Will is the brightest burning star I have ever seen. He was a stellar explosion that briefly outshines an entire galaxy, radiating as much energy in a short time as any ordinary star is expected to emit over its entire life span, before fading from view. 

William was a supernova. And to know Will - was to be set on fire.

He blew the spark within you into an all-consuming flame. You were transformed because of him. You worked to mold yourself into a warrior of your virtue because he showed you the possibility of becoming more…of yourself. 

And that is what we are here to understand today. The light of Will Pearson and how we are transformed by it. Will and I would often find examples in nature to explain what happened with humans. And the best way I can find to understand what has happened is to think of him, and us, like starlight. 

When we look at the night sky, we are seeing thousands, millions of points in time, because the stars are all different distances from us and although their beams are traveling at the speed of light, the their fire takes different amounts of time to reach us on earth. Sometimes, the fire we still see is from stars that have already died. But the light and energy they made is and always will travel through space.

Altering something from Kurt Vonnegut:

“When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. You can look at different moments as you look at {the night sky}. You can see how permanent all the moments were.

It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” 

The moments I had with Will were some of the brightest of my life. The moments existed and will always exist. Even though our supernova has faded from view, the light still travels, reaches us. His is and always will be a part of our night sky, the fabric that shrouds all of us, and the constellations that guide us.

Thank you for the fire, William.

May 2015