It seems I’ve always appreciated the inevitability of death.  Joel’s death made me acutely aware of its randomness though.  So, when I walk down the street, I am keenly cognizant that something could come falling out of the sky from nowhere to land squarely on my head, or that some poor sucker driving down the road toward me could suffer an unexpected stroke causing his car to jump the curb and smash directly into me.  Life is that capricious, death that unexpected.  And I think when one really understands that, everything changes.  Everything either loses its meaning or its substance- not in an awful, heavy, “godicantgoonbecausenothingmeansanythinganymore” kind of way but in a way that keeps you separate from the world while still being in it, still being a part of it. The everyday world takes on a kind of transparency and the telos, the endpoint as it were, is to pull back the thin veil and get a peek at what lies behind it.  After Joel died, for many days, I floated in an ocean of my own breathing , each breath an audible wave breaking across my mind.  All I really remember, until the moment I took Matt’s arm to walk into the Phoenix, into the memorial service his strong, amazing friends had prepared for him (and thus for me), was the roaring of my own breath in my ears and a state of paradoxical grace the belied the awful event that precipitated it.  And wherever it was that I went during those days, I came back different, something at the core of me changed forever.