinda learned by just doing how you chop down a tree. I mean I haven't had to use that skill yet again, but.

And you're talking, and we're talking like seventh grade, maybe sixth grade. Right, but with the raft thing, Ben cut down a tree about that big, a pine tree. Okay. And then he cut it up and then we took ropes and we tied it together and then we tried to float it on the pond.

I wasn't there for that. And the whole thing came apart as soon as we tried to float it. Like when we tried to get on it, it was like, this isn't stable enough. I can guarantee you, if I was there, it still wouldn't have worked. You know what I'm saying?

But he just, the ideas. He would build a lean-to, right? Well, yeah, so that's one of my favorite stories about Ben is the time that he, there was an empty lot across, well, basically woods across the street from his house. Now, I've gone back in the past couple years and now that whole side of the street in Keith Hills

is filled with houses, but for a a long time it was just woods. Yeah. And he said, I go to his house, he's like, I think we should build an A-frame. And I'm like, yeah, I have no idea what the hell an A-frame is. But I'm like, yeah, that's right, A-frame, let's do it. Okay.

And so, again, the thing that was so mysterious about Ben was in a day before the internet, how did people learn things? He just learned things in books. He just, I guess he just went to the library, which nobody else was doing, and would just be like, I got this, I know how to build an A-frame. I don't even know what part, it wasn't until we finished

and it was an A-frame by looking at it from the side that I was like, oh, A-frame. The whole time I was like, yeah, A-frame. Then I was like, where's the A? But we spent all day building this thing out of two by fours. And then. Oh, not Latin limbs. No, we used two by fours as the braces of this thing.

Okay. And like nailed them together. But then we got sticks, and again, the whole time I'm kinda acting like I know what we're doing. You know what I'm saying, like I'm there, I'm helping, but I'm kinda like waiting to see him do something than to know what we're doing. And he probably knew all of this.

And then we put sticks, big sticks on it, leaned them up against each other, then smaller sticks, and then we made a giant pit of mud and then started putting the mud on top of all the sticks and then put leaves on top of that and like straw and grass and stuff. Yeah, Ben was like that guy from primitive, what's it called, that YouTube channel? Primitive Technology. Primitive Technology. Yeah, he would be that guy from primitive, what's it called, that YouTube channel?

Primitive Technology. Primitive Technology. Yeah, he would be that guy if he had a YouTube channel. And so we did this and then of course he was like, we're gonna do this and then we're gonna sleep in there. Camp. And so that night, after we finished the thing, we like kind of like cleaned out underneath it,

we put our sleeping bags under there and we camped in this A-frame and I just thought, this is the coolest thing I've ever done. And every, everything that Ben set out to do was the coolest thing we had ever done. Well, in that A-frame for many, many, many years, we probably did that in like fifth grade. Even when I would come back home from college,

I would go out there and it'd be like, man, there's still like, I mean, I wouldn't sleep under there anymore, but like there's like mud, the roof is kind of still intact. It was like, it was an A-frame, man. It held up. I mean, if you've read The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek, now you see the connection between a kid who can escape

from a reform school and instead of going back home to his parents, just subsists on his own in the woods. Yeah, eating squirrels and stuff. It's not something that we made up. Yeah, he could have easily done all that. I remember you two taking me out to this A-frame, which in my mind it was a lean-to, but I guess it leaned on the other two.

It leaned to itself. Yeah. Made an A. And then you said, would you like to smoke a Big George? And I'm like, uh, I'm afraid. Yeah, so again, this idea came from the fact that Ben was so, like again, he's reading some book and he's like, hey, you wanna make some juniper tea?

I'm like, yes. And so he's like, oh, we gotta go get these juniper bushes and we gotta put them in water and steep it and make tea and it tasted like absolute crap, it was horrible, made you wanna vomit. But he would have these things that he would make that were sort of the My Side of the Mountain. My Side of the Mountain was my favorite book growing up

and I kinda saw Ben as that, I wanted to be that kid but I saw Ben as the kid who could do these things. And that kid lived in a hollowed out tree. Hollowed out tree. And so we had done all this stuff and it hadn't necessarily tasted good or whatever, but then in that same woodsy area over there where we built the A-frame, there were these stalks of.

It was like a weed. It was like a weed that basically was like bamboo. Like it was a rigid, sort of like sectioned off bamboo-like shaft. And it dried up, it was very hard. Yeah, it would grow and then it would die. And you could snap it off. Snap it off and then, I mean,

I'm gonna give Ben the credit on this one and he can take it. One day he decided, what if we smoke this? But it wasn't like a let's smoke this like, let's smoke weed, it was more like, let's smoke this like a peace pipe. Yeah, ceremonial. Like it was more like a Native American type thing.

Finding something in the earth and smoking it. But I mean, it was a hollow device that could be used for smoking if you put something in it that was worth smoking. But we didn't. When you offered it to me, it was empty and you just lit the end of it. You lit the end and you suck the smoke through

and it was acrid. It was, smoking a Big George, man, didn't do anything for you except make you cough a lot. Well, yeah, and when you asked me to do it, I do remember that neither one of you were also doing it. It wasn't. We've done this, let's let Link try it. Right.

We've smoked Big George. But I mean, I just felt this great sense of privilege to be hanging out with you guys when it was like, oh man, Dave, you've built this thing and I'm getting invited to be a part of this. It's like, I mean, on one hand I was like, man, I'm missing out on some fun, but like I'm glad to be here for whatever's going on.

On the days that he wasn't carrying around an ax, he would always carry around a machete. Machete. And then we each went to Womble and Sons and bought our own machetes. Because you're going through, there's no paths unless you make them. And we would always go explore the woods.

And there would be these huge vines that would grow up into the trees. And the vines would, I mean, it would be as big around than a silver dollar. Some of them will be huge. That's an interesting measurement. Big around as a silver dollar. Those were the, a silver dollar diameter

is the perfect diameter for a vine. I need a little bit bigger than that. What was the last thing that filled you with wonder that took you away from your desk or your car in traffic? Well, for us, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is... Anime! Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray.

And I'm Leah President. And welcome to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect. It's a weekly news show. With the best celebrity guests. And hot takes galore. So join us every Friday wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. So we would go into the woods with our machetes

and you're not just chopping down to make a path, but you see these vines growing up and you chop the bottom and then you walk, you grab it and you walk a ways until it starts getting so tall. You know, it's like, because it's anchored up into the top of the tree. And then you just, you jump and you swing like Tarzan.

