OK, a second word from the heart

It's taken me a while to be able to say this at all, and I'm pretty sure that my buddy would be on my case about what I'm saying, but I have to say it anyway.

One of our common friends, also a fraternity brother, aptly noted that Keith was "a gentle soul". That he was, and he was more. He was as orny, hard-headed, blunt, and unyielding as anyone I have ever known. He asked no quarter and gave none, but he still listened and considered. He loved to make a point, that's for sure, but he was always open to facts, logic, sound reasoning and positive outcomes. We talked and discussed a lot, but we never debated. Neither of us ever tried to be "right". What we shared, I believe, is a love of meaningfulness in life. Some might want to call it "truth", but in the end, things had to make sense and they needed to make sense in the larger scheme of things as well. Without heat and hammer a strong sword cannot be forged.

Truth be told, Keith and I were rarely the same mind about anything, but, this is most important, Keith was a person you could connect with. As human and imperfect as he was, he had a lot in common with what the Kabbalists call a Tzaddik (a righteous man), one who is toku k'varo ("their insides are like their outsides"), or, as I like to put it, what-you-see-is-really-what-you-get. They are their own persons; that is, in my mind, authentic: they can get hot under the collar, but are never mean-spirited. And, for as odd as they sometimes appear to others, they retain an aura of innocence that can calm even their harshest opponents.

I must admit that I have been allowed to live an exceptionally fortunate life and I've been blessed with meeting a very few, truly exceptional people. And yes, in his own way, my brother Keith was one of them. I'm going to miss him to be sure, but I have to add that as far as he is concerned, I don't have a single, dark, troubling, or even uneasy memory. He was simply who he was.

Time and our perception of time is a big thing for me, and I'm a big fan of time relativity: Einstein once said that sitting together with a beautiful girl for two hours seems like ten minutes, but sitting on a hot stove for ten seconds can seem like two hours. In an analogous way, that's how time was with Keith: short, yet intense, but without any of the pain! There was always just-the-point, and none of that distracting, obscuring posturing and pretentiousness that we have to wade through with most people. He always said what he meant and meant what he said, and that allowed us to cram a whole lot more life into a short span of time.

I don't know if any of you have a Keith as friend, but if you do, be thankful to the very fiber of your being. Such people are rare -- too rare -- but we need to learn from them and grow through them and know why the world is a better place because of a few extraordinary and too often unknown people.

At any rate, I sincerely wish, from the very bottom of my heart, that you have the opportunity to encounter a "Keith" in your own lives. But, when I meet him again, you can rest assured that I'll let him know what he meant to many of us. And, as a mutual friend pointed out, there is a Hebrew proverb that sums it all up beautifully: "Say not in grief he is no more -- but live in thankfulness that he was."

A word from the heart

Two weeks ago, one of my best buddies died. Like so many these days, he lost the luck of the draw and was diagnosed with a cancer that he just couldn't beat. We all lose far to many friends and family this way, but that's just how life is.

The two of us went way back. He joined the fraternity I was in during my last year or so at college. He left when I did: I with my degree; he with a letter telling him he need not return the next semester. He had done no wrong, of course, he just didn't meet the expected standards of that august institution. No, Keith, was better than they deserved, even if they couldn't recognize that at the time. We had about a year together before our paths parted, for all the reasons you can imagine. I had to go to the military; he had to figure out what to do with his life. And though we had been as good as inseparable for those fleeting few months, parting paths know no mercy. And, as is too often, the case, we lost touch.

It wasn't but a few years later that I read in our fraternity magazine that he had joined the Chapter Celestial, our own fraternal organization's euphemism for dying, and it pained me, to say the least, but it did not surprise me. Keith was a person who had always been 100% in life. Never on the sidelines. Never noncommittal. Never half-assed. Keith was always there. I wished I would have had another chance to hook up with him, but that's how life plays out sometimes.

Just a few short year ago, however, I got a more-than-mysterious message on Facebook. It was from a Keith, and I knew it could only be my buddy Keith, for it was formulated in his own inimitable, unique way. Oh sure, I thought I was being visited from beyond, at least that was my first thought, but it was him, big as life and twice as enlightening. I had got my second chance.

It doesn't matter how long true friends are not in your life, for when you meet them again, if you're so lucky to do so, it's like you've never been away. We picked up our discussion where we had left off, discussed and debated things that were important to us, shared memories that either the one or the other had forgotten, and simply appreciated the thereness of the other.

And therein lies the danger. We get sloppy. We get careless. We get negligent. We lose sight of what's important. We quickly start taking things for granted. We humans are like that, for I don't think I'm all that different than most of us, but I wish to G-d I were. Keith, on the other hand, never let on that he ever took anything for granted. And that's one of the greatest lessons he ever taught me.

Oh yes, I was the older of the two, but that doesn't mean for a second that I didn't have anything to learn, nor that he couldn't teach me a thing or two. That's another thing Keith taught me: age means nothing; the lesson means everything.