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us could have sat quietly? He went to Washington as one of ten national winners of an essay contest two weeks before he died. He did not even tell his closest friends, who only later saw him on television. He was fair-minded. When asked on Martin Luther King Day how we could make the world a better place, he answered, “Look at the inside of people, not the outside.” He was seven years old when he wrote that. Though he had many gifts, he never thought of himself as the tiniest bit better than anyone else. And he chastised those who treated others poorly.
I have tried to think about the nature of the bond between us. I guess the fact of “bond” assumes we are two people, such as would need a bond to hold them together. And I never really felt that degree of separateness that lets you describe the existence of a bond between two different things. His joys were my joys, his pains were multiplied to be my pains. I woke to him and slept only after his lips grazed mine. As private as he held some details of his life, protecting those he cared about from my judgment, his broader life was open, bare before me. I was the witness to all things he valued, most of which were intangible. His weakness, his strength, his vulnerability (which had worried me so), his sense of who he was and what this living business was all about, he laid that open. The truth of life, I would have guessed, could not be found out in sixteen years, and we would be fortunate to have a glimpse in sixty. Somehow, this child knew. Knew that we all fought too much over foolishness, that our vanity and our insecurities kept us from truly helping one another, that true love and friendship were marked by humility and loyalty that disregarded self-interest. And he more than knew these things, he lived this way. His mark will endure, because only these truths of life do endure. The good we do really is eternal, as we had told him, and now that axiom is a charge to us—not just to keep his memory, but to live his life message.
We know that we can never make sense of his loss. He had done it all right. Of all he wanted, he wanted most to be a father someday. And what an unbelievable father he could have been with his compassion, his warmth, his patience. He was a rare gift.
He wrote in a journal during Outward Bound when he was 15: “More than any other goal that I have set for myself I want to show my love and appreciation to my family for all that they have done for me. I know that I don't deserve all that I get but I hope that I will someday be able to say that I deserve it. I really want to do something great with my life. I want to start a family when I grow up. I am going to be as good a parent to my kids as my parents are to me. But more than anything, when I die, I want to be able to say that I had a great life. So far I have had a wonderful life and I hope it keeps up.” Well, it didn't keep up as long as it should have, but we are thankful for what he left us. And he left everyone he touched the better for knowing him. We stand a little straighter in his shadow.

    Nothing of any size or duration is as magical as our memory of it. The way my mother laughed once at something my father said when we were driving in the rain forest in Puerto Rico, first a deep, full, long laugh, then with remnants of the laughter low and hearty coming out in little bits for the minutes following. It was perfect and beautiful, sexy even I suppose, although that is harder to say about one's mother. The trip itself? Not so perfect. It was Christmas, and I wanted the smell of Douglas fir in the living room, not the absence of any smell from a fake miniature tree mother had packed in her suitcase and set up in the rented living room. My brother was dreadfully unhappy about traveling at Christmas and sulked the entire trip; the photographs of him now make us laugh because he was so committed to not smiling for a solid week. But when we tell the story of it, we tell of the funny trip