After graduation, Adam packed up for sunny California and wrote for Disney. He met Wooten and fell in love, and they had two kids. Adam and Wooten opened a baby store called The Milky Way, and Adam coached his son’s baseball team. He had dreams of teaching, of writing, of who knows what else. After college, he went on with his life, full of people we don’t know who have been more present in his life these last two decades than we would ever be again, and we went on with our life. We kept in touch, sporadically but also as one long conversation that we could keep reentering every few years.
But no one has all the time in the world. In January 2011, Adam was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a brain cancer with a terrible prognosis. Adam faced this fact head-on. He had always been an in-the-moment person, always immersing himself in experience, throwing his body and mind into every conversation. We all knew—or should have known—that the friendships we had in college would shift, perhaps suddenly upon graduation or slowly over the years. Adam seemed the one of us who could cultivate the intensity of each friendship in the moment while already being nostalgic for it, for each moment that was so individual and delicious in its own way that it could never be replicated exactly.
