The Death of a Stranger.

It's always sad, I suppose, when someone dies.  I guess I wouldn't know - no one close to me on any level has ever died, at least not yet.  No close and dear friend, no relative.  A former college buddy passed about a year after we graduated - but though I knew him and was sad to hear of his passing - I wasn't close with him the way some people I knew were.  He was a co-editor of mine at The Equinox during our final year - he was the opinion editor, while I handled sports.  He always covered one of his hands - we were never sure why, and we never were going to ask.  But again - I didn't know him beyond the fact that we attended the same college, were majoring in the same thing, and worked together on a semi-professional level.

The closest relative to me died in December of 2009 - but he was not blood related.  It was my grandmother's second husband - a kind of step-grandfather to me, but it was always made clear that he was not related to me.

Don't worry, I'm getting somewhere.

Someone else I barely knew died last weekend.  His name was Daniel Rippe.  He lived in Mexico with his wife and child, and died of injuries sustained in a house fire.  He was 27 or 28 - his son aged 3, I think.

I barely knew him - when I transferred in to Hanover High in the fall of 1997, I think he was a part of our freshman class.  But he did not graduate with us - I never even knew where he ended up going, or if he ever even finished high school from anywhere.  (He did.)  I would see him, his wife and child sometimes when I worked at the Hanover Co-Op during my summers from college, with their long dreads, baggy clothes, and earthen feel.

I don't think he knew me at all.

And yet I feel devastated at his death - certainly not as bad as if I actually had been friends with him - and for old high school people that I knew like Justin Matheson, Nick Hall, Geoff Pappas, and Colin Vernon, who were his friends - please accept my empathy, if you ever happen to stumble upon this.

But what bothers me the most, what sticks in my head as his passing fades, is age.  I turn 27 in two weeks - most of my high school classmates do the same or already have.

Hanover/Norwich/Dresden is a magical place - it's one of those communities where, about 30 years ago, several families, almost all connected through Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital, settled down to raise their families.  A lot of my high school classmates went from kindergarten to 12th grade together.  Most of their parents still live in Hanover or Norwich.  Dan Rippe's parents were one of these, though I didn't really know them.  It's a place where raising a family is easy - education is terrific, quality of living is high, and medical care is top notch.  People are smart, earth sensitive, friendly, and conscious.

I guess I'm rambling - but the point I'm trying to get to is that even though I barely knew this person, and I am SURE he didn't know me from Adam, is that death hurts - and in a closely knit community like Dresden, lots of people feel it.  Even people barely connected, like me.

For whatever it's worth, writing this has brought me a little catharsis.  I hope for those more connected, there is some for you, too, in some form.