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“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
Dan Erb was a very sweet man—an old soul. I don't have shit friends, sadly, the mark of a true friend in our circles is how atrociously mean someone can be to you and you still love them at the end of the day. A true friend calls you on your bullshit, a true friend will deflate your head balloon if its getting too big.
Erb, although the same...was drastically different. We connected over the loss of our dads, and we talked about having daughters and how amazing (and tremendously difficult) it is having them. I would wake up in the morning to songs about love, life, dads & loss. To be honest, sometimes Erb would take me from a perfectly good mood into this introspective place that I wasn't ready to go into.
The hardest adjustment since he passed was to go from saying "sometimes Erb is an asshole" to "Sometimes he WAS an asshole". The WAS part is the biggest hangup.
How he lived:
The quality of a man isn't how well he worked or paid his taxes, the quality of a man is how much he impacts the world around him. Erb LOVED hard. He loved his kids, he loved his girl, and he loved his friends tremendously. Good friends are the cornerstone upon which you build the rest of your life. Good friends are there before you meet your wife, before you have your kids, and before you dare to get old.
How he died: From what I heard, as he was being brought into surgery, he was still making everyone else around him laugh. He fought like the motherfucker he was until there was nothing left. There's a void and it's painfully sad, but to be honest, I kind of love this feeling - I don't love the fact that the texts have stopped forever, or that I won't hear from him again, but feeling this way in loss means that you actually had something to lose.
We miss you Erb!
