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Passing Friendship

Moments of mortality strike in ways that we rarely anticipate. While terminal diseases or the advancement of age can give a person the opportunity to prepare for the final departure, too often it happens abruptly and shockingly.

A coworker of mine came close to losing his life in March when he was struck by a truck whilst riding his motorcycle. As he's said since then, one gains a new perspective on the priorities of life when that happens, and things that supposedly mattered turned out to not matter nearly so much.

On Facebook yesterday, the sad new came to my attention that one of my high school friends, Dylan Thornton was killed in an accident on I-15, the interstate that connects the state from its Idaho border down to its southern extremes. I was never particularly close to Dylan, but he was definitely within my broader circle of friends. Back in the late nineties, we spent a number of evenings together. We made jokes in class. We were part of each other's dance groups. I have a story where I accidentally puked in his kitchen (not the time or place for that one). In short, Dylan was a piece of my youth.

Hearing that he died unnerved me. This news story contains the details that I had never bothered to learn after we parted ways back in 2001. As I read the article, I was surprised to learn that he was a teacher, like me. He taught social studies (as do I). But then I realized why the middle school where he taught sounded familiar: I pass his school on my way to work every day.

In fact, I passed an awful accident on north bound I-15 yesterday. Both my son and I expressed sympathy for the people stuck in that traffic.

I didn't pause for a moment to think about who may have been hurt.

I never thought that I knew the man who died on that road.

We're all well aware but never speak of the fact that our streets are greased with blood. We discuss the risks of the road in abstract terms. We recognize but never vocalize the fact that we run unhappy odds that something far beyond our control can turn our freeways into our mortal life's cul de sac. Dylan was going to do a job like mine, with students he cared about--as I do--and his death will impact those kids who relied on his humor, compassion, and humanity.

Death so often is external to me. It's fiction in the stories I read with my students, or dream up in my own. The real life tragedies always float out of reach. It takes conscious, considerable effort for me to generate the empathy of those who have died in the historical past and give them hopes, dreams, and expectations--a tangibility that I try to communicate to my students. There's an obvious reality that you can't bemoan someone dead for hundreds of years, as nothing would have allowed them to continue to breathe from then until now. I don't shed tears that Shakespeare has passed on.

But Dylan? A wonderful human whose own story I neither read nor knew was coming to an end? That feels strange. That's hard.

Our friendship has passed us by, much as I passed him by as he passed away.

I don't know what to make of that.

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