Introduction
I was once so lucky to meet a man who was too big to fit inside of one name. You might have known him too, and if you did, you were so lucky! We were friends for a decade, roommates for a while, and for the last four years of his life, me, him, and my partner Derek shared a kind of bonded love that no amount of words will ever capture.
But I’ll try.
Greg Corbin had a list of alter egos almost as long as the number of his friends, who are legion.
Greg’s unique ability and capacity to connect with people in meaningful and exuberantly present ways, were legendary. This outrageously heart-generous man was truly a legend for legions. And this, you might say, is my heart-generous way of contributing to Greg’s legacy. This is my Gregism Legacy Legend for Legions … project. I think he would like the too muchness of it all.
So this is my story. My gift to you, in memory of the last absolutely glorious time I got to spend with this dynamo of a human being, and fair warning – I go on and on. With pictures and videos and back stories. Since they’re the freshest in my mind and last stories I ever get to tell about the great big life I got to share with this man who touched my heart in ways I know I will never quite be able to transmit with the mere mortality of these words, I’ve decided to indulge in telling it all the long way.
Grab a cup of tea, curl up under a blanket, and hunker in. Be prepared to laugh, to be shocked, maybe even to judge me, or Derek, or even Greg, at times, a little bit, and definitely to cry. The ending is a real heartbreaker, especially if you’re a sucker for plot twists and red roses, as I will be, forevermore.
If there’s something Greg taught me, and that I hope to impart in some small way to you, it’s that this business of being human is messy, is ascendant, and can be, if you let in the possibility for it, a high tea of hilarity riding an ocean of symbolism.
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This is the story of a trip that was supposed to be one of many.
Greg had built a life that revolved around connection. He spent time and energy creating experiences for the people he loved. They weren’t small gestures. They were elaborate, intentional acts of love. He wanted people to feel something. To feel joy, surprise, delight. And he got genuine happiness from watching us experience those things.
My relationship with him was deeply intertwined with both everyday intimacy and heightened experiences. Phone calls, inside jokes, alter egos, rituals like the Cantina, the scavenger hunts, the restaurants. There was a rhythm to our connection. It wasn’t casual. It was immersive.
Café de Olla and Pepe’s Taco became more than restaurants. They were anchors. The staff, the routines, the food, even “Mr. Mexico” and those Pepe’s Taco boys became part of it. They became characters in this story, part of the world Greg had created and invited us into.
Throughout the trip, there was this constant oscillation between joy and intensity. We were having the time of our lives. We were laughing our heads off. We were drinking, exploring, playing games, making videos. There was absurdity, humor, chaos, and so much affection.
But underneath that, there were also glimpses of something else.
Greg’s complexity was everywhere. He was generous, thoughtful, hilarious, deeply loving. But also impulsive, intense, drawn to risk, someone who lived right at the edge of things. He could be “healthy, obnoxious boy” one moment, focused on fruit and vitamins, and then swing back into partying and drinking the next.
There were also threads of transition.
Greg was changing. He talked about becoming someone different. Moving away from being a party figure, toward being someone grounded in family values, leaning even more deeply into experience and connection. He wanted to continue improving his home, shift his identity, build something more wholesome.
But that transition wasn’t complete. All these versions of him were still present.
This story is full of experiences.
Excursions, the pirate ship, Survivor Island, the ATV tour, massages, the spa, the beach, the red rose in the ocean. That moment with the rose stands out as something symbolic. It captured something mythic about our connection. Standing in the water, holding something perfect and unexpected, talking about the future.
We were making plans.
Real plans.
Living together.
Spending winters there.
Building a shared life in that place.
There was also this sense that I was documenting everything more than usual. Taking more photos, more videos. Almost like something in me knew to capture it.
At the same time, there were moments of danger and vulnerability.
My fall on the mountain.
The motorcycle incident.
Greg hitting his head multiple times.
The intensity of drinking.
The unpredictability of “Chriiis” and “Ricky Rooster Randy.”
And then the balcony moment.
At the time, it still felt like part of the chaos and intensity of the trip. Greg triggering my trauma, and then reassuring me that he was in control.
But that moment became deeply significant in hindsight.
The final stretch of the trip felt different.
There was a shift. I remember feeling overwhelmed, emotional, almost like something was ending, even though we had plans to return. That walk to Café de Olla where I felt that ache in my throat and couldn’t explain it.