And around the Cape Fear River and around Buies Creek, all behind Ben's house, the place was full of these vines. And if you found the exact right diameter, and you found it anchored to the right tree with the right topography, you could swing just an epic distance. We found one when we were back in Buies Creek,

but I don't think it made the edit. We didn't have a machete, we didn't have anything to cut it at the bottom. And then the one that we found was, it was broken. And then when that kills it. Oh yeah, once you cut the vine, we actually had these theories about can you cut the vine and can we bring a bucket of water and set the vine

in the bucket of water to make the vine live longer so we can swing on it more? Yeah. But I was always super worried because I was always the biggest and heaviest one so you know that if the vine's gonna break, it's gonna break on the big boy. Your dad had instilled this awareness

or maybe even a fear of injury because, you know, you were a burgeoning basketball star, at least in your mind. Oh, well, in the minds of all those in Harnett County as well. Take the bait, take the bait. So I remember, because I was already in high school this time.

Yeah. And it was when they were beginning to sort of clear out the area that then eventually became the second 18 holes for Keith Hills, but we didn't know what they were doing, but there was like a kind of a weird dirt road that they had kind of cut through the woods. Yeah, this is one of our last vine swinging adventures. This is the last time I swung on a vine.

And like you said, you find the right topography, so it was perfect. There was a hill and the tree that had the vine on it was right next to this road that was going downhill. Dirt road. Dirt road. And we cut the vine and then you guys started swinging and it was like, it was magical because it was the kind of thing

that you could go really high up on this hill and then swing and then at your pinnacle, at your peak, you guys were probably eight feet off the ground, 10 feet off the ground. If not 50. And I was nervous, because again, it was probably sophomore or junior year, I'm well into thinking I'm gonna play college basketball

and I was always worried at that point about getting injured. And I was like, but I can't say no to this perfect vine. So I swung and I was in the middle of just this euphoric meeting the end of the pendulum and I was up on the vine, like my knees were in the air. That was also a mistake because at its pinnacle, the vine just completely gave way. I mean, I kept it in my hands.

Right, right. You hold the vine the whole time, but it's like no longer holding on to whatever branch it needed to. And I come down on that dirt road on my tailbone. Oh gosh, I remember seeing it happen and I remember the noise you made. Do you remember all the words?

Oh, oh! Do you remember all the, I said, I unleashed a tirade of profanity. It was, we cursed at times, but like I cursed so much in a span of about 30 seconds and I was like, I think I've broken my back, I think I've broken my tailbone. And it's my theory that my back problems, that's when they started.

But you know, it was all worth it. I think I probably compressed some discs at that point. Ben had a canoe. We would take the canoe on the Cape Fear River and his parents, God bless them, we'd put the canoe on top of the car and we'd drive all the way to Lillington or sometimes all the way to Raven Rock

and they'd just, we'd say bon voyage! And then they'd say we'll pick you up in either Buies Creek or way down in Irwin like six hours later. Well that, well. If we did all of that. If we, that was the day we went to Buckhorn Dam though. That was the one that took hours and hours. But we would do all stretches of the river in this canoe

and three boys in a canoe, it's like, it was amazing. Later we ended up buying kayaks. Ben didn't get one for reasons we'll get into, but like the love for the river and you know, we've talked about it so much and how swimming in the river, crossing the river. He did get a kayak. Did he get a kayak?

Yeah, because he could actually, he was the only one who could roll it over. That is right. Yeah, I don't know why I forgot that. Our love for the river was because Ben was the only one who could roll it over. That is right. Yeah, I don't know why I forgot that. Our love for the river was because Ben was the one who always wanted to be there and said, yeah, we can take a canoe out on the air. This is something that we can do.

He never thought of an idea and then said, no, we can't do that. He would think of an idea and we would just do it. And the interesting thing is I think that there was a, cause I will say, I give Ben the credit for being the one that kind of like sparked this sort of sense of adventure and sense of imagination. But I also, I wanna recognize just the fact that

I think he could have done that, he could have done that with other kids who would have not responded to it, who would have been like, but we were on board. Oh yeah. It was very much, and we kind of kept that same spirit. Like, it's like, I don't know how to do this thing. He didn't have to talk us into anything.

But it was very much like, yes, we're here for this. Yes, let's go to Buckhorn Dam. We never stopped to ask the question, is this a good idea? Is this safe? Might we die? And I think if we had stopped and asked those questions, we probably would have, a number of things that we wouldn't have done.

I'm glad we didn't ask those questions. We're very fortunate that we got out with it with only minor injuries. But yeah, we were completely on board for all this stuff. Many times when we would go out and chase cows, he would be there chasing cows right along with us. Yeah. We've told those stories before.

He had a trampoline and he was very, he was so like skinny, but he was pretty athletic and very daring. And he would do all of these flips and stuff on the trampoline and he made up this terminology where, I guess all kids do this on a trampoline, when you jump really high and then you, when you're in the air, you pivot

and then you land on your back and you bounce off of your back and come back up. But he called this a blue rock. Blue rock, yeah. Because I think that's the sound he made when all of the air was forced out of his lungs as he impacted with the trampoline. Blue raw.

So he had a way of contextualizing and inventing ways to think about things that all kids were doing that elevated it. So it wasn't just, come over, let's jump on the trampoline. It's like, no, let's master the art of a blue rock. Well, and I don't know if you, I assume you were here for some of this. We spent a lot, once the trampoline happened,

we spent a lot of time on the trampoline, like days just on the trampoline, figuring out things, coming up with moves. But one of the things we also did is put a tarp One of the things we also did is put a tarp over the trampoline and then get dish soap and put it all over the tarp and then get a hose and wet it down and then the trampoline was at a slight angle.

Which is very safe. And we would run, dive onto the trampoline, slide completely off of it, like slide completely over it and then off the other side into the woods. I remember this, it was one of those trampolines where the springs were exposed too, if I remember correctly. Oh yeah. We didn't have a net.

