Today I want to tell you about Rob.

I met Rob my junior year in college. I was living in an apartment with three other girls, Tara, Elise, and Kay, on the top floor of a section in this apartment complex. There were four guys in the ground floor apartment, whom we first met one evening in September when there was a kick-ass storm, and all four of them decided to come up and introduce themselves because they wanted to watch the storm from our balcony, which had a great view.

With only a couple of substitutions, the eight of us lived in that complex for two years, and it was wonderful. We walked in and out of each other's places without a second thought. We partied together, watched basketball, got crushes on each other. (Of course, my crush turned out to be the guy who came out to us that spring.) But we all loved Rob.

Rob was six days older than me but a year behind me in school. (Someone thought I was a really smart 4-year-old and I skipped kindergarten.) He was tall, had blondish brown hair, wore stylish glasses... just gorgeous, and was as big a diet-Coke-head as I was. His family was wealthy but you'd never know it, except for the times he would quietly offer me a loan after inadvertantly seeing my bounced-check notices. He had a great chest, and therefore gave great hugs.

He also had diabetes, which he had had since he was five.

He never made a big deal about it. He took insulin four times a day, and once he showed us how to give him a shot. He took excellent care of himself, eating everything he was supposed to and nothing he wasn't supposed to. He worked out, went easy on the beer, had only an occasional cigarette. Without the diabetes, he had a healthier lifestyle than anyone else I knew in college.

Sunday, May 14, 1995, was Rob's graduation day. His parents were coming over from Kansas City that morning. They had tried to call him several times on Saturday, but the phone was always busy. When they arrived at his apartment on Sunday, he didn't answer the door. He lived by himself, and they were worried. They called the police, who came and broke down the door.

Rob had died that weekend. They found him on the couch with a needle in his arm and the phone off the hook next to him. They think he knew something was wrong and had tried to call 911, but went unconcious before he could dial.

He was 23 years old.

The whole family -- Rob, his sister, his brother-in-law, and his parents -- were set to sail to Europe for three weeks the next day, as a graduation present. The family went anyway, which probably seemed strange to a lot of people, but it made sense to me. It gave them time to grieve alone together as a family.

Tara called me that Monday night to tell me about it. Elise happened to be out of the country on vacation at the time; we weren't sure what to do because we felt like she should know right away, but no one knew how to get in touch with her, and yet it wasn't the sort of thing you wanted to leave on an answering machine. Kay had transferred to another school out of the state for her final year, and by the time I got in touch with her the next morning, she was heading out the door to take an exam. I guess you can never have "good timing" for something like this. Fortunately, the funeral was not going to be until mid-June, shortly after the family returned home. It gave Kay and I time to make travel arrangements, and Elise would be home by that time.

That first week was incredibly hard. I had never had a friend my age die before. I was alone in a city where no one knew him, so of course the phone bill was outrageous. All week, I felt everything from sad to scared to angry. It was only a month after the Oklahoma City bombing, and I remember thinking, how could God allow someone like Timothy McVeigh to live and destroy, and yet take someone like Rob, as good as gold, so young?

That next Sunday night, I had a dream. Rob and I were spending the day together, walking around campus, having lunch, talking, playing, teasing each other, holding each other. At the end of the day, I drove him to the hospital. He climbed in to the hospital bed, and I sat next to him and held his hand as he said goodbye to me. He laid back and went to sleep, and I kissed him on the forehead, told him I loved him, and went home, knowing that he was gone. When I woke up from that dream, the knot in my stomach had disappeared, and I felt strangely content.

I believe with everything that I am that Rob gave that dream to me, as crazy as that sounds, just to tell me that he was okay, that he wasn't sick anymore. I didn't tell anyone about it at first, because it took me a while to accept it, to understand it, to allow myself to believe that it was real. But I went back to Kansas City for the funeral, and the night before, a bunch of us were sitting around a pool reminiscing about him, and I shared my dream. And no one thought I was crazy.

He would have been 27 today. We still love him, we still miss him. I'm sure we always will.

Happy Birthday, Rob.