There is, of course, no win­ning when a friend dies. There is only loss. Last March I lost a good friend. It was unfair and too soon.

Sam was occa­sion­ally a trou­ble­some friend to have; he didn’t always take care of him­self very well, he could be eas­ily offended, and he had a habit of slip­ping back into old habits. I often found myself wor­ry­ing about him, I hated it, but he was also an enthu­si­as­ti­cally cre­ative, lov­ing and sup­port­ive friend. I don’t think Sam loved any­thing more than mak­ing someone’s day. He went out of his way to do kind things, whether it was lend­ing some­one a book he thought they might like or recruit­ing a friend for an emer­gency, mid­night road trip to reach another friend in need. He was an excep­tional per­son and after a decade of friend­ship I couldn’t help but love him. He was, and is, a valu­able part of my life.

In high school Sam drew a pic­ture in pen­cil on a scrap of my note­book paper and gave it to me. I always liked it and wanted him to improve it for me–maybe redraw it in ink or paint it. He said he would, but over time the pic­ture just got tucked away in a box with a lot of junk and we both for­got the promise.

A cou­ple of months after Sam died my mother brought a trunk down to my house. Inside I found a ran­dom assort­ment of high school memen­tos includ­ing the notes my friends and I had writ­ten to one another, a pair of shoes, a glass nativ­ity scene, and, of course, that pic­ture that Sam had drawn for me. I real­ized that, with­out Sam, it was up to me to fin­ish the project and improve the pic­ture. It had become a collaboration–which I think Sam would have been quite pleased with. I scanned that quick and sim­ple pen­cil draw­ing into my com­puter and fid­dled with it until I felt like it was finished.

This piece of art means so much more to me because it is some­thing that Sam and I did together. It’s ours.