I don't know how you went across the springs, but you did. No, well, because they were covered with a tarp. That's right. The whole thing was covered with a tarp and it didn't help that you kinda sorta hit the bar and the springs on the other side. But there was many, we went through this phase, did you ever spend the night with us out there

on the trampoline? Uh-uh. We went through, we stopped using the A-frame because the grass kinda grew up and we would just put our sleeping bags on the trampoline. And it was kind of funny because like, when you put your sleeping bags on the trampoline, even though you're small, I wasn't small,

but you're relatively light boys, the nature of a trampoline is it dips in the middle. And so by the middle of the night, you're both kind of like right up against each other and your sleeping bags. And one of the things I remember about Ben is his sense of humor was so silly. Yeah.

Like it was just this, we would sit out there and we would tell, we would tell each other jokes. We would just make up jokes. Yeah. And they were always horrible jokes that like didn't have punchlines, there was very anti-comedy. But you would achieve some sort of delirium. Oh, we would start laughing.

Yeah. Just so uncontrollably. Couldn't stop. Having those like laugh attacks where you just, you can't stop and you're like, what? I don't remember what you said. I don't remember, your joke probably wasn't good. Yeah.

I don't remember it now. He was funny though. And he, you know, he watched Letterman, he watched Carson, he would stay up late and do that. And that's just something that I just wasn't allowed to do. And I didn't, it was scary to stay up late. I'm not gonna do that. But yeah, so, and I do remember he went through this spell.

I mean, people talk about the innuendo of Good Mythical Morning. It's like he was the king of that. Oh yeah. I remember that like in grade school, the kids, I mean, the teachers would say something and all right, so and so, you need to come up to the front and he would just start laughing

and he would like look at us and like, I remember he had this like, he had a dirty mind and like he would love laughing at things that were like forced innuendos. And we went through this season of really reveling in the innuendo. Remember that? Well, I still revel in the innuendo. Yeah, we still do.

It wasn't a stage. And he was- It continued throughout my entire life. He was such a smart guy. I mean, I think he did end up reading a lot and he had that computer in the back of the house there. And again, I come over there one day He had that computer in the back of the house there and again, I come over there one day and the two of you had been working on

a from scratch computer coded role playing game that you sat me down and I was like the first user to just like test out your role playing game. It was only text based. Well, no. And you had spent hours on this, days. Well, we had spent, we would revisit it. It was called the Isle of Retbin.

Okay. Which was not very creative. We just combined our two names. And. I see that. It was, you know, it was just basic programming. And again, I don't know how Ben learned how to do this, but he, I remember sitting at his house one time

and once I kind of understood basic programming, I remember he just went to sleep one night and I stayed up like almost all night just trudging away. It was a choose your own adventure game. So it's like you had to create these trees, decision trees. And it was like, all right, if Rhett Ben decides

that he's going to kill this dragon, then this is gonna happen. And I think if you actually looked at the layering of this thing, it probably only had like four decision points, but that creates, I don't know how to do that math off the top of my head, but it creates a number of potential outcomes. And there's some where you would die

and there was some where you would keep going. And do you remember what happens if you win? Because it was a color monitor. No. The screen would flash basically like 12 different colors over and over again and I think that it played some tones that was like some little celebration music.

Just like every other video game at that age, I never got to the end. Yeah, exactly. But like, I've never beaten one video game. And again, and then that turned into like, once I understood that, thanks to Ben, is when I ended up writing that game on the calculator that was The Adventure of Merle Haggard.

Yeah. I wrote my senior year that you had to go into prison and get Merle. I would have never done any of that thing because the thing that Ben, like we had, kind of what I was getting at before. You had to break Merle out of prison. We had an appetite for this kind of thing

and once you kind of gave us the opportunity, He had the avenue. We took it. Yeah. But he had the knowledge. Yeah. I think that's the thing that Ben had. He didn't just have the appetite for it,

he had the ability, he would find the way to do it and we were just like, ah, we got this guy that knows how to do this stuff, so he's just gonna tell us the next thing that we're doing. He was uninhibited. Sometimes we would go over there and we were all into rap music

and he would find these interesting rap songs that weren't so mainstream. Like, listen to this fooshnickin' song and I developed this dance and he would then go into this. He would teach us dances. I would call it. It's so crazy. I would call it a jig.

It was like mostly in the hips, knees and ankles. Well it was the- This particular dance and he would do these dance things that looked like, kind of looked like what Will Ferrell did as Elf in the basement of the publisher. And then the three of us would sit there and try to figure out how to do them. We would learn the dance.

Do you remember the time we went over there and he was like, I figured out how to do the Roger Rabbit? Yeah. And the Roger Rabbit is when you put your, well at least, we may have been wrong, but it was when you basically put your feet behind each other and you're like doing this thing and you're stepping and it's not easy to do.

Yeah. And like we would just sit there and like go in the driveway and like try to get this dance down. I mean when you're in middle school, it's like, I mean, if you're not uninhibited, you're not gonna sit there and invent a dance. And if you are, you're not necessarily gonna invite

your boys over to like teach them. This is something that the girls did, like when they were, the cheerleader girls, they would get together and do their cheerleading dances. But isn't, ironically, TikTok changing that? Yeah, definitely. Aren't people like teaching each other how to dance? Oh, he would have killed at TikTok, man.

He would have been a TikTok extraordinaire. Ben Green would have been amazing at it. Yeah, music was a big part of what we were doing and he's the one who then bought a drum machine. Now, we had already done some talent show performances as we've talked about before. Link and I would kind of- The story I'm gonna tell is the seventh grade talent show.

Right, but what we would do before the drum machine is we would just sing along with a track. Yeah. And so we would play like a Digital Underground song or whatever and we would sing it. But then Ben gets this like Yamaha, I don't remember what brand it was, drum machine, which was basically this black drum machine with,

I remember four. Yeah, pads. Pads. So you play a bunch of things that you could play the drums but then you can also kind of program some beats. Yeah. It had some built in beats as well. He could also beatbox.

Yeah. Better than us, but we would all do it. That was something that we did in our spare time. I remember seventh grade, I got the job of being the guy who set up the microphones and Ben also got the job. We worked together whenever there was an assembly at Buies Creek Elementary School, we would go and we would get out of class 15 minutes early

because we had to set up the microphones and test them and make sure they worked before whatever the assembly was. And so we spent a lot of time setting them up. And then when the talent show rolled around and there was like rehearsals for that, we would hang out and setting up the microphones for the rehearsal and as seventh graders, it was our first year to be able to participate

in this talent show which we worshiped the seventh and eighth graders who would perform an amazing rap song the previous years. So we finally, yeah, we performed same song by Digital Underground and then Ben was a part of that. And I remember we were setting up the microphones and then we had either, we were about to or we had just done a rehearsal and we go backstage.

