Christopher (Chris) Wickstrom, on what would have been his 57th birthday

It's a funny thing, getting older. All of us become part of history, but does this happen only when we die? Or is it bit by bit as we age? My friend and classmate Christopher would be 57 years old today, but he left at a time most would call far too soon, and much too young. His name was Christopher Glenn Wickstrom. He had his mother, and father, and a brother and sister. Everyone called him Chris but for some reason I was the one person who always called him by his full given name. I think was just because I really did like his name; I suppose I also enjoyed saying it. I have missed my friend in the years and decades since he left. The brain tumour took him. This was a particular irony for one as brilliant as he. In our high school in Pennsylvania, Chris and our classmate Tim Roach seemed locked in a perpetual yet friendly competition for who'd get the best grade or the highest score. The rest of us are long grown, and Christopher long gone.

Before the tumor he'd made it to college like the rest of us, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and law at University of Chicago. His mother, my smart and beautiful writer-friend Jane, was not alone in knowing full well her elder son could have gone on to become president of the United States, or, at the very least, had a long political career. By 17, he'd already begun a successful quasi-political career: saving the Codorus Creek. Back in high school, before the tumor, Christopher ran track, loved nature, and did 35mm photography. He taught the latter to me. Years later when he fell ill, he had not been long at his new job as a handsome young, white guy attorney, in one of Philadelphia's biggest firms. He was born in January and died in December. We were dozens gathered in a Quaker meeting house near Philadelphia to comfort one another and wish him safe passage. That day I felt his presence, just outside a window; and I feel it today. I just wish he hadn't had to go so soon, so long ago.