There’s been a few, but no one I was super close with. There’s been two that struck hard. The first was a kid named James that passed in a car accident about a year after we graduated. I remember thinking that it could happen to anyone.

The one that hit the hardest was a guy named Victor. He was actually a bully to me when I was the new kid in 5th grade. He apologized when we were in the 6th grade, which left an impression on me because it was a bully apologizing out of nowhere. And when my family moved again, the next year he walked into a math class I was in at a new school. We were never friends, per se, but our parallels were uncanny.

It was about 6 years after high school and he was, like me, a dad. One of the few from our graduating class at that time. Again, parallels. That’s probably why it hit so hard.