For 16 years that Jack has graced our family with his presence, I always felt a little bit of distance from him...there is a little bit of divide between the older three and the younger three and it's just the 6 years age gap. I was away at Kenyon College and him preparing to go to high school, we didn't have much common ground at that point. But I'm glad I screwed up at Kenyon and ended up moving back home cause otherwise we would have not spent as much time as we had. I remember hanging out in my room, I'm kind of a guy that likes to enjoy his alone time. I can hear somebody outside my room..I don't really have a door but I can hear Jack shuffling his feet, I wouldn't hear anything and I knew he was standing out there. After about maybe 15 seconds, I would say "what's up Jack?" He would slowly walk in and I'd talk to him. We were not really sure how to interact with each other, we hadn't really had that relationship yet. Living at home, I'd start to enjoy his company, listening to him talking. He was socially blooming, talking about his friends and his experiences with girls, he was getting at that age. I felt like I was starting to bond with him like I had with Becca and Maria and I'm sure I will with Sophia and Bella. Eventually I found our positions had swapped and I found myself creeping outside his door, I'd walk in and asked him if he had any work to do cause I didn't want to distract him from his studies. We spent a lot of time together the past year and half. I brought him to IU, showed him a good time. We had a heart to heart and that was the first time he and I had hugged after talking we left the party. We talked about life and his desire to be a writer. He was worried that he had screwed up at school and I told him not to worry about it, just to focus on tomorrow to improve. That was the first time we had hugged, the beginnings of our relationship. It wasn't just a brother and it wasn't a forced relationship because we shared the same genetic material. He had become one of my best friend, somebody I looked forward to hanging out with. And Jack, we talked about him as an aspiring writer, he shared something with me on April 5 of last year, just a bit of stream of consciousness writing he had written and I'd like to read it and it particularly resonated with me. I archived it on my computer and appropriate for the current state of affairs that we all could learn from it and benefit from his perspective here...... "Think of how small you are. You're even smaller than that. You're the tiniest speck of dust on this mote of existence. Our senses are our little peepholes into the realm of the universe, but we know not the whole scope or even idea of the rest. Like those 25-cent binoculars at tourist places, our tiny lifetime is the quarter we spend, and we get this one chance to savor the look before it's gone forever. But seriously, grab onto anyone else who gives a damn, because that's so rare in this bleak, hopeless world. Grab onto the one speck to do a tragic dance through the cosmos." Glad that we got to dance together, I love you Jack.....