A sense of urgency, a sense that this mattered so much, a sense of trying to hold onto the moment.
The last experiences were quieter in tone. The Italian dinner. The final photos. The blanket I bought him for his future home. Small details that now carry an enormous weight.
Then the goodbye.
A long, intimate, deeply emotional goodbye. Holding each other. Expressing how much we loved each other. Fully expecting that we would see each other again.
And then the final moment.
Me sitting in the Uber. Watching Derek hug him. Thinking about getting out and going back for one more hug.
And choosing not to, because there would be another time.
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Before I get into the tale of the last supper and whatnot, though, I’d like to tell you how in those days immediately after, Iryss and I took a look at the Life Of Greg, after the ferociously too early end of it arrived, unwanted by any of us. We realized he behaved in a certain kind of way that many of us benefited from. We distilled it into a formula. It goes like this:
➜ Step 1. Do a nice thing for someone.
(Make it personal.)
➜ Step 2. Delay your own gratification.
(Make it a surprise.)
➜ Step 3. Add some theatre.
(Make it extra.)
Creating this dedicated part of my website for Greg, social media vehicles for the sharing of your interpretation of this formula, as a way of catalyzing and capturing the inimitable magic Greg inspired, is my act of devoted, enduring love for this dear man and the innumerable ways he made my life shinier. Maybe, somehow, in this, I will survive life without him. Maybe, somehow, in this, you will too. Maybe, somehow, in this, each of us finds more magic … and maybe, from the great beyond, our beloved Greg will find his way to nudge the magic a bit, from over there.
They say, in the forest, something that can kill you is near something that can heal you. It’s the magic of an alive ecosystem. I’m lost in a dark forest of grief right now that feels like it could end me. I’m hoping that inviting you to join me in this Gregism Gregacy Legend for Legions project, we’ll create something together that truly celebrates the ethos of what a spirit like Greg Corbin came here to inspire and heal in us. This is me looking for the thing that will heal me, while my grief feels all too crushing and deadly.
I like to picture Greg sitting somewhere in sparkly underpants underneath the tailored menswear he was getting ready to don more of, delighting in all of what we’ll create together, inspired by his very Gregismy way of surviving everything that makes living hard to survive.
Me sharing this pictorial and video montage of Greg’s last two weeks of life is my Gregorian chant to you. May you laugh, cry, forgive, be inspired and go forth and perform your own versions of how Greg did what he did for us.
That’s what the Gregacy is: the new world we are going to create that must exist because he died.
May this help us all survive what losing him did to us.
The Gregacy is a gateway – to living better, by loving more, and laughing more. It’s here, and will be, forever, on my website:
www.GeoRevHooping.com/Greg
Let’s create a ripple of actions that bring a little more Greg into our ecosystems.
Join me.
And now, the tea.
Let me show and tell you about my time with Greg’s last weeks.
Prequel: The Origin of Poontang
If you knew Greg, you know that this man could tell a story like no other. He was incredibly expressive and often required about 15 square feet of space to tell a story, acting out all the different parts with his whole body. His stories were infectious and stayed with you long after they were over. I have to begin this entire memoir with one such story that Greg told us, because it changed our world and got stuck in our heads in the worst way. I can’t tell the story of the last two weeks of his life without explaining it. Unfortunately, it revolves around a naughty word, but it came to mean something entirely different to us.
Of course, we’ve all heard of “poontang,” the vulgar slang popularized during the Vietnam era, often used in misogynistic context or in sexually aggressive language. That is not how we used it. In fact, part of the reason this story needs to be told is to separate what that word has historically meant from what it became inside our friendship.
Greg told Derek and me this story almost two years ago. It was just a random night at my house, the three of us sitting around the dining room table, and it went something like this. I want you to imagine Greg telling it the way he did, fully animated, pausing for effect, acting out both sides.
He had invited a young man back to his house after they had gone out for drinks. As they were talking, Greg noticed that the guy had a habit of signaling that he was following along in the conversation by offering small verbal confirmations. Where most of us might say “yeah,” “okay,” or “I’m with you,” this guy would say “okay,” but his pronunciation was shaped strongly by the tonal patterns of his native language. The result was that it sounded, unmistakably, like “poontang.” If I had to spell what Greg heard, it would be something like “ppphhhhpppUNTANG,” with a heavy tonal contour layered over the English word.
