Two years ago…

While watching Good Will Hunting yesterday, I started to cry. Not because Matt Damon and Robin Williams are great actors (they are) but because there’s one scene in there that is so true to life, I can’t handle it. It reflected my emotions from two years ago perfectly, and that’s the scary part. There’s a scene when Matt Damon finally comes to grips with his abuse as a child, and Robin Williams encourages him, and then Damon just starts bawling as loud and as hard as he can. I’ve done that three times in my life that I can remember, and one of them was two years ago.

Two years ago, I lived in NYC, worked for AOL and was getting ready for my site to launch on June 15th. I didn’t have much to do with the launch, and to be honest, I didn’t really understand business or anything of the sort so I felt more than underqualified. I was moving headstrong toward that awesome goal of getting our site going, when, bam… it changed.

I was talking to my parents on the phone beneath my ikea loft bed, where I spent most of my time. I had a bunch of computers and the like set up there, and it worked as sort of a home office. My parents were expecting my brother, Ryan, to go to their house. They were an hour or two late, which is totally normal for a family with kids whose bladders aren’t the largest, and who’s stomachs beg for food frequently. Then, my parents had a ring at the door, and said “Oh, there’s Ryan, I’ll talk to you later.”

Five minutes later, they called back. It wasn’t Ryan at the door. It was the Police. Ryan died in a rollover car accident on the way to come see them.

I was devistated. I immediately started crying. I went out of my apartment on 89th street and started running west. I walked to 5th right next to central park and stopped. I couldn’t believe it. How could he be gone? We hadn’t talked in a month, and I looked to him for guidence on most “adult” topics. How could this be over?

My sister died in 1998, which may have helped me prepare for such a hard time. She had Cancer, so it wasn’t the same situation at all, but I was used to grieving. I felt like I had just gotten over Sherilynn’s death, why the hell did I need to start dealing with another family member’s death, and worrying about their family, etc.?

I immediately started making plans to get back to Utah. I called C.K., my boss at the time, and told him I wasn’t going to be able to work. I called him in tears, and I felt like a total tool, but I knew he’d understand. The team at Netscape really helped me out, a lot. I didn’t want to deal with any of the crap I was going through, but they helped pick up my workload.

Now, two years later, I find myself in NYC again, but I think I’m done grieving (or as done as anyone can be.) I still cry. I still miss him. I still have dreams about him. There are times (especially when my career is changing) I want to call him and ask what he thinks. Those are the hard times. The anniversaries? Those are the easy times, at least to remember him. I’m not going through what his wife / kids are going through, and those guys are the ones who need the most support.

(as an aside, I just imported all of my old blog posts here so you can see the archive stretching all the way back to 2003. My writing skills are immeasurably better than they were five or two years ago. Please, keep that in mind.)