Well, I go backstage and I notice that Ben is crying. I don't know that I'd ever seen Ben cry, you know? And I was like, hey man, it's okay, we're gonna do great. We're gonna kill it. We're gonna kill it at the talent show. I'm feeling good about this. The first graders are gonna love us. We know gonna kill it at the talent show. Like, I'm feeling good about this.

The first graders are gonna love us. We know the words, your beatboxing is amazing and this drum machine makes you look totally legit, man. And he said, that's not it. And he said, I said, well, what's wrong? And he said, oh, don't worry about it. And he didn't tell me what was wrong. But then I remember,

you told me days after this that your mom had given you the news after talking to Ben's mom that he was sick. And we're like, wow, that's sick. We had noticed that Ben would, you know, miss a day of school. Yeah. But that wasn't that unusual, but it was happening,

it was more frequent than you would. Yeah, it got increasingly frequent. Expect. But it's not anything that he talked about. You know, he didn't wanna bring it up. But as it turns out, he eventually would tell us that the doctors diagnosed him with chronic fatigue syndrome. Which at the time, I mean, it's still a very,

they still have, last I checked, they don't have a whole lot of understanding about this disease. It's sort of like one of those, you know, like Lyme disease used to be. It's like, I don't know exactly, we don't know exactly what this is and this might just be a name for a family

of different conditions or whatever. But this was the beginning of people talking about it in the mid 90s. So, or actually the early 90s. And it was, we had no idea what was going on. It was discussed at times of kind of being a catch all for when you don't know exactly what's wrong with someone too but you know that they're extremely fatigued.

I mean he described some mornings not being able to get out of bed. I do remember him telling us at one point in seventh grade, he said sometimes he could barely crawl to the bathroom in order to use the bathroom. And we couldn't believe it. We didn't know how to process it. We never saw this, like we never saw it firsthand.

He didn't look well. He started to look more frail. But when we would call him and say, "'Hey, do you wanna do something?' Sometimes the answer would be no, but if the answer was yes, it would be, we would be able to go on our adventures. Yeah, we'd show up and we'd hop on our bikes

and we'd go play just like we always had. In eighth grade, then that was seventh grade, in eighth grade, when school started back, he didn't come back. Right, and they said that he was gonna be basically homeschooled from that point on. And I remember, this was, I've never been good at processing this type of information.

I'm still not good at it. Like when somebody is like going through something, I'm like, I don't know how to comfort you right now. It's like that part of my brain was damaged or something. You know, it's like, and I remember being like, this is this guy that we've spent all this time with, we've done all this stuff with, and all of a sudden it's like,

he's not, oh, he's not at school. And he's sick? How could someone as like has, they're so vibrant that has so much zest for life. this is so vibrant that has so much zest for life. How could they be the ones drained of life? It just, it did not add up. It was, I felt like we couldn't believe it. Well, and the interesting thing that was happening

as well, and this is like a tale as old as time, is that we were kind of moving along with what it was like to be in middle school. And we talked, I had a girlfriend. Yeah, I got a girlfriend. And it was like that for a while, that was the only thing that matters. Well, that was definitely your world.

Yeah. Whenever you got a girlfriend. Yeah, and so it was like, okay, I'm playing basketball, I'm thinking about high school, I'm thinking about all the girls in high school, I got my girlfriend right now. We were doing those sort of middle school things and it wasn't that the going to the river and fishing

and swinging on vines and camping and all this stuff wasn't something that we wanted to keep doing, but it wasn't everything to us anymore. It was something that we did when we could. Right. And so because we couldn't, and it was interesting because I felt like that, because a lot of people have asked the question like,

Link, you've been best friends this whole time, right? It's like, yeah, we have been best friends, but it wasn't like it was me and you and nobody else. Yeah, and? In a lot of ways, me and Ben were closer for a few of those years, like in like third, fourth, fifth grade, and then as he started kind of dealing with his stuff, and me and you kind of continued on

living a quote unquote normal life that was kind of unencumbered by the kind of issues that he was facing, then we basically like our friendship kind of just superseded every other friendship and it's been that way ever since. Yeah, I mean, I definitely remember feeling on the outskirts of the trio. You know, it was, like I said, I would show up to things

and kind of have to, I would gather what I had missed. I think it's fair to say that for that period of time, we were best, I don't know, I think we were best friends, but you were best of friends, the two of you. Yeah, it wasn't something we thought about. Yeah, there were no lists being made. Right. And there was no discussions about that.

But yeah, I could feel that a little bit. But again, it was because, I knew it wasn't calculated. Ben was the kindest, most welcoming person of all anyone we had met at that age. It was impossible to hold anything against him. So I didn't feel jealous. Like I said, I felt privileged to be invited

as the scared kid who wasn't adventurous, that was kind of brought along for the ride and kind of ushered out of my shell, so to speak. But it was difficult living on the other side of Buies Creek and knowing that there was probably stuff going on, there were A-frames being built and there were fish being caught in it, I wasn't a part of it. But as we got older, I was increasingly a part of it.

And then it's been started, wasn't able to do as much, then I think we got even closer and closer. Well, so kind of fast forward a little bit. So high school got, you know, I have a lot of regrets about the amount of time that would pass between seeing Ben. Yeah. And I would hear, my mom, like would talk to his mom and would find out that like, oh, Ben's really struggling

with chronic fatigue and you know, he basically didn't get out of bed this week or whatever and then she would be like, you need to go see him. And it was interesting because again, I'm not making an excuse. I felt so inadequate to engage and be like, I know we're not gonna go over there and like go do something fun.

I'm gonna sit there and we're gonna talk about what he's doing. Am I supposed to sit beside his bedside? Ben gave the impression he didn't want us to see beside his bedside. I don't, Ben gave the impression, he didn't want us to see him that way. Yeah, right. And you know, I also regret not saying, you know what, it's fine.

