the Rothberg experience

The tragedy that reached me by phone on Wednesday night is impossible to articulate accurately and truly. It’s impossible for me to express the horror and terrifying minutes that broke me into sobs I’d forgotten how to conjure. The thoughts and fears and pains that went through my head absolutely broke me to pieces as I still cannot fathom how this could have possibly happened.

When there is a terrible process, you believe that while the journey might give you all of hell and back, it will work out. It will be okay and as long as you keep moving, it will turn around. You believe it because you have to believe there is some minuscule version of justice in the world that makes it revolve from the awful into the better.

And sometimes it just doesn’t. Sometimes the sick humor of the universe does not deliver the justice we’re brought up to believe in.

He’s gone now, and I hope to anything and everything that he is no longer suffering. I hope he is as free as he was a year and a half ago- before his world became a hell of hospitals and sickly radiation. Free to move his fingers and toes and laugh about his endless talent.

We lost someone incredible. His brilliance was blinding, charm unmatched, and wit impossible to parallel. Worst perhaps, his potential was literally endless. There was no border he could not move, and no heart he could not capture.

I know people will remember him forever, his name ringing through everyone’s memory as the hero that deserved the best. To his family I send everything in my heart, wishing there was anything I could do, but knowing that the only thing I can offer is that I’m sharing a portion of their inexplicable pain. To our friends I say I long more than anything to be with you right now. I know how much we need each other and I know together we’ll remember his genius, his sharp wit, and beautiful smile that loved a strong joke.

And I’m left both honored to have been granted the little time I had with him, and completely heart broken that he had so little with the clay of the earth I know he would have sculpted into something more beautiful than we could have imagined.

זיכרונו לברכה
Z. A. Shporer

Forever loved. Always remembered.