posted on behalf of the Bourn familyWe have been overwhelmed by the good wishes and wonderful stories so many of you have shared with us. For us, Doug was a great brother and son, along with being a meticulous pilot, a pioneering engineer, and a giver of time and talent.
Most importantly, thank you for your friendship and generosity at this difficult time. Doug would have wanted all of us to celebrate and embrace the life he lived – he lived it well.
—The Bourn Family
I loved Doug. The last we talked was Valentine's Day. I was moving back to California, and he invited me to stay with him if I needed a crashpad. I will never delete that text message. Its the last thing we talked bout. That and getting together for some sailing. We worked together on his boat sometimes. It was a dream, to sail through the Panama Canal. And I just came back from the canal
ReplyDeleteabout 3 weeks ago.
Doug and I were friends since 2000. We met at Peet's coffee shop and then went to lunch. It turned out we had a lot in common, and from that point on, Doug was in my life. He was a steady and true presence. If one of us was sad, he would call, or I would call. We both always took time to listen to each other, no matter how busy we were. In Silicon Valley, this is rare. We spent some holidays together, consoled one another, dated for a short period of time, studied "outback medicine" together, railed about our need to exercise more, and shared working on the Tai Chi Chair DVDs. This DVD has now helped people in remote locations who are chair bound and is also in 5 countries. The material from the Tai Chi Chair DVD that Doug helped with is now taught at the Parkwood Rehabilitation Center, in London Ontario, in a number of nursing homes all over the US.
When we met, Doug impressed me immediately. He asked me what was it I wanted to do. REALLY DO. I had just finished studying Chinese Medicine, had just gotten my certification. I told him I wanted to work with really really sick people. So he wrote a check for 30,000 to be used to work with the transplant patients at Stanford Hospital. This work was the seed for more work that occurred later, and I now have based a new field of medicine, Haptic Medicine, from this original project that Doug sponsored. The work has just gone down to Haiti, with an MD from MIT. The really impressive part of this work was that Doug wanted no credit.
That's who he was.
Doug helped a lot of people when they ran into trouble. Real trouble. I know one woman who had cancer, he helped her with
her treatments. And he helped his neighbor, Barbara, and shared her life. He helped his childhood best friend Dave. He helped me sometimes, esp when sadness crept in.
Doug was an outstanding individual. He made significant contributions to Tesla, and was a devoted hardworking employee who cared deeply about what he did.
He also had a great "bullshit" detector. :) If someone was feeding him a line, he would let them know with a twinkle in his eye, and start laughing. Then make a comment like, "yeah and I have a bridge you might want to buy...."
Doug will always be in my heart and an inspiration. Nothing can change that.