Ron Mardigian: In Memoriam

My friend Caroline is in China for a business trip and she emails me to say hi, to tell me she's in Beijing. "I forgot you are in Shanghai!" she writes. It would have been nice to see her, but at least it's good to hear from her.

Caroline and I used to work together at Bio-Rad, a company that makes research equipment for researchers in biology and medicine and where Caroline still works (and where I used to be a high-powered HR professional). We are both of Sephardic Jewish background, and even have the some of the same friends, which we discover after we hang out for a while.

Caroline tells me why she's in China, where she's staying and then she tells me that a coworker of ours, Ron Mardigian, has died.

I am in shock. Ron was in his forties. Forty-nine to be exact. He was older than me, but he always felt and looked around my age, not "old" by any stretch of the imagination.

I don't get it. I email Caroline again. She tells me that Ron went to Tahoe, went to sleep one night, and didn't wake up the next morning. They don't know what happened.

I am still in shock. Ron was not an old man. Actually, he was a very young, and alive, man. Just to give you a little taste of Ron, when he started working for Bio-Rad, which is right on the San Francisco Bay, he would go windsurfing during lunch (that is, until someone told him that he couldn't).

Ron and I would hang out at in between cubicles, chatting about backpacking. Ron was Armenian, I am half-Moroccan Jewish, and I felt we also had this connection somewhere way back in the East. Ron taught me some bad words in Armenian, but I forgot.

Whenever I saw Ron, we would talk, crack jokes together, and laugh. Ron made the corporate world at least 28% more bearable. Little did I know, but in less than two years, I would be leaving it to start my journey as a Chinese doctor, something that Ron thought was cool.

Despite the fact that I would be abandoning the world of computers, reports, email, office politics, and performance reviews, I found that there were many really good people at Bio-Rad. People who were human. And then there was Ron. I would say he was a Boddhisattva, which just means someone with a deep, kind heart who cares a lot about others.

After working for Bio-Rad for a while, Ron had an idea to bring biology to classrooms, and asked the president of Bio-Rad if he could help biology teachers teach kids biology by using kits the company would produce, kits that schools would never otherwise have access to.

Fortunately, the president said yes, and Ron's job changed.

Here is what one teacher said about the program that Ron helped create:

After completing my biology course, featuring your Explorer Kits, a student asked me what she needed to do to go to college. Up to the point of seeing and doing genetic engineering, she had no reason to pursue her education beyond high school. There wasn't a single person in her family that had ever attended college and she had no idea where to start. What she did have was a passion to learn more and a sense of purpose for her life. Over the next two years, we worked together to get the necessary perquisites completed, including an independent research project using one of the Bio-Rad kits. I am writing you today, because I just attended her graduation from UC Berkeley, where she earned a degree in Neurobiology. This fall she will start a graduate program at Johns Hopkins where she plans to pursue a PhD. It is these students that make my job worth while, but having the Bio-Rad curriculum and the wonderful kits to awaken the passion for exploration makes my job a lot easier.

To me, Ron is not gone. I can hear his voice. Even now, he is inspiring me. He is telling me to live my life with integrity, to be happy, to have fun, to be of service to others. And most importantly to laugh.

Ron, bro, you gave me and others many gifts, and even now, you've given us another. We wish you were still here with us to laugh and bring us your warm spirit, but we know that sometimes you just gotta accept reality and let it unfold in its way.

It's like an old Korean Zen teacher in Berkeley used to say. He used to teach the following mantra to his students: "Don't know!" In other words, we have to be okay with not knowing the reasons for everything.

Ron, I don't know why you've left us, but I can feel you smiling now. I can feel that big heart of yours. I know you loved all of us. I love you, and I know many, many others did, too.

From the bottom of my heart: Thanks. I'm going to do my best, bro!