Shit
I found out the day before I left for Brazil that a good friend from college was killed while hiking in the mountains of Peru. Here’s a New York Times article explaining what happened.
I can’t even put into words how I feel about this. Even with almost two weeks to reflect, I am still neither eloquent or poetic enough to capture Court Demas or how I feel about his death, but here are some random thoughts.
After I found out I found myself going over the academic (and therefore, useless) exercise of trying to guess why he was murdered. Bandits? Shining Path? By focusing on these ultimately irrelevant questions, I avoided the loss. I’m still avoiding it.
In college we were pretty good friends, but we didn’t keep in touch much afterwards. The Court I remember was one of the warmest and most brilliant people I have ever met.
The story I always told about him was how in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, he would always turn in his assignments late, but they would do twice what was called for. His professors were so impressed that they failed him and he was ultimately kicked out. But, the punchline is that the Computer Science department hired him. So instead of paying to take classes, now he was getting paid.
The other thing I will remember is his dumb laugh. It was so filled with joy and and an almost innocence… “Ha ha ha, no way!”
I miss you Court.