After a few exchanges, Greg realized what he was hearing, and it absolutely delighted him. So he started leaning into it. He would say something, pause deliberately, and then glance over, waiting for it, just to hear that “poontang” land again. The way Greg told this story had us in stitches. He acted out both sides of the conversation, stretching the pauses, exaggerating the timing, and we were laughing so hard we could barely breathe.
That was the beginning.
The three of us started repeating “poontang” almost immediately. It became a kind of verbal stim that we latched onto hard. For years before that, we had already been saying “m’kay” to each other in that same rhythmic, repetitive way, and this just replaced it. Evolved from it. The sound, the timing, the hilarity of it just fit perfectly into the way we already communicated.
The word detached completely from its original meaning.
Over time, “poontang” became a word that meant everything to us. It could be good or bad depending on the context. We identified as poontangs. If someone else was doing something stupid, they could be a poontang too. There was “poontangery” out in the world, and sometimes many, many poontangs in a single day. But it could also be light, playful, and affectionate. You could just be poontanging, whether you were working hard, or hardly working.
It became this full-spectrum word. Positive, negative, absurd, affectionate. The more ridiculous it got, the more it replaced our normal vocabulary. It became part of our private language, something that belonged entirely to the three of us. And we were very aware of how inappropriate it would sound to anyone else, which only made it harder to contain.
We used to joke about how it kept trying to slip out in public situations when we weren’t together. I would be at the border, trying to import supplies, standing in front of a border agent who looked like Rambo, and I would have to physically bite my tongue to stop myself from saying, “So what you’re saying is… poontang poontang poontang poontang.”
We also just… said it. Constantly. Repeatedly. I would estimate that between the three of us, we said “poontang” somewhere between 30 to 50 times a day, every day, for the last 600 days.
You can do the math.
And somewhere out there is a young man who will never know that his simple, tonal “okay” changed the language of our friendship and started a tidal wave of poontangery throughout Canadian society.
The Arrival
The view from Greg’s Casa (2025)
Greg has been traveling to Mexico nearly every winter for the last fifteen years, and Puerto Vallarta was his favorite city. He had a little casa, and it wasn’t just a vacation spot for him. It was his place.
The apartment itself was charming and a little irregular, brightly painted, full of art and cactii, and he loved it deeply. Every year he added to it in his own way. Wind chimes, a bidet, coloured lights, upgrades to the furnishings and appliances. He took pride in it. He was building something there, year by year.
What really made it special was the location.
His building sat high up on a mountain in Cinco de Diciembre, above the Zona Romántica. It was a dense, layered neighborhood, a mix of condos, Airbnbs, and makeshift homes stacked along the hillside. The road to get there was an extremely steep, uneven cobblestone road, that turned into a trecherous dirt road.
There was no parking in front of his building, and nowhere to turn around. Ubers would try, but most of them refused to go all the way up. Usually they would drop us at the top of the steep cobblestone section, and we would walk the rest of the way ourselves. Greg, of course, was fit enough that he often just walked straight up the whole thing like it was nothing.
I always found it kind of unbelievable that there were so many multi-story buildings packed onto the top of that mountain, along such a difficult dirt road. But because of that, the view was unreal. Completely unobstructed. Ocean, jungle, city, everything.
His apartment was a two-bedroom, but the heart of it was really three spaces: the kitchen and dining area flanked by the living room and the master bedroom. All three were connected by a long, narrow balcony that ran the length of the unit, and we used it constantly, moving between rooms along that outside edge with the view always right there.
The master bedroom was where Derek and I stayed. It had the ocean view and a king-size bed. It was Greg’s room when he was there alone, but he always gave it to his guests. He loved having people come stay with him. That was the whole point.
He had been inviting me for years before I finally went. We didn’t financially prioritize it for a long time, even with him offering to share his place. But in 2025, Derek and I made it work for the first time. Greg hosted us, and it was an unforgettable vacation that inspired us, big time.
So we spent the entire next year planning to go back in 2026.
I spent that whole year studying Spanish. By the time we returned, I knew over a thousand words and could hold basic conversations. Greg and I talked constantly leading up to the trip, on the phone and over text, going over everything we were going to do.
But when I look back on those conversations now, it wasn’t really about the plans. It was about being together. Just being with him, in the place he loved most.
At first sight, I fell in love with Puerto Vallarta too.
