The District Sleeps Alone Tonight

At his funeral, Dr. B talked about Ryan's project, about how he worked to find a new treatment for a so-called "orphan disease." So called because so few people in the United States contract it. So called because the people who do contract it here are poor, convicts; the people who contract it elsewhere are in poor nations with poor sanitation. So called because it is no longer profitable for pharmaceutical companies to search for treatments--we sit by, watch the organisms gain resistance, watch as the drugs we've relied on for so long falter and fail.

He pointed out that this was, in fact, the essence of Ryan's being. I found it weird that I had never exactly seen it before, his absolute selflessness in the face of everything. Sitting in the church pew, I thought about the amount of work Ryan completed the summer he taught me everything I know about peptides. That amount being none. He gave up ten weeks of work for me--gave me his reagents, his hood space, let me make one of his compounds. Later, as I've mentioned before, he would dig all the red Mike and Ikes out of his boxes, leaving them on my desk or lining them along the keyboard of my computer. The red ones--the only ones I like. Over time, he gave me more things--took me out to a lunch or two, cracked open beers on Friday lab afternoons and passed them my way. When he left, he moved everything from his cabinet to mine. I walked in the lab, found him putting my name on his set of pipettes. What was his was mine--that's how it was.

We found the same things funny--we enjoyed base, crude humor, the kind I rarely share with anyone now that he's gone. "Have you seen that video?" he might say, "the one with the chick from The Little Mermaid singing about how she wishes she had a vaj?" If I said no, then he would pull it up and we would watch it together. On quiet afternoons, when he was supposed to be reading papers but was actually dicking around on the internet, I would pull a chair up to his computer to watch episodes of South Park or Family Guy clips. He was always playing Bloodhound Gang songs for me.

We were like siblings, him very much like an older brother [the kind I don't actually have]. He would take out his old college notebooks to let me read something, and leave--I would take out a post-it note, draw an arrow to the date, and write in "I was in seventh grade then." He was the first person that much older than me that I could connect to on a peer level.

By convention, I have always kept the emails he sent to me in a separate folder in my inbox. The last one I have archived in arrived three months before he woke up gasping in his bed and died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. We'd been sending someecards back and forth for some time, but for some reason I let the back-and-forth settle here:

My life's not terrible, not by any stretch. But it was better when he was here.

A few days ago, we decided in the lab that we needed to redistribute pipettes. We each needed our own set. Gyda came out the door, carrying the ones for me: three pipettes with green tape, "Jen" scrawled out in his handwriting across them.

"the district sleeps alone tonight, after the bars turn out their lights and send the autos swerving into the loneliest evening, and I am finally seeing..."