ForeverMissed
Large image
His Life

Greg: A Brief History

August 9, 2012

Gregory Forthomme Moss was born in the village of Mt. Kisco, New York, on May 31st 1970, of an American father, Bruce, and a Belgian mother, Claude.  His parents were living temporarily in an over-the-garage apartment on his paternal grandfather's grounds before moving into New York City, where Greg quickly got to know the bronze Alice in Wonderland characters in Central Park: Alice on the giant mushroom, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter.  Greg and his parents rented a tenth floor apartment.  One evening his father was lifting him to reach the cord that turned his bedroom's overhead light on and off.  The one-year-old pulled the cord, turning the light on twice.  He reached for the cord a third time, his tiny hand encircling the cord's end.  Buit he didn't pull, instead laughed, the joke on his father.  It was a first glimpse of his wry humor.

 

It wasn't long before Greg's parents decided, given his Dad's lack of luck at banking, that they might live in Italy, since Greg's Belgian mother's parents owned an old farmhouse outside of Florence.  Greg's maternal grandfather was a diplomat and was stationed in Brussels; the farmhouse, though furnished, was empty.  Bruce could write the novels he had always wanted to write, and Claude could write books on economics or cooking.  Within months, in the village of Figline Valdarno, Greg was attending the Asilo Nido (Nursery School) every day while his parents plugged away at their writing.  The Italian women who ran the Asilo showed their great love for their charges.  Then measles struck—every child caught it but Greg, a mystery.  Yes, he had been inoculated in American months before.  Time passed, and Greg added Italian to the French he'd learned from his mother and the English he'd learned from his father.  The second year he entered the Scuola Materna (Kindergarten), and made great friends with a classmate named Mauro.  Their teacher called them piccoli diavoli.

 

Over in America the stock market had begun a slow swoon.  Greg's father depended on the market to finance their Italian adventure.  When his stock portfolio dropped by over half its value the game was up.  Greg's Dad had to go back to the States to find a paying job and a place for them to live while his mother took him to stay in Moscow with her parents—her ambassador father was now stationed there.  The summer of '74 in America was like the later summer of '08: nobody was hiring.  By the time Dad found a job in December, and wrote for Greg and his mother to come and join him, she had decided that Europe, her home, offered greater opportunities for her than America. 

 

Greg wondered why he did not see his Dad—who sent him tapes he'd recorded from accompanying storybooks—for two years.  His mother sent him to the American School in Moscow, and then to the American School in Rome when his grandfather was posted there.  Bounced around a lot by now, the five and six year-old Greg took some of his frustration out on his classmates in the schoolyards, according to his mother.  He pretended he was either Asterix or Obelix, the boisterous characters in the French comic series for adults. 

 

In the summer of his sixth year, Greg found himself back for a month and a half with the Dad he hadn't seen in two years, who was now with a young woman who would become his stepmother, Barbara.  Greg also met Barbara's parents, Ruth and Walt, and Barbara's siblings, Janet, Julia and Walter.  In time they would become a new family for him. Many weekends, Greg would spend at Ruth and Walt's, free to watch TV into the wee hours, having a good time chatting with his new "grandfather."  Even after his father and Barbara divorced, in 1988, Greg would remember the beloved Ruth's birthday every year, including the last April of his final illness.

 

Barbara had been a highly skilled dancer, but had permanently injured her foot and was dealing with debilitating chronic pain.  Nevertheless she put great energy into helping Greg recover from the psychological wounds of his parents' divorce and the cultural transition to the U.S.  He found himself in American grade school, improving his English.  By his Eighth Grade graduation he was academically one of the top ten students—a Decemvir— at The Harvey School in Katonah, N.Y.  By 1985 Greg was confronted with the fact that his Dad and Barbara were not getting along—a second divorce in his young life was on the horizon.  With his home dissolving yet again, he soon found himself away at the competitive St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts.  His brains stood him in good stead, though it took him a while to acclimate socially in the new boarding environment.  When graduation time came, Greg decided to "go west, young man," and headed for the University of Colorado at Boulder.  "Boulder rocks!" wrote one of his St. Mark's classmates in his yearbook, wishing him well.

 

At CU, Greg majored in Psychology with a minor in Philosophy.  Perhaps it was while studying such subjects that he developed the habit of giving an opinion only after careful thought.  It could be disconcerting, on the phone, to suddenly have the other end go quiet (had they lost the connection?) when actually Greg was weighing his own considered opinion—which could often be in disagreement.  While at CU he held jobs in the Department of Housing where he handled public relations, filing, security and safety procedures, and cafeteria responsibilities.  Also, as a night clerk, he worked maintaining security for the residence halls, making rounds, and keeping logs of registered guests.  While there, he met Stephanie, who became his first long-term girlfriend, the relationship lasting until several years after his graduation in 1994.  That year his father, moving out West from New York to live in Santa Fe, gave Greg a recent model Honda Prelude as a graduation gift.  Greg stayed in the Boulder area to live, and one morning he was preparing for his first job interview.  Soberly dressed and mentally rehearsing how he would present himself, he walked out to where he'd parked his car the night before.  But where was his brown-gray Honda?  He searched the parking lot.  Right before the first big job interview of his life, his car had been stolen.  He rescheduled the interview, and Greg eventually held jobs at Neodata and Hospital Shared Services, before he began selling for the Denver Mattress Company, where several years of hard work made him one of their top salespeople.  He became the proud owner of a new Jeep Grand Cherokee, in which he occasionally demonstrated his semi-NASCAR driving skills to his visiting father.

 

Greg and Stephanie stayed together some years after college, and when they broke up Greg dated other young women, eventually meeting Peggy.  His troubled four-year relationship with her led to a crisis of job-changing and soul-searching.  He landed at last at Denver's DCP Midstream, the second-largest natural gas gatherer and processor, the largest natural gas liquids producer, and one of the largest marketers of natural gas in the U.S.  The people were not only hardworking but friendly, with a great corporate spirit.  At last, in 2004, he had found his home.  He became a fully vested employee and loved it.  The emotional and tangible support Greg received from the DCP Midstream fellow-employees after his June, 2011 cancer diagnosis, in the form of get-well cards and all manner of generous gifts, was a major factor in his surviving such an aggressive disease as T cell lymphoma as long as he did.  

The nurses and doctors on the staff of the Bone Marrow Transplant ICU of Denver's Presbyterian St. Luke's Hospital, where he spent most of the last year of his life, were especially fine.  Their great affection for Greg and his good-natured patience was reflected in the tears of several when the chemotherapy options finally ran out and he passed away that July third.