Fragments of a Human Life.

Every January my company hosts its annual sales meeting.  The week long schedule is packed to the gills with meetings and presentations and sessions and keynotes.  And that's just during working hours. In the evening there are dinners and receptions and cocktail hours and hospitality suites.  It is exhausting.  Exhilarating.  But certainly exhausting.

Truthfully though, I tend to look forward to the scheduled dinners and evening activities the most; partially because it means any presentations I had to give during the day are behind me and mostly because it is one of the few times my colleagues and I can hang out socially and get to know one another a bit beyond the conference rooms and our work personas.

This past January, as one of those big group dinners was wrapping up, I found myself standing with a few of my colleagues that I didn't normally hang out with too often.  I knew them professionally of course, and we had worked on a handful of projects together throughout our tenure at the company.  As the event at the restaurant wound down it was with this group that I began talking about where we should head next; what nearby bar might be able to accommodate our boisterous crowd.  Before I knew it we had a rat pack assembled - a handful of my closest co-workers, along with our new found crowd.  We made our way along the sidewalks of San Francisco, all of us happy to have a week away from Boston's frigid temperatures, the group of us giddy with that funny combination of enjoying one glass of wine more than one should have at dinner, fresh air, and sales meeting exhaustion.  I don't remember how one joke in particular got started, but as we were walking something set one of my co-workers on a ridiculous and hilarious tangent that had the five of us almost doubled over we were laughing so hard.  In fact as I sit here right now, almost four months after the fact, my cheeks hurt a bit from smiling at the memory; it feels like it was just last week.   

On Saturday morning I learned from my manager that my colleague, that smart, funny, busy colleague of ours who had been the one to initiate that joke that kept us all in stitches that balmy night in San Francisco, died very suddenly and unexpectedly on Friday evening.  My boss had sent me a text early  on Saturday, asking me to call her when I could.  She and I get along very well, but we are not in the habit of connecting with one another over the weekend.  I prayed for some sort of corporate update, some announcement that might be going public on Monday that she wanted us to be prepared and aware of, but deep down in my gut I knew this was a more personal sort of update.  I feared the worst.  When she and I finally connected and she relayed the news I audibly gasped.  He was 40.  In good health.  Married.  Two little kids.  The smartest guy in the room.

What is this life.
This death.
Nonsensical.

Obviously when something like this happens people go through the "normal" stages of grief.  Personally, I have been faltering back and forth between completely shock and utter disbelief.  All afternoon on Saturday I just kept thinking - He was here. And now he's not.  Gone in an instant.  A blink.  A breath.  A silly joke told to keep a group of us entertained as we climbed San Francisco's steep sidewalks toward a bar.

I try, very hard, in this beautiful life I have been blessed with, to lead with love, to bring hope and joy and heart into my days, my own little world.  This attitude however is not always easy; there are certainly days I'm more patient, more aware and thoughtful, than others.  This week I have found myself walking around in a bit of a surreal daze, my heart heavy with the thought of this nonsensical loss, my chest literally aching with worry and stress and a multitude of other things that have been on my mind as of late.

I have wondered, as I think about my colleague, what his last thoughts were before he left this earth.  I hope, I pray, that they were good and peaceful and full of love.

Several of my colleagues and I joked through our grief on Monday nodding as we reminisced about him, that had he been there he would have told us all to get right back to work.  In thinking of my co-worker, I have been trying to reset my mind, to get back to the world I know and inhabit of focusing on the good and the simple.  To using my days well and brightly.  To details.  To paying attention.   For they are the things that make a life; that we remember. 

He will be missed immensely.

"There is no end.  There is grief and there is love and they spin together in this human body which is, in itself also a book."
-Column McCann-