You know, I wanna hang out with you, even if that just means sitting in your room. But we didn't really have a, I don't know, we didn't have a track to go on. It's like, okay, this is how you do it. This is how you empathize with somebody. You know, I do wish, to your parents' credit, to your mom's credit, she was like,

hey, you need to go see him. And you did. Yeah. And then I would hear about it. Again, I felt a little bit more on the outskirts of it. But it kind of felt- And it was intimidating. But it felt like, it was like, oh, what are we gonna talk about now?

Yeah. Because I'm doing all these really typical high school things, you know? It's like, what am I gonna talk to Ben about? I'm supposed to talk about all the stuff that you can't do? Right, and so the times between visiting each other would just get longer and longer. But there would still be times throughout high school that we would get together.

I think, am I right about this? I remember after Ben became famous for his running, which was extremely odd given everything we've told you. I remember after Ben became famous for his running, which was extremely odd given everything we've told you. He always wore these duck shoes. Now a duck boot, you know, it is a lace up boot that the whole bottom is that like rubber so it's waterproof. Those were his signature shoes.

The only type of shoes he wore were duck shoes and he wore low top duck shoes where it had like three eyelets on either side or two and you'd lace it up. He would not wear socks and he would wear those duck boots but that was supposed to keep water out but like he would walk through stuff and the water would be going all in it. He wouldn't care but he would run for miles.

He would jog around Keith Hill. He would jog around Keith Hill in these shoes. And he was such an odd bird, right? And everybody knew, oh there goes Ben. He's got chronic fatigue syndrome, yet he's running around, you know it's. I mean and I don't know, again, I don't know. We never talked a lot about that period of in his life.

But my understanding is that he would have good days and bad days. Yeah. And so it was like, okay, I've got energy today. I'm gonna, I'm going out. I'm gonna run. Yeah. And we would get together. It was just increasingly infrequent as we got into high school.

And okay, and one of the other things that was happening, and we talked a little bit about this in the last years, is like we were basically becoming very, very serious about our faith. We had started the band, and so this was beginning to kind of consume us and it was the way we talked. Consume our time, let's not say it ate, it didn't eat us.

No, no, no, no. Consumed our time. Yeah, yeah, but I'm saying that our lives began to be much more oriented towards God. Especially with the band. Yeah. We spent as much time as we could with the band. Yeah. We spent as much time as we could as a band. You started neglecting your basketball.

I mean, we were talking more about being filmmakers too. So it was like those two passions were, and then whoever, whatever girlfriend you had, pretty much filled you to capacity. Yeah, I'm not gonna take the bait on that one. But the interesting thing that was happening with Ben is that he had always been this, again, he's the one that had the knowledge about things, right?

And as he had all this time on his hands, where he was basically not able to kind of get up and do things physically, the dude was reading. And then by this point, he was on the internet all the time. And he would occasionally just kind of mention something that I would be like, wow, Ben is in a different place spiritually. He didn't go to church with us.

He's got lots of thoughts about this stuff. Thoughts that were to me sort of like, where's he getting this information? Because this isn't what we're talking about in youth group. This isn't orthodox. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And so we always had this kind of sense that like,

Ben is kind of just, he's kind of his own guy. And, you know, I definitely don't think he would call himself a Christian. And that was becoming more and more important to us. So then there was another sort of a new roadblock. Source of tension in our friendship, yeah. This, well, I mean, am I gonna talk to him about this stuff? Because we were developing this conviction

that we needed to share the gospel with our friends. I mean, this is why we started the band and we did invitations at our concerts. Like we would invite our friends out to watch us play and then at the end, we would, we talked about this in the last years, but we would go into this thing where it's like, all right, everybody bow your heads and we're gonna pray,

give you the opportunity to accept Christ. That's what we were doing with our friends. And so Ben's sort of ideas that were, that seemed different and challenging began to be, I would say even intimidating to me. Fast forward a little bit more, we go to college, we go head first into Campus Crusade. We've told that story so if you superimpose that on,

you know, well I got an email address, I would email Ben occasionally. Yeah, at that point it kind of resorted to email. We were off at school, he was still back at home. I think he took classes, like college classes from home, if I remember correctly. Yeah. But so, you know, there would be a couple of emails

back and forth every month or two. And I remember, and it wouldn't be the three of us, he would, I would talk to him, you would talk to him separately, right? We didn't understand CC. Right, we didn't. We didn't understand threads. It wasn't a...

I remember him saying one time, he was like, I like getting emails from you because you write like you talk. That made me feel really good. I don't know what it was, but for some reason, I remember that specifically. But it wasn't, it was, the emails were far enough in between that every time we would restart an email exchange,

it would kind of be catch up. So it wasn't like we were having an active relationship. It was more like let's make sure we know what's going on in each other's lives a little bit. But again, the more you share about your life, the more you feel like you're sharing things that he might not be experiencing or isn't able to experience.

Well, and not just that. It's like, it's hard. Our lives were more and more about ministry and growing in our relationships with Christ. It was like, that was what it was about. And I remember we would have these email exchanges and I would, you know, I'd say something about what I might be doing.

And then he kind of gave, he would give us these, he had these perspectives and these like interesting thoughts about things, but I just, I couldn't engage with him. And again, there was just this, the time between correspondence continued to increase. Then I went to, it's in terms of the way that I can, I interacted with Ben while I was in college. 98, I went on Summer Project

with Campus Crusade in New York City, as I talked about. And of course, that time, when you're that age and you've sort of put yourself in this situation where you've been doing nothing but ministry for two months and it's been all about sharing the gospel with people and you've learned how to do that very well. And with the on Campus Crusade, what that in Campus Crusade, that kind of means

taking people through a presentation of the gospel, which we called the four spiritual laws. And I think now they call it the would you like to know God personally booklet and it's probably something different now. But essentially, it's a short, easy to digest booklet that sort of explains the truth of the gospel in a digestible way that people can then make a decision on the spot.

You remember what they are? God has a wonderful plan for your life. Two. All have sinned. We are sinful and therefore separated from God. Three, Christ died and paid the penalty for our sin so that we could reestablish a relationship with God, if point four, you make a decision to place your faith in what Christ did on your behalf.

Say, maybe I just saved some people. So I. But it was that concise, right? And so it made it very shareable, which was again, the evangelistic part of. Yeah, and so one of the things I was thinking when I got back from New York is I was like, Ben was really on my heart, right?

