Mark powered my will to look past a person's shell and look for their personality. I spoke with him nearly every day from April 1996 to the lastday of his life, Tuesday, 7 January 1997. He was going to a dentist appointment, we said good bye, and a few hours later, Dave tells me he's dead.

Mostly this page is to get some closure for myself, as Dave's memorial pages in Mark's honor are so beautiful, http://www.peak.org/~dshaughn/mark.htm that I don't want to try to compare to them.

My first instinct was disbelief, but even with Dave's sometimes inappropriate sense of humor, this couldn't have been a joke. The full impact of Mark's death didn't even reach me until Dave and I were sobbing on the phone to each other.

While trying to appreciate having him at all, not having him is much worse. So many questions of whom to blame, not wanting to realize the truth of an accident. Had Dave not instantly told me of a car accident as the cause of death, I'd have thought that he'd killed himself, so many times he'd asked me, "Would you be too disappointed if I died?" Jokingly, of course, but at times you couldn't tell if he was serious or not without <sarcasm> </sarcasm> tags.

Possibly the most tearing thing about this death is that he was finally getting out of his hole and becoming more bold and self-assured each day. He'd begun to find confidence in himself, updated his resume, and was ready to take control of a life that he'd been apathetic with before. He lost his life at the time when he was just beginning to build it up and find comfort in things he hadn't cared to look at before. "The good always die young."

He had endearing idiosyncracies, which I'd find annoying in most people but not with him, for some reason. Never one to give a straight answer, you'd have to dig to find out what was on his mind. He made me play a guessing game to find out his given name, which would usually irritate me... but it made him laugh and get more talkative, so I enjoyed it as well. When asked "Why?" he'd answer me, "Why not?" His predictability was comforting in the otherwise unpredictable shit that is the daily grind. When he worked at KFC, I'd always know to look for him around four to five P.M.,if he didn't come, something was wrong. On the day of his death, I looked at the clock when he left, it was 12:42 P.M. I came back at 2:30, checking for him, but he wasn't there. Nothing crossed my mind except that maybe he'd gone to sleep. By 11 P.M., Dave's worst worries came true, and Mark's sudden disappearance had turned into a permanent leave.

As always with death, I keep wondering if I could have told him I loved him some more. Supposedly, he knows now... he always knew... I miss him. Selfishly, greedily, lovingly, I miss him.
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(forgive me Petra... I needed these to stay here. D.)