Adam Cohen.

I'm too young to be catching up with a high-school classmate via his obituary. Adam Cohen was too young to be that obituary.

I didn't know Adam very well and don't have any specific anecdote about him as my classmate in humanities and in Spanish at Winston Churchill High School. I do have a very vivid image in my mind of him in the classroom, and the image is of him smiling. He was always smiling and pleasant, in my memory, and I'm not saying that because he just died. It's true. He was smart and well liked.

And shit, he did a lot more than I have done in his short 38 years. We studied literature alongside each other and he actually realized the promise of those studies by becoming a Shakespeare scholar. He also had two daughters and wrote a memoir for them when he learned he was sick.

I am thinking of Adam tonight and of the family he left behind.