Death

Amy’s favorite poet, Mary Oliver , just passed away at 83. In her honor, following is Amy’s favorite Mary Oliver poem White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field . Coming down out of the freezing sky with its depths of light, like an angel, or a buddha with wings, it was beautiful and accurate, striking the snow and whatever was there with a force that left the imprint of the tips of its wings – five feet apart – and the grabbing thrust of its feet, and the indentation of what had been running through the white valleys of the snow – ...

My mother-in-law (Amy’s mom) passed away last Sunday. The funeral was in Hotchkiss, Colorado yesterday. At lunch with her extended family, someone said something that stuck with me. “No one gets out of this alive.” I went looking for the source this morning and couldn’t find one. Amy thought it was Woody Allen, a Google search turned up Jim Morrison (due to the name of his book), Robert Heinlein was cited as saying something similar, but in the end I decided it didn’t matter. I just liked the statement. ...

Paul Kalanithi’s book When Breath Becomes Air is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I stayed up late the past two nights reading it while in bed. As I put my Kindle on the bedside table last night I had tears in my eyes. Paul passed away on March 9, 2015 at age 37. He was a Stanford-trained neurosurgeon and writer. He was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2013, though he never smoked. He was married to Lucy (Goddard) Kalanithi who sounds like an amazing woman. When he died he had an infant daughter Cady. His family was extremely close to him. ...

I woke up to an email today from Aaron Schwartz , founder of Modify . I don’t know Aaron other than our email exchanges but he thanked me for Venture Deals which he said has been very helpful to him. His note went on to say: *A close friend of mine, and one of my best friend’s co-founders just passed away after a 15-month battle with non-smoker’s lung cancer. I thought the below article was incredibly revealing about how meaningful a partner and leader can be for a start-up. If you think it would be useful to other entrepreneurs, I hope you’ll take a moment and share it. * ...

An hour ago I received a phone call from one of my closest friends who has been a hugely influential mentor of mine that his wife had passed away. She was a close friend also and they’ve had an enormous impact on my life. She’s been ill for a while so this isn’t a surprise and when I saw her about a month ago I knew her time was coming. But it’s still incredibly hard to process, especially knowing how close they were as a couple. ...