Online Eulogy

Just recently, my guitar teacher in Cambodia just passed away. I was extremely shocked and disappointed by the news, as I heard it when I was in another country. Ian Thomas, otherwise known as Gypsy Davy, was a avid blues and rock follower. He is probably best known for his role as bassist in the band “The Missing Links”. This band came to fame by winning a huge battle of the bands concert in Australia.

Ian Thomas is on the top left corner

In response to his death, I asked one close friend of mine, who was also a student of his to write a tribute to him.

Some people say that when something bad is about to happen, you can feel it even though you are unaware at the moment that such an occurrence is on the verge of becoming real. It’s not true. Fate does not in fact have a way of telling you that it is about to act on its own will. She merely slips by, taking what she wants from the world and moving on, leaving reality behind. On Monday, August 17^th of the year 2009, fate took Ian Thomas. He died of pneumonia in a small hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It was not an easy thing to let him go for it was as much unexpected as it was unwanted. To all those who knew him, to all those who were students to his teaching, he will not be forgotten nor will his memory be overlooked.

Mr. Ian Thomas has been a passionate musician all his life and taught me for a few of the years I have lived in Cambodia. I look back fondly on the jam sessions he used to hold at his apartment and remember them as some of the most meaningful learning experiences I have had. It is quite an ordeal to contemplate the thought of his presence on this earth as one that has lasted as long as it did. As for me I am only 15 years old and him 61. His passing, to me has felt like something of a loss. Something that’s been there all my life and as far as I can remember has now vanished. It’s definitely a bit different now telling yourself that you won’t be able to trudge up the flight of stairs and into his apartment, guitar in hand to play a jam session again. It unsettles me even more that I cannot really come to remember in great detail the last time I had been over there to his apartment. Going over there had seemed so natural that it was not one of those things you thought about closely. His passing has seemed to bring me to want to revisit every time I had ever gone there. I can almost put myself there right now if I close my eyes tight enough.

There has never been a guy quite like Mr. Thomas. His love for music had obviously not gone one bit stale as he was always faithful to the music he played and to the image of his teenage band, “The Missing Links”. Needless to say, he was a very powerful mentor, a very proud mentor and I am not here to argue otherwise. He deserved to be proud. He will remain to be a prominent memory of my times in Cambodia, a place in which I have now since left. I had just left before he died though I knew he had been hospitalized before I left. I can only regret not giving him my words of farewell before I left Cambodia. The turnout was not what I expected. He died on the day I started school here in Beijing. The troubling news came a few days later, like a blow to the head.

Thank you Ian Thomas for everything you have taught me for it has been so much more than just music. In a sense you were like a father to me. May your loyalty to music carry you onto wherever you may go. So here’s to the memories and the experiences, my final words of farewell. I’ll see you on the other side.

Farewell Mr. Thomas, we will miss you dearly.