On a somber note....

(image via Best Bucs, where there is a great tribute from a few years ago)

April 1st would have been former Hurricane Sean Taylor's 26th birthday.

Sean was an amazing athlete who I first became familiar with during his high school football days at Gulliver Prep.

He was "Big East Conference Defensive Player of the Year" in 2003, his final year at the University of Miami and a first round draft pick for the Washington Redskins.



As you may know, November 27th 2007, Sean died from gunshot wounds sustained the previous day at his home in Palmetto Bay, Florida.

It seems like only yesterday that we watched the news in silence, unable to believe that he did not make it.




He will never be forgotten.




It saddens and angers me that justice has not been served, especially considering the recent news concerning the trial, which has already been delayed enough.

Rest in Peace











Yesterday was a sad day for me personally, for a different reason.

I try to return to the Northeast every Spring, regardless of where I am. I have a ritual of visiting my brother's final resting place at a peaceful cemetery on the coast of Maine. Sometimes I bring flowers, but mostly I removed leaves that fell during the fall and got trapped by the ice and snow. I hate to think of it covered, hidden by overgrowth, forgotten.


My brother was probably the one person who was actually capable of understanding me. We share the same traits, both good and bad. We are both carbon copies of our father.

He died suddenly and unexpectedly at age 26, which is how old I am now.


His death tore through my family in a way that can never be mended. It changed all our lives forever, as one would expect. It changed who we are/were inside.


Every year I miss him more, because every year there are endless new things that I urgently need to tell him. Adventures I need to share, ideas I need critiqued, antics to report that only he would appreciate. The list grows and grows, endlessly.

This is an excerpt from an Editorial in the paper after his death:

".....also died last week, at age 26. While he lived he was a young man of great charm and winning bluster, unsure and cocky at once, as the young so often are......[his] problems with substances both liquid and powdered were well-known among his large circle of friends. He tried to kick them, but apparently, couldn't. Had [he] lived to be an old man, he would have been a genuine original. That he didn't is and will be a loss those who knew him.... It is easy to say goodbye to someone whose life was long and full, whose time, by normal biological clocks, had come. It is too difficult to do so for one who dies so young. ......May his life be remembered with all fondness. May his death be a lesson."


That last line has been permanently etched into my heart and my mind.
I carry that original editorial with me always, tucked into the pocket of a Moleskine notebook, but I have never shared it before.