I was like, this guy, I love this guy. And he's not a Christian. And I've got to share the gospel with him. I got to share the gospel with him. I got to. It is my, I am mandated to share the gospel with this guy. And I was like, I agree. He was, you know, we're both real good friends with him, but you know, you were even closer of a friend than I was,

so this is on you. And- Because we both don't need to do it. Now, okay, I'm gonna tell you- It seems like it. Now, okay, I'm gonna tell you. It seems like it would be really tough. I'm gonna tell you what I did, I'm gonna kind of give you my perspective on it later. So went over there and had one of our sort of like

awkward conversations and I kind of caught up with him and what he had been doing, kind of told him about my summer and just said, hey, there's something that I'd like to share with you "'that I think is really important.'" And then I basically break out the booklet and walk him through it. And then I think he just said something at the end, like the whole point is that you're supposed to bring people to a point of decision.

You don't wanna, you wanna close the sale, essentially. You know, you want people to say yes or no, and if they say yes, you wanna be like, okay, well, would you like to pray to receive Christ right now? Ben was a little too smart to get to that point to say, he wasn't gonna let me get to that point. Right, meaning he was smart enough to know

what you were trying to do. He saw what was happening. Because he knew that he didn't wanna make the decision, he was smart enough to circumvent the awkward ending. To tactfully and kindly say, I'll think about it, basically. Now, I find it very ironic that you got this guy who was so, so more knowledgeable

about so many things than I was. We'd had this rich experience and he had taught me so many things and I had done all these adventurous things with him because he had gone and he had taught me so many things and I had done all these adventurous things with him because he had gone and he had done the research and he had read all this stuff. And then I go away and I come back with a booklet. Pamphlet really.

I come back with a one size fits all pamphlet. And instead of having a real conversation, I'm like, you wanna go through this booklet together? Yeah. To me, it just feel, I cringe thinking about it now. Not because I was ashamed of the gospel at the time, I wasn't, I thought that it was, everybody needed to hear it.

But the impersonal, unloving nature, I would say, in the way that I did it, that didn't take into account the circumstance, I just didn't have a real conversation with somebody. I think it was very loving and very cringy. I don't think it was unloving, I think it was very loving and very cringy. I don't think it was unloving. I think it was the best that you could do based on the convictions that you held.

Okay. And I don't think, and I think that Ben knew that, and he knew that he did not want to make that decision. So he graciously let you off the hook. You know? But I just felt like a hypocrite. I felt like a hypocrite. Cause it was like, hey man, I went off, I lived a life.

I did all this cool stuff. I kind of saw you when my mom told me to come see you. And then I go off and I come back and I'm like, hey, and I've got this, I've got the good news. I've gone off, I figured this stuff out. I know everything that there is to know about the secret to the good life basically. And it's all in this book.

Here it is, let's go through it together. And it just, to me, I'm offended on behalf of Ben when I think about it. But he was gracious and he took it like a friend in a loving way. Yeah. And at least you, at the time, I feel like at least you could share that much.

You know, the ball was in his court as if maybe he didn't know those things before you shared them, I think is how I felt about it. You know, all you can do is share and then you leave the results to God. But you feel this tremendous pressure to share until you have and then there's at least relief

that like, hey, I've done my part. But then in retrospect, you look at all the context and you start to have the feelings that you just shared. And I totally get that. I mean, I didn't have that conversation at that point. We both had, you know, other things that we'll talk about very soon. But from there, it was, yeah, I mean, when we graduated,

we got married, I don't think Ben was able to come to my wedding. Did Ben come to your wedding? No, I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think so either. But I think there was still the occasional, like maybe once a year we would see him and it would be like, I feel so bad

that it's been so long since I've seen you. You're still, you have this condition and you're at home and I've moved on with my life. Now I'm married, now I'm having kids. Now I'm leaving my engineering job and I'm joining the staff of Campus Crusade. Now I'm leaving Campus Crusade. I think there'll be these few and far between touch points

is like this is how my life continues to move forward. And there were the occasional emails and based on the conversation that we had had, we had sort of established sort of a dialogue about philosophical, spiritual things. And so occasionally he would send something that was, you know, he was doing all kinds of research about all kinds of things.

And he wasn't closed off by any means. He would reach out to let me know that he had read something or he had this thought about Jesus or whatever. Yeah, but I definitely had this guilt that I think is well founded that like someone who was so important to me that I just didn't make time for. And if I did make time, it was like,

there was still this weight of like this one issue loomed large in my mind and was kind of like maybe the real reason I ultimately would reconnect over time was because this looming issue of like eternal destiny. Yeah, he's not saved. And then, you know, we eventually leave Steph and we start our careers.

I mean, we started working in the basement in Lillington and making our videos from there as we got going. Some of the exchanges that we'd have with him, again, by that point when we were in Lillington, we were 10 minutes away from his house. Yeah. And then it was like, yeah, we should see Ben. It's like, we should go by and see him, but we gotta work.

We gotta work and then I gotta go, I gotta drive the opposite direction 15 minutes in order to like help with the baby and like, you know, continue to do my life because there's so much going on in my life. But I know that he knew about the work we were doing. He got a big kick out of the songs that we'd write and like the music videos that we would make.

And so like there'll be some email exchanges there. Do you remember when we got the news? Like how we heard? I don't. I don't remember specifically either, but we, yes, I don't remember how we heard, but we heard from someone and it was kind of going around the county

that like Ben was sick. It's like, well, yeah, Ben's kind of always been sick. Now Ben is really sick. Ben's got cancer. Oh man. Ben has cancer? Is it connected? Well, people didn't know, you know, and then-

Do we go see him? I have to think we went and saw him when we got that news that he had cancer at his house. I definitely think as he started to get worse, it was testicular cancer. And it moved very quickly. That moved very quickly. By the time that they had caught it,

it had spread and it was really bad. And then once we found out, we saw him a few times at his house. And every time he was looking worse and worse. And then we got the word, I mean, do you remember visiting him at his house? Honestly, not until after we had visited him at hospice. They put him in hospice,

which was basically an end of life care. You're dying, so we're gonna make you as comfortable as possible and we're gonna give you round the clock care in a facility which now was in Lillington. Oh and it was, it was. It was on our way from. A mile from our.

