Patrick and Kristin
Patrick and Kristin
Originally uploaded by #anne#This is my friend Patrick. I learned on Friday afternoon that he had died last weekend, unexpectedly. His death is just... completely senseless. He was one of the most alive people I knew. Relentlessly active, creative, passionate, intense.
We first met at the start of my sophomore year at Macalester; he had just transferred from Grinnell. We met in a computer science class and quickly became inseparable. I can't tell you how many emails we exchanged, meals we shared, projects we worked on together, and so on. I remember once pulling an all-nighter with him, working on a computer science project. We fueled ourselves with harsh french-press coffee and hand-rolled cigarettes. At dawn, we went outside for a smoke and made fun of the people starting their morning runs.
We lived together the summer after that and the following spring in a group house near campus, full of wild adventures and cooking experiments. During that time our relationship became strained and we decided we could not live together the following year. Despite our problems, this crushed me. It felt so wonderful to be a part of his sphere that I could not imagine moving past it.
In the years after that we patched up our friendship, but never regained that initial intensity. Still, we saw each other with some regularity when we were both in grad school, listening to mix tapes in his car like the old days. Whenever I spoke with him we were able to pick up the connection immediately and talk like always. This picture was one of those occasions, our friend Anne's wedding last summer.
Since learning of his death, I have had a constant reel of memories of him playing in my head. Even the littlest things-- I saw a jar of Nutella on my shelf and thought, oh, Patrick loved Nutella!
Even though we weren't as close in recent years, I know he continued to live with such intensity and creativity and joy. I just can't believe that force is no longer in the world. Honestly, after his memorial service I kept feeling that he would pop out of some back room and thank us all for being there.
It's kind of blowing my mind how all the trite things people say when someone dies seem so right when someone you actually know dies.