The first time I realized I was going to die I was cutting out an obituary for a project for my 6th grade class. I was working on the living room floor, as my father slouched nearby on the brown couch, reading. My eyes suddenly focused in on the age of the dead person in the newspaper—I can’t remember it now—and then something clicked. “This person died,” I told my dad, startled. “I’m going to die someday, too.” I then felt a surge of panic, of a kind I would become accustomed to in the years to come. My dad looked up from his book and said: “Yes, but not tonight.”
I started crying about Max Ritvo’s terminal cancer before I even met him. I never told him this because it was too embarrassing. We’d begun emailing in the late spring of 2014 since we’d been assigned to teach together, along with KB Thors, in a summer program for high school students at Columbia University. His emails were these enthusiastic bursts of ideas (always original and often impractical) about how to get our future students excited about creative writing. He was full of exclamation points, encouragement, and XOXOs. We planned a meeting to discuss our syllabi and it was decided KB and I would call Max together (from Brooklyn) since he was in Los Angeles visiting family. “Max is terminally ill,” KB said before we called. “It’s something he talks about a lot, so I thought you should know beforehand.”
