Beagle & Deb at In de Vrede Cafe taproom of Trappist Westvleteren on the Great Zythos Beer Festival Beer Tour of Belgium.
Back in 2012 I got an email from a Belgian beer lover in New Jersey, who wanted to sign her and her husband up for a beer tour. I told her she just won the Best Wife in the World Award, which turned out to be an understatement. Deb and her husband Brian, known as Beagle, had been married for 9 years. He got the nickname Beagle from his older brother, who when they were little couldn’t pronounce Brian correctly and it sounded more like Beagle.
Deb wanted to do something special for Beagle for a reason I did not see coming. Up to this point, this is a fairly common story as I’ve had a number of wives sign them and their husbands up for one of my many beer tours. Most of my travelers are couples.
She went on to delicately but forthrightly tell me in an email,
““See, not to be a downer but, my husband was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in 2009. He’s 44 and all of this has truly made us re-evaluate putting things off and letting life pass us by. He is currently “stable” meaning they have it under control and is in the best care we could ever ask for. Trips like this give us a reason to carry on and keep kicking cancer in the ass. He’s not letting it bring him down and is really quite able to do anything he wants. He’s the strongest person I know and this trip is a dream of his...This year, well, when I looked up the dates, I damn near cried. I am finally able to get him to Belgium!!!!””
This, as you can see, was to be a bucket list vacation just in case as there was a likelihood he could come out of remission.
So Deb and Beagle signed up for the Great Zythos Beer Festival Tour 2013. They went on the tour and had a great time. How could they not? Traveling across Belgium and enjoying some of the finest beer in the world. Only the three of us knew of Beagle’s cancer remission. It was our secret. Beagle did great on the tour and spent much of it smiling ear-to-ear. I was grateful to be able to play a role in producing a tour that provided so much pleasure for this seemingly regular couple from New Jersey. I was being a real Beer Santa. The tour wrapped up in Leuven, we had our farewell dinner to put a bow on the tour, give everyone a chance to share their favorite memories and say their goodbyes. Then everyone went their own way back home.
I kept in touch with Deb by seeing her posts on Facebook from time to time, as we do with each other. Then months later in January of 2014, I saw a Facebook post from Deb that Beagle’s cancer had returned and that he had passed. I imagined how devastated Deb must have been. I was crushed because I was thinking he had beat the odds, but this sadly was not the case. I extended my heartfelt condolences to Deb. What a wonderful wife, to sign him up for that beer tour? We can only hope that if we were in the same situation someone would do something for us that meant so much.
When I first started producing and leading beer tours, I had no way of knowing that I would be able to play such an important, yet unexpected, role in people’s lives, using my knowledge and passion to provide pleasure and comfort for them. I’m honored to have known Beagle, to still know Deb and to have had a hand in Beagle getting to Belgium. I am humbled. I have been thinking about recounting this story of Beagle and Deb for years and was recently prompted to do it in this blog (with Deb’s consent) when I saw Deb’s recent Facebook post paying tribute on the anniversary of Beagle’s passing.
As the years went on, I would catch bits and pieces of Deb’s life from her posts. She met a new man, Chris, and married in 2017. She lived to love again. They got a St. Bernard puppy named Tater. My heart was warmed.