The phrase “rest in peace” used to feel empty to me. A cliché almost devoid of any real meaning, one of those polite things you say because society has deemed it appropriate. I understand now what it really means, and I still find it incredibly misleading.
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We first met way before my tweens, when family friends were still at best adults I vaguely knew. Music united us early. We went to my first out of town concert together. I remember learning on that trip that it’s possible to sit down at a restaurant and decide to leave before ordering if you don’t like it. I remember learning that “first row” restaurants are often terrible value for money. It felt exciting and powerful.
We built board presentations in English together and analyzed the quarterly results reports of companies we cared about, when teenage me needed to make some money to pay for adventures abroad. That dynamic worked so well, I soon found myself building sales KPI spreadsheets and checking on promotion activities and taking business trips at 16. It felt exciting and powerful.
Then the tables turned and we met for a “reverse internship” at my work place on Harvard’s campus, where, as an undergrad, I first got to have full responsibility for a real business with real stakes. Before that, an absurdly loud Bruce Springsteen show at MetLife, crêpes in New Haven on the northward drive. Exciting, powerful.
Many more concerts. A few joint vacations. And building this company. I remember giving feedback on first logo and website drafts before graduating. I remember building the very first (awful) PowerPoint template. I remember agreeing to doing “a little bit of project work” after graduation, while mostly taking a year to travel. Ha!
Many long and insightful and delightful days and nights. Many lounge visits and planes and rental cars. I remember taking a picture of us eating mediocre burgers from the hood of our car on the way to a client. I have many a playlist, created in a battling back and forth. Best Live Performances. Best Songs Through the Decades. Best Songs with Desert References.
Exciting. Powerful.
People may not remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel.
Time heals all wounds.
More clichés. Most of them are clichés for a reason, shorthand for much more complex ideas. Under the surface, behind all that complexity, they tend to hold deep truths.
I lost so much more than a business partner. I lost a mentor. I lost a friend. In a very real sense, I lost a family member.
It makes sense that many people feel angry when cancer takes their loved ones. We look to cast blame; and with no one to cast it on, we get even angrier, directed at nothing and no one in particular, just mad at the innate unfairness of the universe.
In retrospect that’s one fundamental quality that united us, beyond mutual interests, a generally aligned view of business, and sufficient curiosity to bridge our age gap:
We always found our way to peaceful forward-momentum.
Our paths to get there could hardly differ more, one relying on a back and forth between the inner and outer world, the other almost exclusively facing inward. But we arrived in very similar places nonetheless.
Who knows how any of the rest of us would react if we received a near-certain death sentence, if we had to fight a practically unwinnable fight that, at best, eventually ends in a draw.