Gary & The End of Linearity

About Gary Thompson

I had been mulling a change to my LinkedIn profile summary since the passing of my beautiful bride of 24 years, Maureen, on Tuesday, Oct. 21. When you lose the love of your life, you do a lot of thinking. One of the things that has struck me while I’ve been thinking is that we all talk a lot about what we do, rather than talk about who we are. What makes us tick. What drives us. What we love. What makes us put the gloves on. The following is about who I am…. To read about what I’ve done, my LinkedIn profile provides that detail.

I recently received a great bumper sticker from a dear friend. It crystallized everything. The sticker reads, “Life is Short. Do Stuff That Matters.” If you scroll through my LinkedIn profile, you can see what I’ve done across my life’s journey. I hope some of it has mattered, but the parts that I hope have mattered aren’t just the results, metrics, things we typically track but instead that a smile I flashed, a word I said, or a feeling I evoked changed someone’s heart. For if we change a heart, we’ve made a ripple, a ripple that will flow from one person to the next.

In my case, the biggest ripple that changed me was the love of my life, Maureen Diercxsens Thompson. On July 14, 1990, we both said, “I do.” Of course, we knew we were soulmates the day we met each other a couple of years earlier. Her life was shorter than it should have been, but she did stuff that matters, not just architecture, but three loving children for whom I am privileged to be their father.

Her life on this side of heaven was shortened by breast cancer, an 11-year struggle, with 5 years of remission, and the past year one of increasing challenges with a metastasis. She did stuff that matters all the way to her last breath, working the Tuesday before her passing and loving on all of us throughout the weekend before her final Tuesday.

This is who I am. I am a man that was blessed by the love of his life. I am a man driven to change how we think about and fight cancer. I am a man that will not cease in Thinking Different about how we as people connect with each other.

About The End of Linearity

The End of Linearity is designed as a place for expressing my thoughts around the evolution of a miscellanized world and its impact on society, education and our lives together. It is also a place for my own non-linear journey through life.