Someone is alive and walking around and talking and having fun and making people smile and staying positive through the worst, then all of a sudden they’re not. All of a sudden they’re just gone.
Maybe it’s not sudden. Maybe they’ve been sick for a while and you always knew this was going to happen, but it still hits you harder than you expect it to. Maybe that person was a big part of your life, or maybe they were just a small piece, but they mattered. They made a difference. Their presence changed something in your life, whether it was a miniscule detail or a giant cluster of moments that would never have happened if you hadn’t known them.
It’s hard to watch the world keep spinning for everyone else when your life has such a hole in it and such a bright light has gone out. You still have classes and meetings, work and extracurriculars, but nothing is really the same.
Everything else seems so small and so trivial. Why should you do your readings when someone is entirely gone from this life? How are you supposed to keep up with everything still moving when all you want is to stay in the past when that person was still a part of your life.
There’s a quote I grew up hearing that was always applied to the last day of summer camp when everyone cried about leaving their favorite place in the world. But I think it’s pretty applicable to this situation even if it’s cheesy.
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” Dr. Seuss said that in his infinite wisdom. The advice is there: Don’t cry about death, smile about life.
Celebrate that person’s gigantic smile and the way he filled any room. Celebrate his passions for song, dance and technical theater. Celebrate the Fourth of July at the beach where you went to his house late past midnight afterwards and just talked and giggled about the Big Ben Twitter account.
Celebrate all the days you drove him home from school because it was too hot to walk, or because it was raining, when he told you about his girlfriend at the time and how she was being unreasonable, so you knocked some sense into him because that girl absolutely deserved a response to that question.
Celebrate the last time you saw him at your birthday party the summer before college, when he showed up way too overdressed because he was going to a different party after, and he didn’t smile in the picture because his huge clown-like frown was definitely funnier.
Celebrate your Twitter conversations last year when you were excited about the smoothies you could make in your new blender; he asked you to send him one, and you joked about sending a smoothie through UPS all the way to Berkeley.
Celebrate how positive he was through all of it, how he was smiling in all those pictures even up until the end.
Even though you didn’t talk much recently, you were best friends once, and that counts. And you can’t forget that. And he had so many great friends before you and after you that you’re learning about on Facebook now, and you are so grateful that he was never alone. You’re overwhelmed by how much love for him exists in the world but you’re not surprised. He always made friends wherever he went.
Thanks for being a part of my life, a part of so many lives. This one’s for you Chris Cosby.
