“A guy I grew up with recently died. I attended his funeral, but only because I thought there’d be free food afterwards. I brought to-go boxes with me. You know, to remember him for as long as I could.”

“I could picture life—school and everything else—continuing on without me. But I could not picture my funeral. Not at all. Mostly because I couldn’t imagine who would attend or what they would say.”

“I find myself thinking back to something I saw on the local news about a year ago. A teen football player had died in a car accident. The cameras showed all his friends after the funeral—these big hulking guys, all in tears, saying, “I loved him. We all loved him so much.” I started crying, too, and I wondered if these guys had told the football player they loved him while he was alive, or whether it was only with death that this strange word, love, could be used. I vowed then and there that I would never hesitate to speak up to the people I loved. They deserved to know they gave meaning to my life. They deserved to know I thought the world of them.”

“What was he like afterwards?Totally adorable-he fell asleep right on top of me!What was he like afterwards?I thought he'd died. No, Really! He fell asleep-I had to roll him off of me so i could breathe”

“I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

“The moment that I realized that I wanted to be a better man for him and that because of him I was a better man than I was before I met him, that was when I realized that I loved him. No flaw that he had, no quirk could ever make me stop loving him and he knows that, so he's free to be himself and he's free to love me and because he loves me I'm free to be myself, knowing that no flaw that I have and no quirk could ever make him stop loving me.”