We would carpool from Fuquay. Office. And we'd go past this facility, hang a right, and then go to our studio. So, you know, the plan was, well, at least once a week, we'll go by and see him. I think is what we, it's like we were scrambling,

we were trying to make our lives work, but on our way into work, we can go by there and see him for an hour. So it's, I mean, if you've never seen anybody in hospice, it's kind of, it's like a hospital room. There's a hospital bed in there. I don't know how long he was there. My recollection is that it was a few months.

I don't think so. Maybe six weeks. You think it might've been four weeks? In my recollection, he was there for a few weeks and then they were like, well, he's gonna pass away and so we want that to happen at his house and so they basically put the hospital bed and everything in the house downstairs.

But so to kind of get, you know, there was this, there was a lot of guilt associated with, you know, having Having not seen him And But the main thing that we were thinking about was This guy's gonna die. Yeah. And we gotta save him.

Yeah, we saw him, I mean, we would visit him, we visited him a few times and it was, he was doing bad, but it was, he always had a smile for us. He had his same sense of humor that he always had. He had his same sense of humor. He would crack a joke, something about his balls because that was where the cancer started.

Yeah, I remember him saying, you know, he said, do you wanna see it? Yeah. And then he, you know, he just had a hospital gown on and we looked at each other, it was just the three of us in that room and we were like, I guess?

And he had this smile on his face like, this is funny. And then he showed us his testicle that was as big as an orange. Yeah. I mean like, and then he made a joke about it and we laughed because that's who he was. Yeah.

And he had the ability to do that. And then he said, if you think something's wrong, don't ignore it because that's what I did. Yeah. And I think that may have been in our last visit. Well, what I remember is that we would go see him and then every time we saw him, we would turn the conversation towards spiritual things.

So regardless of how it started, we like, Ben, I know we haven't talked about it that much. I know I talked to you about this when I was in college, but have you thought about your eternal destiny? Have you thought about where you're gonna go? Or we might just say it, I don't remember exactly how we said it, but I think some ways it was more like,

well, you know that God loves you and we would say things that were more like encouraging platitudes. Well, I mean, the way I remember it, I would ask him questions, I was like, what do you think about God now? Yeah, I remember that. Where are you at with the way that you think about Jesus? And you know, this dude thought a lot

about the spiritual things and he had a spirituality. He wasn't an atheist. He was definitely, I would say he was agnostic because he had this- He said, I didn't know. I don't know. He was like, I just don't was agnostic because he had this. He said I didn't know. He was like, I just don't know. And I remember one time basically pressing. I was like, I know this is offensive and this is tough

and the dude is dying, but his soul is worth it? Yeah, and I think in this particular time, we had the sense that it was close to the end for him. We had been talking about in our previous visits, his preparations. He said, I want you guys to sing at my funeral. Yeah.

And we were like, oh gosh, okay. And he said, I want you to sing one of your funny songs, like the cornhole song. Like that, again, that was his way. He was like, I think it would, I was like, well, that's gonna be weird, Ben. He's like, I think exactly. That's what he wanted well, that's gonna be weird, Ben. He's like, I think exactly. That's what he wanted.

I want you to sing the cornhole song at my funeral. And he said, you know, we said, Ben, we wanna, well, I don't know if he said it or if we said it, but he wanted to go to the river one more time. And so I remember we mentioned that to his parents, they're like, you know, he wants to go to the river and they were like, we don't know if he's able,

like if we take a wheelchair and like just take him to the edge of the river where you guys used to swim, it's like, if you think that we could do that, we would want to do that. we could do that, we would want to do that. The next time we visited was after that conversation and we got a sense that it was the last time and that's when he showed us his balls and made us laugh. I remember before he went in, his older sister,

who we had known our whole lives said to us, guys, just try not to talk about religion. Like that's how she put it. Well, she was like, I don't want you to, I think she said. We don't wanna upset him at this point in his process. Well, I think what was happening is, you know, he loved seeing us,

but we were so singularly focused on bringing him to faith. Helping him. That- We fell. The conversation would get, I recall one time where I just really pressed in and I said, Ben, what do you have to lose? If just pray a prayer with us to make this decision. This was the last meeting.

Yeah, but this was the last meeting before his sister told us to not talk about it anymore because we honored that. before his sister told us to not talk about it anymore because we honored that. And what happened was is he said, I don't know, I don't know, I can't be sure, and he started crying. Yeah.

And you know, the thing is is at the time, I felt bad, but I was like, well, crying a little bit now is not anything compared to what'll happen to him if he doesn't make this decision. I mean, that's the logic that was happening in my brain. Yeah. And we had talked about it ahead of time that we had to do, we just felt like we had to be

as clear as possible and do everything we could to help him. So this, I was not blindsided by you pressing him. We had agreed upon it. Yeah. And I mean, we would leave those meetings and I would just ball, like on the way back home. Feeling responsible for that. Yeah.

And worrying about him. But his sister told us the next time we went and she said, you know, please. But you said you pressed him and that's, I mean, to pray with us, right? Yeah. So yeah, that's what you meant by that was, well, I don't remember exactly how we said it,

but it was, you don't have to know, let's just pray and we can pray something you can repeat after us and you can accept Jesus. I mean, and he said, okay. And he, you know, it was basically, we prayed, you know, and it was, it's one of those things that like, you can look at it at the time afterward and say,

okay, I feel relieved. Maybe that did it. I feel, I mean, the words were right. We can't control like what's going on in his heart, but you know, he did say the words. And it was kind of reduced to that. Like, from an outsider's perspective, you might think of it as like a magical incantation.

That's not how we thought of it, but it was. If he was sincere in his heart, then he was saved. And only God knows. So, yeah. And I don't know if he did it for us or if he did it for him. But the thing is that- Or both probably.

It's just so hard to process because it gave us this sense of closure that, okay, all right, we did everything we could. And I do think that we were acting out of love because of the way that we thought about the world at the time. He knew that, he knew that. And, you know,

so I don't blame us for doing something that was, you know, I wish we could have spent a different kind of time. Yeah. As opposed to like trying to convince him of something that I don't even believe anymore. You know? So if there was one more meeting, then that was it.

