My dear young California friends,

I have agonized for a week on whether and what to write, feeling that to say nothing would be a disservice to you. In most young lives, rarely will you experience the death of a close friend. Rarer yet would be the death of two. Four and a half years ago, Joel died and many of your lives, as well as my own, were transformed forever. Four and a half years ago you rose magnificently and in unison to meet one of lives most difficult challenges, the loss of a beloved friend. And yet life has made this request of you all once again. “Bear this”, it demands. Bear the dimming of another light that will never be allowed to reach its full glow, never be allowed to dim naturally over the course of many years after it has shined most brightly. Life has called on you once again to bear the light for them, has asked you yet again to shine just a little brighter in your own lives so that the absences of theirs are less unbearable. And you can do this, you can bear this unbearable burden once again, with as much grace and unconventional beauty as you did before.

Typically, after the sudden, unexpected loss of someone close, or even someone we have interacted with or known for some time, we ask ourselves if we were kind enough, if we were loving enough, if we were generous enough with our comments and/or our time. Unfortunately, we are all too utterly human and, in retrospect, we all fall well short of what or who we think we should have been. We never are quite that good. Simply in asking ourselves those questions, however, in examining our own lives and actions, we honor one of the gifts the dying leave us- the opportunity to live, if not better lives, at least more authentic lives. They would want that much from us. Neither Joel nor Phoebe would ask us to be saintly, to be saccharine sweet and disingenuous. So we have to take a minute and reflect on what they would ask, on what they leave us. We all know what Joel would have said, or have our own ideas about what he would say that have steered our subsequent actions to some degree. Unfortunately, I didn’t know Phoebe. But I looked at her art on her website, and I know her friends; I know the insides of some of their hearts almost as well as I knew my own son’s, and I suspect that she would tell you what you already know- she might tell you to sing and dance and float as high as you can until you touch the sun. She might tell you to love and laugh and paint with your fingers if you like, or walk barefoot in mud. You carry her message on your heart and in living that authentic life; you give fuel to her light and allow it to keep burning.

Together you are magic, all of you. You changed my life. You took the most awful thing and gave it meaning. Through your continued realization of your own lives, through your love for Joel and for me and your insistence on keeping his light alive, you have caused me to believe I can make a difference. Through your belief in me, you have saved the lives of a fair number of people in Africa and kept children from being orphaned. You can do it again. My thoughts are with you. I love you all.