17 Years Later (August 8th, 2026)

Today marks the 17th anniversary of a plane crash, involving a small plane and a helicopter, above the Hudson River that killed all nine people aboard the two aircrafts. In that plane were my childhood best friend Doug, one of my heroes (his father, Danny), as well as his uncle. Doug was just 15 years old. It was a tragedy that not only ended the lives of some truly wonderful humans, but altered the trajectories of so many others. To the extent that healing means to return to the same form as before an injury, I have still not fully healed from this and never will. I am forever changed because of the love we had for each other and their tragic loss.

Doug and I met when we were three or four years old. We became each other’s best friends during kindergarten and while we had an expansive social network for young people with many other friends, there was never a doubt what we meant to each other. Our families became incredibly close as we did. Both of our dads were in real estate and spent a ton of time together, as did our moms, and we both had older brothers who, despite being a year apart, were also good friends. We lived two minutes away from each other and soon after Doug and I became best friends our families started spending more and more time together. 

We took many family vacations together. From Aruba to Disney World to Israel to Mexico to the Shore among others, we had some incredible travel experiences that brought us even closer together. To go further, Doug and I also played sports together and our dads coached together, which only brought us closer. To go through all of the memories that we had together would be longer than reasonable for a blog post, and to pick just a few memories would be unfair in this piece to the value of the memories that I have of him/them. 

It would be easy to call the “best” memories the ones from luxurious vacations we took because there was something uniquely special about those. But that takes away from the more routine memories where we would try to hide when our mom came to pick us up so we could hang out together longer. When you strip away the noise from memories, whether we were at one of our homes or on the other side of the world, the best part was just being together. I do not mean to take for granted how lucky we were to have the diversity of experiences we did together, we were aware that it was a privilege even then, and now I look back at the different memories and am so grateful for all of the many things we got to do together in a relatively short period of time; but at the core of it was just time with someone I loved who loved me, someone I understood deeply who deeply understood me, a beautiful relationship that spontaneously ruptured. 

Doug was unique. He was a goofy and talented kid, which is what most people who knew him saw, but he was also deeply empathetic. When he was very young, he learned in a terrifying moment that he was deathly allergic to seafood and shellfish. That near death experience he had at a young age made him a careful observer of the world around him and a caring person. He was incredibly funny, but could also be incredibly serious when he needed to be. He was deeply passionate about things he cared about and thrived in multiple realms. I will never know who he would have become, but know he would have been great. 

Danny was unique as well. I wish I could have gotten to know him as an adult, but as a kid he was an amazing role model. I remember how strong and athletic he was. For all I know he worked out multiple times everyday of his life. He was a loving husband and father. I know that he was a successful businessman though I never really interacted with that side of him. He was also the life of the party. I often hear the saying “dance like nobody is watching”. Well Danny danced like everybody was watching and he wanted it that way. I can still hear his infectious laugh as well as his motivation to get others to work hard and be the best they could be. 

I learned so much from them and so enjoyed the time we spent together while they were alive. I am sure I took too many moments for granted, but I have hung onto their memories now for more than half my life, and will continue to as long as I live. I have continued to learn from them since they died and am grateful for the time we had together. I miss them in a way that is only possible when things are special. They were special and they continue to be special.

Their death ended a part of our relationship, but I still feel them with me. They inform the work I do and my strive for greatness. Doug and I used to have conversations about what we wanted to be when we grew up. While, as should be the case for all children, our dreams ranged in a number of directions, there were some common elements. We wanted to be professional athletes, and unfortunately that was not something I could achieve for him. We wanted to marry gorgeous, loving, and smart women, and fortunately I have a beautiful and talented wife. And another thing we always discussed when we envisioned our future was wanting to make the world a better place and help others. My life continues to be informed by these dreams we had.