I don't recall seeing him when they moved him back to his house. Again, this may be the nature of memory. I have a recollection of talking to him once in his home, but that may be something that I've just created because I've been in his home so but that may be something that I've just created because I've been in his home so many times and they told me where the bed was. But I seem to remember, no, I think I did talk to him

because he was getting a little delirious at the end. I wasn't there for this. And he had actually, so he had like a catheter and he got up in the middle of the night and like walked and didn't realize it was in and stuff and they were just like, you know, he was telling me that and he was kind of talking about it as a funny story, like let me tell you what happened to me last night.

But then it quickly got to a place where, you know, his mom said that, you know, you don't wanna see him like this, he's dying. When we got the call, it was, I mean, we knew the call was coming, so we weren't blindsided by it, and I think at the time we didn't feel, we felt like we had done our piece.

I think that's how we felt about it then, not how we feel about it right now. Yeah. And yeah, they asked us to, they said there'll be an opportunity to share at the graveside service. And either they asked us to sing a song or we volunteered and said that he asked us to but.

But we didn't sing the cornhole song. We knew we could not sing the cornhole song. But we thought that the perfect compromise was to, and of course this has a whole different meaning now but you know, it didn't at the time. To sing the Michael Jackson song, Ben, which is about a pet rat. A killer rat who was the Michael Jackson's pet.

Yeah, and I pulled up the lyrics. Yeah, you learn it on the guitar, we sang it in harmony at the graveside service. Ben, most people would turn you away. I don't listen to a word they say. They don't see you as I do. I wish they would try to. I'm sure they'd think again if they had a friend like Ben.

So we made a joke about it being a song about Michael Jackson and a rat. Which is very appropriate for Ben. He would love that and everybody agreed he was there. It was a difficult song to sing. Do you remember what we said? it was a difficult song to sing, but. Well, and do you remember what we said? Because I remember in addition to the song. I remember, I think I know what you're gonna say, yeah.

Again, you know, interesting thing is that at the time, it wasn't that I wasn't, you know, as I said in the stories, it wasn't that I hadn't doubted things pretty significantly at that point, but it hadn't gotten to the core of my faith yet. This didn't create a crisis, it created a moment where we had to believe that Ben- He was in heaven.

He was in heaven. And that's what I told everybody at that funeral. I was like, you know- He did in heaven. He was in heaven. And that's what I told everybody at that funeral. I was like, you know. He did have faith. I didn't go into the details of what the story that happened because I thought that might be inappropriate. But we basically said that, you know, again, this is one of the things that is so interesting.

I've been to lots of funerals. And I haven't, everyone I've been to lots of funerals and I haven't, everyone I've been to for the most part has been a Christian funeral. You know, there's a certain, it's ironic because there's a hope that comes with faith. The idea that people go on and that you're gonna see people again and you're gonna see people in heaven,

which may be true. But then the flip side of that is that, well, if you subscribe to a particular, you know, understanding of Christianity, well, some people are not gonna be in heaven, they're gonna be in hell. And those funerals are awkward. When someone is not saved and everybody knows it,

it's like, well, he lived a good life, let's tell some stories about him and let's just hope that God has mercy on his soul, essentially, which I just always find so, you know, I get it, I understand it. That's the way you see the world, then that's kind of the way that you're gonna respond. But for us, for Ben, because we had gotten him

to the point to pray that prayer, we could have this perspective that was like, Ben left this world with faith and that's why we're gonna see him again. And we were able to say that. And I don't know, it's interesting because now, looking back on it and the way that I see the world now, and I'm like, yeah, maybe I'll see Ben again one day.

I don't know, I don't think that I can know, and I no longer really care that I can know. But I see what we did was very much about us. I'm not saying we didn't love Ben. I'm not saying we didn't actually care about him. And I'm not saying that we weren't motivated by a concern for his soul. But I also think that a part,

a not insignificant part of that process was about us feeling good and being okay with ourselves and being able to say that we did our job, we did our duty and now we can get up at the funeral and say that he's got faith. And I don't blame us but it was- I don't think it was the majority selfish. I think there were elements to that.

I think that we needed to have that hope because we loved him so much. Yeah. And we wanted to share it because we wanted to say something at the funeral because if there was anybody, we wanted to help anyone else that felt the same way that we felt.

Yeah. But I don't know how it made his family feel. And it probably didn't make him feel better. And I also- I think they understood. Yeah, I think they understood that our hearts were in the right place, but they were already hurting so much.

It was like, I do. I think they gave us the benefit of the doubt because I mean, listen, they lived in Buies Creek, North Carolina for a long time. And they knew that we were sincere believers who cared about this guy and saw the world in that way and just wanted to see him come to faith. I think it probably was a little bit annoying

because I don't know where they are, where they were at the time, but they always seem to be really thoughtful people who didn't just acquiesce to the status quo, which the status quo in Buies Creek was, you're gonna be a Bible believing Christian. And so I do, I don't know, I feel like there's a part of me that wants to apologize.

I think that in these- On behalf of my former self. In these, my thought on that is in these books, you know, as we shared at the top, we really sought to honor Ben because of how important he is to us. But I do think that there's also a part of it that's like, it's the best we can do to make amends

for the regrets that we have. And again, it's not just the spiritual stuff, but it's just not being capable of being the friend that he deserved in over many years since his diagnosis, his original diagnosis. And so I think it's been our best effort to honor him and to, but yeah, I am sorry for,

and I know he forgave us. We did discuss it at his bedside. We told him we were sorry. For not being there for him. For not being there for him. And he forgave us. That's the kind of person that he is. And, you know, so,

I think that everything that we do, he touches. And I think that's the, he touches. And I think that's the best we can do to honor him is what we have done. Yeah, I think the only thing I'll add to that is that we don't know, we don't know what's next after this life. But there's one thing I do know with certainty

is that Ben lives on. And his legacy is what we try to honor and what we try to honor and what we try to embody. And with that, I'll give a recommendation, which is along these same lines. Okay. We've all got, We've all got,

we've all got bends in our lives. And it doesn't have to be somebody who, you know, is sick or is dying, it might be, but just somebody who has been a friend and impacted you and maybe some circumstances of life have led you away from them and you haven't connected with them in a while. Make an effort to connect with them. Okay, well, thanks for listening

and if you wanna contribute to this this conversation you know what to do hashtag Ear Biscuits and we'll we'll talk at you next week and probably not cry next week I don't know