The eternal Edgar Rosa

When Edgar Rosa and I became friends during my freshman year of college, I genuinely couldn’t believe my luck. I had been a quiet, bookish kid in high school — not exactly the qualities that make you popular in New York City’s boisterous suburbs. Now here was one of Emerson College’s undeniable cool kids, a man with a buoyant, charming, extroverted personality who got invited to all the parties, and he wanted to hang out with me all the time and room together sophomore year. The more time we spent together, the more I learned from Edgar. I became more outgoing, more confident, more cool. If ever I found myself embarrassed or frustrated, there was Edgar to boost me and remind me that, in a school filled with trust-fund kids who left home with daddy-backed Amex black cards, the ticket to our success was confidence and tireless work ethics. We spent hours in the dorms exemplifying the work-hard-play-hard lifestyle we both loved. We excelled, and we did so with the music playing loud and long.

After two years in the dorms together, we signed a lease on our first apartment in East Boston. When he left Boston for Los Angeles, to start his career, I wasn’t far behind him. For me, LA was not to be a long-term thing. After a rough year that ended in my losing my job, I returned to my parents’ house in New York. I felt totally defeated. But Edgar didn’t see me that way. He’d call me and catch up, tell me how LA wasn’t the same without me, but remind me that I was doing the right thing, that I’d pull myself together. It seemed impossible at the time.

As usual, Edgar was right. I got a rare, solid job in journalism. Eventually, I ended up going out on a date with Amanda Henning Santiago, a girl I barely knew except for when I saw her star in a freshman-year student film Edgar had made. When I married her six years later, Edgar was by my side as my groomsman. I made my little brother my best man. But even without that title, Edgar stepped into the role throughout the night, taking control of the ceremony at moments when everything bottlenecked, making sure Amanda and I were happy and tended to, deploying his impossible charm on my mother-in-law. The night before, after the rehearsal dinner, I went home, but Edgar led my entire extended family and friends — and everyone who was in the hotel lobby in Williamsburg where everyone was staying before the wedding — in a toast to me and my future. To this day, it’s the moment my family talks about more than any I was actually present for at my own wedding.

There were entire years when, being on opposite coasts, we didn’t see each other. We could go months without calling each other. But whenever we did, no time had passed. We were still the same. Unlike many of the best relationships in my life, our friendship never knew jealousy, envy, spite, or pity. I cannot fathom what it would feel like to feel that with Edgar. It’s not that we kept it light; Edgar knew me on a level almost no one else did. He knew the darker, more lascivious side of my personality. He saw me at many of my lowest moments. He loved me not despite those things, but because of them. He helped me to love myself completely. His cancer diagnosis last year felt surreal. But we talked almost every single day, sharing music, gossip, life updates. Edgar was indomitable. He fought with the strength — and against the odds — of a gladiator.

On Friday, we lost him. My life won’t be the same without him. But my life wouldn’t be the same without him. Everything — my work, my wife, my daughter who will forever know him as her Uncle Edgar — are all downstream of my friendship with him. I will never have the opportunity to thank him appropriately for that gift. But I will work every day for the remainder of my life to show gratitude for him, and to carry him with me wherever life goes. Thank you to his wonderful mother Tamara and his sisters Ivy, Ruby, and Olive for sharing him with me.

And to Edgar, forever my brother too, I love you eternally. But as you once said so smoothly, with that smile that could make you tingle: “You already know.”