I've never been rattled by human death. I suppose a healthy combination of self-loathing and misanthropy doesn't exactly make a great recipe for sentiment in this area; I'd probably be a better grief counselor for those who have lost pets, since that has always affected me far more deeply. Even the event of losing my most brilliant engineer – which I've written about at some length – didn't really shake me for a few days.
But I bring up death – being in an especially dark mood lately – as a segue to sharing a tale I've been meaning to share for many years. It is about the death of a friend when I was 18 years old, and his name was Kurt McFall.
