conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
July 9, 2006 at 2:14 am
· Filed under life thoughts, people
My original intention was to write some non-sense about Pirates of the Caribbean: Dean Man’s Chest, or complain some more about unmet expectations. That all went out the window when I saw an email in my inbox from Mary Ashburn with a subject line of “sad news”. Upon opening the email, my jaws dropped, my hands went up instinctively to cover my mouth as I sat in my hotel room in Reston, Virginia wondering what the hell happened up on Boston. The tears came gushing out as I clicked through the Boston Globe article link that came with the hard-to-believe words of the email. The tears wouldn’t stop.
The funny thing is that I actually thought about Dave yesterday. I was sitting on the hotel shuttle that picked me up from Dulles Airport. Right as we turned left onto Sunrise Valley Drive from the exit road off of Dulles Toll, I thought “Gee, I really haven’t seen Dave for a while. I wonder how he’s doing. And really, here’s a guy who is super cute, so nice, and such a solid person. And Harvard Med to boot. Why the hell is he single? I wonder if he’s got a girl now?” I don’t know what exactly about the way the traffic light looked as the shuttle turned, or the way the suburban parkway was lined with brightly-green trees, what about those that made my thoughts randomly turn to Dave Magoon. And the timing … yesterday of all days I randomly thought about Dave Magoon.
I can’t stop asking myself just how in the world this can possibly be??? How do accidents like this happen? How did I ever manage to get up from my near-death bike crash last week? How can Dave possibly no longer be with us? How can life be so ridiculously unpredictable, so lucky and so unfairly unlucky at the same time? Of all the people in the world, how could it possibly have been Dave?
The funny thing is that the last time I saw Dave, he was actually laughingly weaving me a story about the rooftop above his apartment that he is not allowed to be on. He and his roommate put a gazebo on the rooftop so that they could go out there and party it up sometimes. However, a great big gust of wind blew the gazebo over the edge of the building, landing it on a car parked in the street and completely ruined the car. He laughed and said he wasn’t sure how they were going to resolve the issue with the car-owner nor his landlord because his landlord would first demand to know why there was a gazebo on the forbidden rooftop to begin with.
There is one memory that I will always remember of Dave. When I saw him in Boston last fall, the first time in what must have been at least a couple of years, he gave me a hug so big, and so geunine, that anyone else would have thought we were long-lost siblings seeing each other for the first time in decades. It made me feel so good.
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I’m sorry to hear of the loss of your friend Shan. The two biggest reasons people are religious is life and death - it makes both things so much easier to deal with when there’s a sense of purpose. I’m envious of people who follow faith, as it’s not something I’ve ever been able to feel deep inside. I look at so many things in the world, and it in fact does not make sense. Even the miracle of life doesn’t require a god if we allow for the existence of infinite parallel universes (that’s not sci-fi, just a real possibility). But that also doesn’t mean there’s no reason, no god. We can’t judge things outside our universe by the laws we form within it. Maybe outside our universe, in Heaven or limbo or whatever, 2+2=5 somehow. And maybe that means something that we see no meaning in actually has great significance above just empty loss. That’s as close as I get to being religious I guess, is realizing I really don’t know anything and - as a thinking feeling human being - must believe there *is* a reason…
[…] In the mail today, I got the annual report published by the scholarship I had at UVA, telling about what the current Scholars are up to, and what all the alumni are up to. Glancing through all the classes, there were two “In Memoriam” in total, both in the 2000s (the program started in the early 80s). One was for Dave; the other was for a guy of whom I knew, but I never knew him personally. Ironically, I knew he was really good friends with Mary, the girl who passed on word to me about Dave’s death this summer. I tried to google some information on the second guy’s death, but everything I found simply said that he died in his home on February 6. This made me wonder how Mary is doing. I haven’t really seen her since she graduated in 2001, nor have I talked to her much, yet she was such a defining person for me my first semester at college. I want to reach out to her, just to say hi, ask how she’s doing, how she’s holding up. To lose two dear friends in one year must be so tough, but I don’t know how to approach her. It’s been so long, and I don’t even know what I would say. […]
[…] « how can it be? missed connections? » […]
Shan - Hey, not sure if you’ll check this link or not. But, I felt like writing. David and I shared a birthday, which was yesterday. Yep, not the same year, but the same day… I’ve known the Magoon family since I was born and David as long as he walked the Earth.
Anyhow, I am writing simply because I was thinking about David today and Googled his name. Your post came up and I wanted to let you know I appreciated what you wrote. Still sucks though. Even a year later… sigh.
Cheers,
Mark
PS: do you live in Charleston? I’m an officer in the Navy and spent a good deal of time there over the past few years. I love Charleston, the city just has the most amazing feel.
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