A short commentary on inexplicable loss.

My?Ammirati & Puris?colleague Peter Rauch and I certainly were friendly, but not friends.?Twelve years have passed, yet to this day, for reasons I cannot adequately explain, I felt compelled to memorialize him with a?tribute?soon after he departed to the big advertising agency in the sky.

Being a fan, I wanted to?write?about Tom Petty after his passing.?To pre-empt the inevitable question from readers – “Why the hell did you post this??” – I modified?Adventures’?subhead lead-in to (sort of) explain why.

Other tributes appeared; some were acquaintances, others were colleagues, a few were friends, among them?Pat Fallon,?John Loden,?Mike Lotito,?Tom Nelson, and?Shelley Lanman, whose tragic loss I felt so profoundly I’ve commemorated her luminous-now-lost presence numerous times.?

Last week I read David Brooks’?New York Times?column?on, “How Do You Serve a Friend in Despair,” where he recounts his long history and with Peter Marks, whose long, slow, and seemingly unresolvable bout with depression leads to suicide.?Brooks is an?Opinion?columnist, not a journalist, who primarily focuses on politics, with occasional forays into matters of ethics and morality.?

But this??I suspect Brooks is trying to make sense of the senseless.?He knows it is far afield from his usual columns, and tries to prepare us for what follows:

“This article flows from what I learned from those agonizing three years and that senseless tragedy. It reflects a hard education with no panaceas.”

I thankfully have not had to address anyone taking their own life, but in my own, far less impressive way, try to tie each untimely exit to a lesson or, if I’m lucky, and insight related to client service.??

Do I miss the departed??I do, with the written word serving as an instrument of personal memory.?You need not read any of them.?Selfish perhaps, but truth be told, I write them for me, an expression of irreparable loss.

I confess I have little in common with David Brooks – different politics, different religion, different circumstances, given he writes for?The New York?Times?and I write this blog – save for the one quality we share:?the use of language to come to terms with and explain what is inexplicable.