A year ago today, my friend Dan Gordon-Levitt, aka BurningDan, passed away at the age of 36. It’s been a tough year; I've never had a death affect me so profoundly. I'm still having a very hard time dealing with it. I didn’t get to spend as much time with Dan as I would have liked. I met him at a point in his life at which he was beginning to reinvent himself – he had left his Dad's business and was doing a lot of traveling, teaching Flow (a meditative practice/martial art/form of creative expression he developed from the fire spinning so popular at Burning Man, which he attended each year), and even when he was stationary for brief periods, he was in LA and there were 3,000 miles between us. Even so, he was very dear to me. I was eighteen years older than he was, and I had a sort of paternal affection for him.

Dan was an extraordinary young man. His creativity, openness, and enthusiasm for and willingness to embrace life put me in awe of him. I often wished I could be more like him. Apparently, many others felt similarly; in fact, I didn’t know until after he was gone how many other lives he had touched. As clichéd as it sounds, the world is a better place for his having been in it.

This is all I have left of him. It’s a photo of us with Krista, a young woman he was seeing at the time, taken five years ago this week when they came to stay with me for a couple of days here in Boston. They got up at around 5:00 AM because they were leaving that morning, and Dan decided he wanted to take a picture of the sun rising over the ocean (I guess, living on the West Coast, and even with all of his traveling, he didn’t often have the opportunity to see it coming up over the Atlantic). I took them to Castle Island (named for the presence of an 18th century English fort), a small peninsula in south Boston. Dan was a little put out because there were some ships and machinery in Boston Harbor (which you can see in the background), and he thought they might spoil the view. It occurred to me afterward that I could have taken them to a location on the north shore. It was closer to where I was living, and it would have provided him with an unobstructed view – but it was 6:00 AM and I wasn’t thinking clearly (I never told Dan)!

Also, it isn’t a great picture of me. (Frankly, I think it would have been much better without me!) I didn’t know I was going to be in it, and obviously, I was having a bad hair morning (I was wearing it much longer then and was in desperate need of a haircut). What can I say? It was windy, and, again - 6:00 AM!

Still and all, I don’t think it turned out too badly, and I value it greatly because, as I say – it’s what I have left of him.

If any of Dan’s friends see this and want to shoot me a message, you’re very welcome.

jeyges@gmail.com

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