My friend Sean died yesterday at the age of 31. Those are the facts that I know, and they’re the only ones that matter. How and why aren’t important. What’s important is remembering him properly.
About a year before I met Sean, he was treated for a very aggressive form of testicular cancer. Sean didn’t like to talk about unless it was in the form of jokes (e.g., he named his remaining testicle “Flanagan.”) However, according to people who were there, his cancer had metastasized into his internal organs. For a time, it looked like he wasn’t going to make it, but then he went into remission. After all this is when I met him.
Sean wasn’t a veteran, but he had a veteran’s sensibility about his own mortality due to having confronted it at an early age. He had a dark sense of humor and seemed to live his life like he was on borrowed time. This is perhaps why we connected. He encapsulated both the joy of simply being alive and the knowledge that it could come to an end at any moment. He had a great deal of compassion for others, while at the same time he didn’t have patience for people who were shitty to each other. He would gladly call you out for treating others poorly, as he did with me on more than one occasion. He was one of the few people who could successfully shame me for behaving badly, and I’m a better person for having known him. He expected better from us because he knew there wasn’t time to spend our lives doing anything but being kind.
That said, there was also a devil-may-care streak to him which I found in turns hilarious and infuriating. On one night when his boss, Amber, had taken him out drinking, he leaned on a street sign to balance himself and King Arthured the sign out of the sidewalk. He decided this meant that the sign now belonged to him, so they stuffed it in the car and hauled it back to our apartment (Sean and I were roommates at the time.) I found out about this when I heard them clomping up the stairs carrying the damned thing into our living room. I was standing there, toothbrush in mouth, getting ready for my commute to the DHS data center, watching this unfold. Suddenly Sean saw me and said, “Oh, shit! Daddy’s home! Run!” The two of them ran down the stairs laughing and wound up at the Club Ms. Mae’s. Sean thought he’d pulled off the perfect heist.
About a month or two later, I watched the Packers win Super Bowl XLV with him and our other roommate, Irene. They were both rooting for the Packers specifically because I was a Packers fan. Irene came up with the idea to do a shot every time Ben Roethlesberger was a rapist. All three of us blacked out that night.
Sean was more than the sum of whatever anecdotes I can string together. He was a vibrant presence, a compassionate friend, and one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met. He deserved better than he got, but he always gave people better than they deserved. People who knew him are heartbroken at his passing, as am I. Yet I’m also grateful that the cancer didn’t take him the first time around, as I never would have met someone who ended up becoming one of my best friends for a time, and New Orleans was blessed with another decade of having him around.
Sean touched a lot of people’s lives during his short life, and while it saddens me to see my New Orleans friends’ Facebook feeds switch from pictures of Mardi Gras to pictures of Sean, it goes to show how loved he was. I hope he knew.