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Right before we left, there was a major cartel-related violence event. It happened on February 22, just three days before our flight. There were coordinated attacks across Jalisco, including in Puerto Vallarta. Businesses were set on fire, roads were blocked, vehicles were burned. It was all over the news.
For a day or two, we genuinely didn’t know if we were going to be able to go. A lot of people were telling us not to. And to be fair, there was some real risk. You’re never guaranteed safety anywhere, but in Mexico that reality feels more visible. Instability, accidents, violence. Those are things you accept as possible when you travel there.
The violence did seem targeted against the infrastructure and government response. There weren’t reports of civilians being murdered in PV. Still, for a while, we thought the trip was probably cancelled. It was really sad.
Meanwhile, Greg and his dad, Ray, were up at the apartment, completely tucked into what felt like a mountain fortress. The building had an iron gate, bars on the windows, and sat high above everything. They stayed in, all stocked up, and waited it out.
Greg wasn’t too concerned! He told us there was quite a bit of poontanging going on Sunday, but that there was significantly less poontangery by Monday and Tuesday. He had food, water, and plenty of booze, so he was playing video games while his dad kept up with the news. It definitely disrupted their usual routine, but from everything I heard, they actually had a really nice time just being there together.
He sent me pictures and videos, and you could see smoke rising in multiple columns, in his neighborhood. I think a lot of people would have been rattled by that. But not Greg. He was calm. Not reckless, he wasn’t going out, but he wasn’t panicking either.
They are burning down the Costco in Puerto Vallarta 😮 #mexico #2026
His biggest concern, by far, was when Costco was going to reopen.
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By Tuesday, February 24, my 44th birthday, things started to shift. The airport was operating again. Our flight wasn’t cancelled. So we made the decision. This trip meant too much to us to miss!
I had been working so hard for months to make this trip happen.
Our flight left at seven in the morning, which meant we were up at four, so we didn’t even bother going to sleep. We just planned to sleep on the plane.
For the second year in a row, I spent my birthday, February 24, in that strange in-between space, not really celebrating, just stressed and getting ready to leave. Derek was incredible through all of it, helping me pull everything together in the final hours before we had to go.
Even though I had a full year to prepare, I still found myself sewing until three in the morning, because of course I did.
I wanted clothes that would work for me in Mexico. It’s hot there, and we were coming straight from a Canadian winter. I wanted bamboo shorts and dresses with huge pockets. The kind where you can carry everything you need without a bag. I had this vision of being able to move around freely, especially on travel days and when we were out exploring. I had planned to make three dresses, but I only finished two. One was for going out, and one was for everyday wear, with massive pockets.
So Derek and I pulled an all-nighter, me sewing, him helping, both of us running on pure momentum, trying to get out the door in time.
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One of the main things we brought with us was our BedJet.
Derek packed it into our suitcase like it was essential equipment, which, to us, it was. A BedJet is basically a device that blows air into a special sheet so you can control the temperature of your bed. It sounds unnecessary until you try it, and then it becomes your entire personality.
People think they’re inviting me over for dinner, but no. It’s actually a three-hour BedJet pitch.
Greg was the first person I ever gave that pitch to, and he bit immediately. He bought one. He loved it. The three of us were fully converted BedJet heads. The only reason Greg didn’t bring his to Mexico was because Derek and I had two BedJet Minis, and his was too big to travel with.
So we brought one of ours, and the plan was to use it together on the king-size bed. We loved sharing a king-size bed. The three of us would inhabit a king, taking turns in the middle, cuddling, watching Survivor or whatever, completely poontanging.
Now, the sheet situation.
The BedJet works best with a special “cloud sheet” that has channels sewn into it. I had intended to make one before the trip, but because I was working three jobs and sewing until the last minute like a maniac, I didn’t get around to putting the channels in. So instead, I made a version with just a single opening. Which meant that instead of distributing the air, the BedJet just filled the entire sheet like a balloon. It would inflate up around us while we were in Mexico with like four feet of air, hovering over the bed.
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⋄⟡⋄So Derek and I got everything packed up. I had the dresses, we had the BedJet, and that was about it. We didn’t bring any real provisions, so if the cartel situation had still been actively unfolding when we arrived, we would have been in trouble. But we went anyway. We figured that even or especially if something was still going on, and Puerto Vallarta was dangerous, we would rather be with Greg in Mexico than not. Since the plane was still flying and hadn’t been canceled, we got on it.