My friend Brett [second from the right in the below picture] has lost his almost decade long battle with cancer.

I distract myself, I go out with people, I laugh, and yet...
When I'm home alone again, with the silence, the tears come again.
The sadness just won't leave.

This was going to be a post about Inception, but something actually managed to push it out of my mind. A dear friend of mine, full of life, Dan Schreiber, has passed away. I can't even comprehend it. As I write this, I think the emotions are churning, I actually feel like something just took the breath out of me. I think this may actually be my first friend who's died. It's part of life right? We all die eventually. Last summer I had my first friend get married, but this is part of life too. I'm not even sure if this post makes sense or if I'm just rambling, I just know that I have to deal with all of this emotion. Dan was a fellow graduate student and an aspiring chocolate maker. He was brilliant, top of the math department during his undergrad at the U of I, and chose to do a PhD in computer science. Last summer he started experimenting with chocolate making, from the cacao beans, and he got quite good at it. ..

I just had to take a walk. The silence is deafening. I walked in a daze, listening to Here Comes The Sun and Because. There was something very melancholy about the department when I walked in. Maybe I was just projecting my emotions, I just don't know...

From Drop Box

You know, any time you see someone young died, they always say how full of life they were, how nice they were to everyone. It's so cliche but it's completely true about Dan. Why do the nice ones go first? I never told Dan this, but he really inspired me. He was brilliant enough to get a PhD with ease but chose to do what he loved instead, make chocolate. It's so funny, the other day I was cleaning my fridge and came across one of his earlier chocolate wrappers. I'm a packrat, so instead of throwing it away, I tucked it beside the jam bottles. I look at it now kind of in shock. When I started experimenting with baking this past semester, I wanted to try baking this scone recipe I found that called for chocolate chunks and dried cranberries. I described the recipe to Dan, and he instantly knew what chocolate I'd need to go with the cranberries. I've never known anyone so enthusiastic about chocolate. That's the wrapper I unintentionally saved and now have. I won't be throwing it away.