My weekend was full oxymorons — fun and sadness; birthdays and death days; forget and remembrance. What was supposed to be a weekend celebrating a friend’s birthday had me thinking about a friend’s death that occurred a year and a half ago. The birthday girl tends to be an emotional drunk: in the middle of karaoke night, she started asking, “Where is James? Why isn’t he here?”

It’s quite unexpected how things can turn out in life; what you thought would come true never does, and what you never thought could happen happens. It’s hard to believe it’s been more than a year since James’ untimely death, but it’s quite easy to see the effect it’s had on us. While I can’t claim to be as close to him as his core group of friends, I was his lab partner in high school and shared a couple of classes with him during high school and college. And while I wasn’t extremely close to him, I’d like to think that I was a good friend — I  hope that I was at least as good of a friend to him as he was to me.

He would have been graduating at the end of this semester and going on to medical school. It’s a shame that the world missed out on such a great individual, but I know that he’s always watching over us. My friend said it best that night — “Stop asking questions. He’s here, he’s always here with us…..he’s always watching over us.”