so it goes.

"So it goes."

It's a three-word phrase that is repeated endlessly throughout Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which I just finished reading a couple weeks ago. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and plan on moving onto other works by Vonnegut as the summer continues. So, the phrase. "So it goes." It follows every event involving death and destruction that is described in this novel set in World War II. Almost seems to be a way of dealing with senseless, painful events that one must simply cope with and accept in life.

I also read The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, which I finished last week, taking from it lessons of vanity and the price and pain of eternal youth and life, and I'm about halfway through Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (who, by the way, passed away this past weekend). Before you think of me as a morbid person with strange literary tastes, you must first understand how important and how inevitable it is to have to face questions of life, death, and existence. Not all of us do it often, particularly when we are as busy as we Americans are these days, but it's bound to happen...and it's worth doing.

These last couple days have been hard, and I can imagine the rest of this week, and for a while longer, it will be difficult. It is with my deepest regret and in sadness that I have to recognize the parallelism that lies in my summer reading choices and what happens in real life. We read of tragedy in our poetry and our novels, see it on the big screen, hear about it in melodies and songs that dance in the air and in our memories, and often, we can symmpathize, try to understand what it feels like to love, to lose, to hate, to fall apart and feel pain.

Sympathy makes us feel like we understand, like we are closer to those who suffer, it eases our consciences and makes us feel like we are better people. But in the end, nothing is really the same as the real thing.

I found out this weekend that one of my old teammates from high school and summer league, my neighbor, and good friend passed away after having been missing for over a week. He would've been 21 on Sunday. I sent him a birthday e-mail that morning, not knowing what had happened and that he was already gone. I got the phone call 2 hours later from his best friend. He could barely get the words out. And so the past few days have consisted of random outbursts of uncontrollable tears, insomnia, the desire to look at old pictures and lose myself in memories, uncomfortable phone calls with long-lost friends, embarrassed to realize that we have fallen disgracefully out of touch, and the fear of this coming Saturday afternoon when we are going to be forced to confront the reality of the event and dress in black to join others in formally commemorating the beautiful person he was and will continue to be in our memories and our hearts.

He had a strange knack for picking out the tiniest, most easily overlooked detail of a moment and comment on its beauty. He could be quiet and lying on the ground on a blanket looking straight up in the sky and the smile that spread across his face into the corners of his eyes could make you feel as though lying there on the ground were the most joyful thing in the world. He gave great powerful hugs. He never judged a soul, saw the best there was in each person, and protected his friends from mean comments and inappropriate behavior when he saw it necessary. He could make you think of the deepest concepts, the most profound questions without making you feel stressed out. He was the one who made you enjoy the moment and sit back and enjoy the ride when you were tempted to try and be the back-seat driver. He was a beautiful, incredible human being that touched those who knew him and let his quiet voice get close, and his passing is an enormous loss.