The Bane of Good Men

A tribute to friends recently lost but never gone

Stu was the first person who subscribed to my newsletter.

I desperately missed writing since my last paid gig as a columnist in 2019 and it was a reaction to something that Stu said on Twitter that made me want to get something off my chest in long form, so I went looking for blogging platforms and landed here. I wanted to be seen again. I tweeted a link to what I’d written and I got an email notification about my first subscriber. He was always like that—supportive.

My friend Stu had two lives online. In one life he was Stuart Layt, a journalist of some repute who covered politics and health science for the Brisbane Times as well as a newsreader with the best radio voice in the business. The other, the one I’d known first, used the handle Disco Stu, named after the Simpsons character. He wrote for Cracked and discussed geek culture on forums where I’d met him years before even knowing we lived in the same city. I’ve chatted with him for maybe 20 years. I probably knew the man for 10 years before I even knew what he looked like. Hilariously, I’d been listening to him read the morning news through my grandmother’s radio before I knew that was him.

Stu passed away this week. He was really something. A very good man.

If it can actually be said that there’s a true physical form of the concept of evil on this planet, I don’t think it’s the Devil, and I don’t think it walks as a goat. I think it’s a crab, or at least that’s what the ancients thought it best resembled when they named it in the Latin – Cancer.

It’s too tempting to believe that this atrocious, useless thing has agency. It’s not even a year ago that it came for another friend of mine. Michael was older than Stu. He’d lived more life but he hadn’t seen all seasons of it. What could not be denied about Michael was that he was a very, very good man. A tower of virtue.

Michael raised his kids right and treated everybody at least as good or better than they deserved. His charity and benevolence was limited only by his capacity to give. He was a prankster to a fault, a good hearted joker, a white Kiwi with a Māori wit and a tradie’s tinker. He was my first boss when I was twenty-one but he had no climbing ambition. He stayed in the job he was good at while many of us went on to outrank him, but boy was he good at it.

He turned 60 last year and I chatted with him about his coming retirement. His hobby, of all things, was repairing and reselling broken lawnmowers and other landscaping equipment. That’ll keep him out of mischief. He had some issue with his eye that turned out to be cancerous and was a little concerned that they might need to take the whole thing out, but they got it, a simple procedure, and we had a good laugh about all the pirate jokes we wouldn’t get to tell.

I’m haunted by the memory of the day we had Michael come over to our place to collect an old lawnmower, and he wound up taking a lot of other old junk as well that was cluttering up the place, for no reason at all apart from that he saw an opportunity to do a favour. There was something already inside him that day that intended to kill this man for no reason and it would get its way. We were inches away from it when he hugged us. I look at that memory now the same way that only the viewer sees a movie monster standing behind his next victim and they cannot hear you shouting through the screen.

And then Stu. We weren’t each other’s closest friends but not because he had a limit on the amount of love he had to share—Stu was limited only by time, and he was owed much more of that by right than the universe doled out to him. A dozen better eulogies have been written on Stu’s Facebook page in the days following his passing by people who were closer to him than I was, and who knew him better. But it doesn’t matter how close you get to the heart of the man, you can’t find anybody with a negative memory.

Stu was a very, very good man.

As one of the few friends I had who wrote for a living, I bonded with him over that. And with a sense of humour with an absurdist streak that we shared. He and I and our wider circle of friends had a yearly tradition of visiting the local Medieval re-enactment festival, but where others took their costumes seriously with the reverence that the event asked for, Stu and I took a different tack. The most memorable year, I dressed in a robot suit I built myself, while Stu rocked up in a ten dollar rental Halloween wizard costume. Man, the PWoT guys really loved Futurebot and Wizard.

This very good man married a very good woman nine years ago from yesterday. I caught her garter when she threw it in the air—unintentionally, knowing that blokes weren’t supposed to—and oddly enough the superstition came true because I was the next one of our friend group to get married, a few years later, after the birth of Stu and Rose’s child Chloe.

It's the bane of good men that wrecks families and plans and extinguishes lives, and leaves us writhing in impotent, unreleased rage and anguish. I have diminishing tolerance for stupidity as I age but it’s difficult to be truly angry at stupid things, to hate them. You can hate stupid people but it’s harder to be angry at an animal. Cancer is even stupider still. It’s the stupidest, most infuriating, worthless, idiotic thing. How spectacularly stupid it is to take someone like Michael or Stu from the world when they are needed here. When they are loved here. How insane and downright evil to rob a child of the opportunity to be raised by this man. Being angry at it is like screaming at clouds.

Stu’s reputation in journalism was of such high regard that the Premier of Queensland gave a eulogy in parliament (Annastacia Palaszczuk — Stu once told me how he remembered how to spell her name when writing about her — Sydney Zoo Canberra Zoo). You try to make some sense of all this by zoning on on things like that, like maybe he was becoming so larger than life that he got the cruel universe’s attention.

Losing a friend to terminal illness hits you three times. It hits you first when you learn about it. It hits you second when you’re told they’ve gone. The third time it hits you is when they don’t come back. It took a while for the third hit after Michael went because he was just such a prankster that it was hard not to imagine him rocking back up to work on Monday like nothing had happened. Good joke, you’ve gotta laugh.

I don’t think the third hit has landed yet about Stu. Because I keep finding myself checking Twitter again to see if he’s liked anything. Like I’m going to be able to say “see you round, mate” like he’s going on a vacation. I search my mind like I hope that I told him what a good man he was, and if I did I certainly didn’t say it enough.

Because that’s what’s important. To make sure that people know that they are greatly loved, if they are worthy of great love, like Stu was. Like Michael was. And I think they were given that. For good people, really great people, part of their greatness just stays and sticks to the people close to them like glitter you can’t get out of your clothing. You find fragments of it stuck to your skin weeks later. If there’s enough glitter then it never goes away.

I think Stu’s beautiful wife and daughter must be covered in that glitter, absolutely saturated with it, sparkling like disco balls. Like Disco Stu would have wanted. And his friends, and Michael’s family and friends will never scrub it out or want to. And that’s something that cancer can’t take away, abominable as it is.

Some of that glitter stuck on me and I hope that some of it stuck to this letter as well to rub off on you. He sure had enough of it to spread around. This is the first of my letters that will sit in his inbox unopened, but I hope he knows what it would have said.

Vale Michael. Vale Stu. Rest in power. Thanks for everything.

If you want to hear just how made-for-radio Stu’s voice was, he co-hosted a pop culture podcast with Natalie Bochenski here.