A celebration of life, then and now
One life lived, and one still ongoing
I’ve written about my friend Chad twice here over the last year. The first time, a little over a year ago, when I dialed his home number from when we were kids, hoping to reach him, to connect with my sick friend.
I did eventually reach him, once by phone and a handful of times by email before he passed away from a cancer I know very little about because he never wanted to talk about it. Instead, he always asked for details from my life—pictures, videos, stories of our vibrant existence with our vibrant daughter.
And so I gave them to him, emails with stories of the first day of sixth grade, kayaking on Mirror Lake, the latest trip to Disney, and many other milestones.
The second time I wrote about Chad was in memory of him and of our formative years together in high school—him, me, and our buddy Matt.
And now, for a third time, I’m compelled to talk to you about him again.
This past Saturday was a celebration of life held in his honor at his parents’ beautiful home and garden on the southern Maine coast. There were heartfelt tributes, hilarious stories, and a dedication of a new greenhouse in honor of a man who loved to sink his hands in the soil.
I was fortunate to reconnect with his sister (a warm and wonderful farmer in Alaska), his brother (who was so young the last time we saw each other that he barely remembered me), and with Matt, my oldest friend and a guy I’d really like to see more often if he didn’t live on the opposite coast.
I also got to (finally) meet and spend some time with his life partner who lives with their son in their native Switzerland. Our time together was far too short, but we started to fill each other in on the parts of his life we knew best that the other didn’t—me, the early years; her, the later ones.
I hope this isn’t the last time I see her. I hope the next time I can talk with their son, a shy teen who is the spitting image of his dad and seems to have his thirst for knowledge, for questions, for figuring it all out.
A celebration of our life, now
We carve out time and travel great distances to celebrate life that is no longer with us. I wanted to end today with a celebration of our life, as we live it now.
Today our daughter was back on the waves, surfing with over a dozen other special-needs kids and adults on a warm, blustery Maine beach.
It doesn’t get much better.
See y’all Friday for our live show with author Lucy Knisley. :)
❤️
Adam