Jacob was my cousin. I didn't know him as well as many of you. When I think of him, I see his smile and the quickness of his hands. We met for dinner in Morningside late in the spring of 2001. As I was reaching for the check, he pulled it from my fingertip[s – a gesture of wicked kindness. He refused to let me pay. "Next time it's on me," I assured him. He gave me a sideways look – I could pay if I could grab the check.

At that time, I was thinking of applying to MFA programs. I was struggling with my application piece. It was a story about two brothers. That night we talked about brothers, about Copenhagen and about writing. He didn't encourage me or discourage me from applying. He invited me to his graduation so I could see what it was about. Show, don't tell – a writer's lesson. It was a gesture that seemed too large.

The night he graduated, he read a comic story about an intervention. We all laughed heartily at the puzzle of the surface area to volume ratio. After dinner, Jacob discovered he'd lost his keys. He, Dana and I circled Columbia in the dark, chain smoking (Jacob and I, anyway), staring at the ground. I imagine his keychain still uncollected at Columbia's lost and found.

Two weeks later, my mother called to tell me Jacob had died. My cousin DJ and I had been out drinking that night. We had just lamented his absence, and toasted his success. "He was good, Ma. But he was good." I wept into the phone, again and again. I can't separate in my mind if I was weeping because he was a good writer or a good person. It seemed that something had gone terribly wrong with the universe, that someone so gifted and so generous should die so young.

It was three years before I finished my story about brothers. I had first to wrestle my own demons – substance abuse, depression – to the ground. A few weeks ago, I was accepted to the MFA program at the University of Minnesota.

Thank you Jacob for showing us all how it is done.