Der mentsh trakht un got lakht. Man plans, God laughs. Or is it God plans, man cries? All I know is somebody fucked up and there doesn't seem to be a Plan B and the tears won't stop.
As we search for reasons (there are none) or meaning (there is none) or solace (there does not appear to be any), we slog through the muck of our own irrepressible thoughts as we tiptoe around the palpable heartbreak on the faces of his parents, his brother, his soon-to-be-fiancee. We bring offerings -- cookies baked in grief, candies spun in empathy, vegetables marinated in fear. It feels better to eat than to speak. When we speak, we say the darnedest things. As if there is a right thing.
At the risk of gross understatement, somebody with great promise has died. This was a special twenty-seven year old, just as a twenty-seven year old should be. Smart, ambitious, generous, energetic, successful, fearless. Keenly aware of life's evanescence, eerily so, but completely unafraid. He leaves the rest of us determined to honor his legacy, to forge ahead, to open our hearts, to be unafraid. Yet he leaves us all, in our own way, terrified.
On the days leading up to the funeral, it was hard to resist comparisons to The Big Chill. University of Michigan alumni gathering together to mourn the untimely death of a friend. Friends bound together by a shared campus during a tumultuous era. Years later, they wonder why their friend is gone. They wonder, too, why their ideals and dreams are gone too, buried long before they lowered their friend into the ground.
This was different, though. Very different. Five years out of college, these kids are still living their dreams. They are too busy to be disillusioned, too enthusiastic for regrets, too young to lose one of their own. These kids are bound together, too, by college campuses and the tumultuousness of their own generation, but they still straddle other worlds. They are still our children. They are still remembered by teachers who knew them when, who knew they would one day do great things. They are still, by virtue of youth and with a little help from social media, very much tied into their childhood friends, their high school buddies, their prom dates. They have parents, and grandparents. They belong to all of us, still. They have launched, but not completely. I defy anybody to recall Alex's mother in The Big Chill, or a brother, or to know what he was like as a child, or even what he looked like in college. (Okay, we know it was Kevin Costner, but that was not essential to the story.) This was different. Very different.
Adam never got the chance to become jaded. He was human, and no doubt suffered disappointments, but he was a long way from being disappointed. He was way too young and way too busy. This week, I met people who knew Adam before he grew up, people who grew up with him, people who watched him grow up, and people who were ready and, as his soon-to-be-fiancee put it, excited to continue the journey with him. He touched so many lives, so many generations, and nobody can figure out, yet, how to pick up the pieces.
Today, with everybody dispersed back to their own lives, his parents -- and I borrow his mother's words here -- must face the first day of the rest of their lives. Adam would tell them -- and the rest of us -- to be optimistic and energetic and unafraid, the way he was. To love, and to travel, and to express our true selves. He would want us to laugh again. We look to Adam, I suppose, for Plan B.
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