Like many of you, I have plenty of trouble falling asleep, let alone staying asleep. There are always more things to do, more assignments to complete, and more hours to spend watching the night slip further away with each tick of the clock. My brain doesn't have a bedtime. It's not exactly a real problem, but it's enough of an inconvenience that I let it bleed into other areas of my life, and it can have an adverse effect on my work and my social skills. While it's simply because of my overactive thought processes most of the time, there are rare occasions when something happens to genuinely throw a wrench in the works and keep me from getting anything done until I deal with it.
Lately, my thoughts have turned to the ever-heavy topics of life and death. Here I am in my twentieth year of age, right on the threshold of my twenty-first birthday and my senior year of college and it still seems like so little has happened. I've seen my friends travel overseas, graduate, get married, have kids, and really get started in their lives (not necessarily in that order). At other times, they pass away and leave the people around them stunned at how quickly they disappeared; it always shocks me when I find out that someone I know has suddenly become someone I once knew.
Anthony Swartz is one of those friends I'll never see again.
There are plenty of people who were better-acquainted with Anthony, his personality, his work and his legacy. We only became real friends my first summer at Maryville College - Anthony was working as a Conference Assistant while I took summer classes and since we usually had our evenings free, I'd eventually wander over to Gamble Hall to spend the next few hours playing cards or video games, watching the odd episode of House on Netflix, and grabbing Taco Ball around 11 p.m. because we'd both be hungry after a long day of doing nothing (I still get cravings for tacos most nights, which also contribute to my general lack of sleep). Interestingly enough, Anthony's general tag in most of the games he played was "Insomniac," and I always thought it was a funny coincidence that we wound up playing together. Thanks to Anthony, I wasn't completely on my own during my first summer spent away from home and I was introduced to more great friends like James, Michael and Daniel, who would all make appearances when they could so we could actually have at least four players for our games.
After the summer ended, Anthony was selected to be an RA in my building and while we continued to play games and make snack runs when we could, his increasing workload from school took precedent. One thing stood out about that year in particular: one of our fellow residents decided that, along with some of our other gamer friends, we should create some sort of official organization for a social gamers' club on campus. A few short weeks later, Anthony and I were among the six founding members of MC Gamers.
Six people came together to make that club. Five of us are still alive.
Out of my own self-interest, I won't dwell on the details of Anthony's abrupt passing; his story has been circulating for a while now, and I can't shed any more light on the situation than the next person. As I said, there are plenty of people who knew him better, but it still hurts. I lost a friend, our group lost an important member, and the world lost a brilliant student who was bound for a much brighter future than this one. Furthermore, he isn't the only one who's gone - there's a family somewhere missing a husband, a father, and their anguish is equal to that of our own. There's plenty of sadness to go around, so hopefully, we'll all be able to pull through this together, but with that being said, we all have to take the time to recognize that this really happened and that it's genuinely painful.
There is hope and there will be a time to celebrate the life that Anthony had, including the way he brightened the lives of all of his friends. For now, however, I will simply bid my friend - a good man, a genuine genius and an Insomniac - farewell.
