To tell you how my week has been…

I need to pay homage to another individual I’ve lost in my life and I’m sorry to be horribly morbid two days in a row.

Life is not fair, my mom used to tell me.  So this is how it goes…

August 20th, 1995 my friend Kerby Kalakian died in a car accident.  He was just a month away from his 20th birthday.

Every year around this time I get a little impatient and frustrated.  I feel like I’m not DOING enough.  Kerby filled his life with laughter, friends, fun and general rowdiness.  He was a skier, a musician, a loudmouth and a hairball.

He was the guy at the party that made you feel included when you didn’t know anyone.  He was the guy who told the bad jokes with the hugely contagious laugh and smile.  He could belch and fart with the best of them… and did.

He was the guy who at 12 years old told me that people thought that I thought I was perfect and his tickling was merely a way in which to humanize me for the masses.  Seriously.  12.  I learned a lot that day from a punk ass skateboarder.  He had a knack.

I talk about him now as he shook my world in his living and in his death.  He taught me immeasurable amounts by just being himself and saying what he thought.  He made an impression on everyone he met with his bright smile and carefree take on things.  He was so generous with his love.  I miss him more often than it seems I should after all these years, but that is just how it goes.  I have Kerby stories up the ying yang.  I’ll spare you the details.

Peter Marshall, a former US Senate Chaplain, said once, “The measure of a life is not its duration, but its donation.”

That sentiment was the framework for the sermon at my mother’s funeral, but serves well for all of those we have lost before it was their time.  I think of that whenever I want to back out of things because I’m tired, or have had too much going on.  I think of that when I get lost in the day to day things that so easily consume us.

If I live to the fullest and die young, I will not have wasted a minute of this amazing experience and journey of life.  If I grow to be an old woman I can boast a long list of life participation.

I hate that I am impatient at times, but I am grateful for that life lesson, despite the great cost at which I learned it.

Kerby was one of those people who got that concept of cramming his life full.  He was the first one to show me how to do it right when it came to “going BIG” in life and this little posting is to just share the thought…

share his memory…

maybe keep him alive in this one little way.

So says me.