Requiem

I wrote the following piece to memorialize a dear friend who passed away unexpectedly in March 2026.

Dear Kristin:

I was walking down Sycamore Street in Arlington, Virginia when I learned that you had died. To call myself shocked would be to belittle shock, and to say saddened would understate sadness. That you and I had been texting not days before about the inanities of Wuthering Heights both accurately captured our friendship and underscored the cruelty of fate. Since then, I have struggled to find the words that capture my grief. I doubt I will.

For three decades, our friendship defied description. Every moniker I’ve tried to label you with--my best friend from high school, my closest friend, even (as I once told you) my best friend--undersells how much you meant, how many aspects of my life you influenced. Without question, I would not have evolved into the person I am without you. Not close.

While I knew you before I went abroad, it was senior year, my awkward wedge between Germany and college, that this friendship grew. As I reeled from the loss of my “other world,” you became that sounding board and comrade. One who got all the jokes, who could push me to study harder, who could meet me in my angst, whom I could just exist with. While I appreciated you in the moment, it was only later that I realized how seismic this had been. Not only were you the first friend from home to visit my “other world” with me, but you helped me re-establish my life in America.

Yet while most high school friendships don’t survive graduation, ours blossomed. Across all facets of life, I learned to lean on your wisdom and levity. Those times I needed a laugh. Your steadiness in advising me through breakups. Even years later I’d go back and read those emails and marvel at your ability to both acknowledge my grief and see both perspectives clearly. That one ex considered you a threat long after our split speaks to your and my connection more than any compliment I could give.

In my younger days, I held this notion that everyone in your life filled a defined role, a social circle of interchangeable pieces as crisp as the Seven Ages of Man in “As You Like It.” While I realize now how naive that was, I should have seen it far earlier. Because you transcended labels. You were equally as comfortable as an intellectual sparring partner as you were goofing off, as informed about the Red Sox as about Shakespeare, as eager to spout off about the Beatles vs. Van Morrison as the politics of the Holy Roman Empire. But beyond that, it was your eye--your discerning editor’s eye--that elevated my writing from hobby into livelihood more than any teacher or colleague ever did. And while there’s plenty I couldn’t have written without you, I’ll leave it at this: Without your critique on those business school essays, they don’t woo business schools. And without business school, I don’t meet my wife or build the life I have now.

You are as irreplicable as you are irreplaceable. For a friend who defies labels, so must the grief.