When you lose somebody or something that is special to you, you don’t simply heal, as that implies that you return to the state you were in before an injury occurred. I am forever changed because of their loss. I am forever better because they were a meaningful part of my life, though they have now been dead for more time than Doug or I were alive before they passed, which is hard for me to wrap my head around. But the solution is not to pretend it doesn’t hurt or simply try to move on, as that diminishes how much they meant and still mean to me. It is okay that it hurts, it is okay that it still hurts after all this time, as it’s a mark of our love. 

My sophomore year started less than a month after they passed. I will never forget how hard it was going back to school. When you are best friends with someone from kindergarten on and always go to school together, the classroom serves as a constant reminder of them. I struggled in school and was quickly diagnosed with ADHD and Depression and prescribed medications. I was labeled with deficiencies because I was grieving a traumatic event. Systems were more concerned with ensuring I could “keep up” instead of meeting me where I was. It wasn’t that I simply couldn’t pay attention, it was that I was dealing with questions that seemed much more important about life and death than the traditional academic curriculum I was being fed. 

I am not saying this is the common experience, many of my friends interpreted and internalized the loss differently than I did, but this was my experience. There is no one right way to grieve, but we must be given the space to process and integrate loss with supports around us, rather than just forced to stay on track with a world that has drastically changed in a moment. It really did feel like the world was moving forward without me and I was being medicated, which likely prolonged the numbness from the shock of their loss. Fortunately for me, I was provided with healthy coping mechanisms and therapy that ultimately did allow for me to integrate difficult lessons, but I know that is not available for so many people who experience loss in our society.

We, as a society, need to learn to grieve. It is uncomfortable, but painful experiences we do not integrate get repeated. Of course, my failing to integrate did not make others in my life die in a plane crash specifically, but it did lead to me pushing away and essentially rupturing close relationships I had. This need to grieve and integrate is true at an individual and collective level. Being totally stuck in the past is not healthy, but failing to integrate the memories and lessons from traumatic experiences is not healthy either. This process leads to post-traumatic growth and post-traumatic wisdom, it can bring new meaning into our lives. But those who run from these hard feelings are bound to continue running from it for the rest of their lives, until and unless they are forced to confront the realities of what they have been running from. Often this will occur as the original trauma has begotten more trauma, for instance through addiction or violence, and it becomes even more challenging to integrate this compounding trauma. 

In addition to the individual losses that we must learn to grieve, we must also learn to grieve collectively. Our society does not integrate lessons from large traumas and reenacts trauma, which threatens the wellbeing of us all. There are more examples than would be appropriate for this blog post, so I won’t go into them, but they are all around us. What I am advocating for at the individual level applies to us at a collective level. We need to re-learn how to grieve fully.

I do not mean for this to get too far away from the original topic so I will reel it back in here, but believe that these lessons apply and are relevant for further discussion someday. But today’s piece intends to serve the memories of two incredibly important people in my life, and everyone who lost their lives in that accident seventeen years ago today. Not a day has gone by since that I have not missed them dearly. I have dreams about both of them, and Doug especially quite frequently. Sometimes in those dreams he has gotten older with me, and other times he has not, yet I find that each time I have one of those dreams now I feel glad that I got to spend time with him when I wake up, in addition to the heaviness that accompanies those dreams. 

I feel them with me and believe they are. I hope to make them proud and will keep growing stronger for so long to come to give them the best life I can. “So long as they speak your name you shall never die.” I will always hold them close to me and continue to carry them, alongside others who have given more to me than I can ever return, so that they are not fully dead. Their bodies are gone yet their lives can shine on because of all that they gave, and continue to give, to me and so many others. As my work and influence grows, so do their lives and legacies. 

I miss them dearly and will forever mourn this anniversary. I miss them everyday, but I find that as the number of years since the accident grows larger, this day serves as a sobering reminder of how young they both were, especially Doug, and what the world lost that day. We will never know who he would have been, but I have no doubt it would have been great. I try to be great for both of us and carry him with me. Today, as has become tradition on this anniversary, my dad and I will golf at the golf course they used to play, and then we will get dinner at one of the restaurants we used to eat at together, where I will get the ribs Doug and I used to always order.