Josh Bee Remembered 5 years on

It's now five years since we lost our dear friend Josh Bee. This picture is of SRS fleet's memorial service five years ago today. Below is the original Eulogy that I wrote for JB as we affectionately called him.

The Josh Bee Memorial Eulogy

Josh Bee was a fighter, his message even today is on the member's comments and reads,

"I'm good at taking damage, need to test a build, shoot me a challenge"

Well JB was certainly challenged in life, he suffered from muscular dystrophy, a horrible muscle wasting disease that sees most people die in their twenties, JB fought on to the age of 36.

The disease didn't blunt his intellect, he was a prolific writer, poet and artist, he had a keen wit and would offer a quick and stinging retort if required, and whilst it was not always easy to understand him due to his ventilator, he still always made the effort to join us on teamspeak.

For those of you who never heard JB speak then you missed the infectious laugh and the long stories of how he saw the world. JB was an accomplished player of STO, he was able to beat many in PvP, even though his hands could barely hold the two controllers he needed to play the game.

He loved his Galaxy-X, it was not only tanky but hit real hard, it was always a challenge to beat him, and when you'd spent 20 minutes fighting and you finally got him down, he would just heal himself right back up, and remember he was doing all this whilst being effectively paralysed. The mind boggles!

And did we ever hear him complain? No, well I never did, despite many horrible medical procedures and other secondary illnesses, he still battled on, he was a prolific gamer, and I think for him gaming gave him a freedom that he could never experience in real life.

JB was a founder member of the SRS fleet, both fed and kdf, he came over from our previous fleet with me and was very active from the start. In later years he found STO more and more difficult to control and for the last few months he was logging in just to say hello, he also always made sure he came on TeamSpeak though even if he was playing something else.

For me JB was literally an inspiration, whenever I looked at my life and felt sorry for myself, I thought of JB with all his problems and yet managing to always make me laugh.

I wish I could have met him in real life, but thanks to STO I felt I knew the man, I've lost count of the hours we spent chatting over the years, so I guess I feel I knew who he was, from his quirky sense of humour to his go-faster stripes on his wheelchair.

So now our friend Josh Bee has left us and has embarked on perhaps the greatest journey into the unknown final frontier, a journey unencumbered by Earthy restrictions.

Wherever you end up JB, make sure you keep the Earl Grey hot and the ready room tidy, I'll be expecting that bridge invite one day my friend, make it so.

Sue Bee, Sarah Fletcher, I thought you may take some comfort from this small ingame memorial. We had the largest turnout for a single event in our history with 29 people taking the time to pay their respects.

Matt Johnson, Commander in Chief, Star Trek Online - SRS Command