Eight: Memento Vivere

Dear Mark, This week marks eight years since you left this world for the next. I was recently telling someone that after you died and I went back to work, I was walking towards the bathroom from my office in the Student Union, glanced over to the other side of our floor, and reversed course. For months I had searched everywhere for you, and on that day I was certain you were hiding at the end of that darkened hallway and had decided to surprise me by showing up at my job. Instead, I found a group of students eating their lunch in the Student Government Office and I hurriedly turned around and hid in the back stairwell in shock. I don’t know if I was more stunned that you weren’t there or that I had completely lost my mind. While that memory and others are so vivid, much of those early years are a blur. Everything seemed like it was in freefall and for the life of me I could not get a grip on a single thing to stop descending into blackness. I would count down one day without you, one…