During the past year, I have gained more insights about death than ever before. Four long-time friends, all my age, passed away. I received a master class in the different ways we remember those who were important to us but are no longer there.

Then, this weekend, I gained yet another insight: that another thing that passes when we lose someone close to us is our shared experiences. The memory remains, but something is missing.

It happened this weekend when I was reading a magazine article on the legendary designer Milt Glaser. He, along with George Lois, Bill Bernbach, Jerry Della Famina, Mary Wells, and others redefined graphic design and advertising, grabbing it from the account executives and making creative king. This was just over 50 years ago, and my partner and I, very small fish in a very large puddle, studied their work and got as close to it as we could.

I remember sitting beside my friend at his drawing board going slowly through a copy of Art Direction magazine, looking for things we could build on with our clients, realizing that we were following geniuses, but being young enough to think that there was still hope for us. We both stayed in the business for a long time and achieved some measure of success, together and apart. Whether we were working together or not, we never let much time go by without getting together and sharing our opinions, opinions that floated further apart as we got older. But that didn’t matter.

When I read the article on Glaser, I wanted to reach out to my friend, just to recall those times fifty-odd years ago when we had a long future in front of us and not enough sense to be realistic. But that friend has died, just a few days before  his 83^rd birthday, and with him went another part of me.

The memories, of course, are still there, some of them vivid, some fuzzy around the edges, but the ability to relive those experiences are gone. You had to be there, and now only one of us is.

I think John Donne got it right when he wrote:

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

 This weekend, when I realized that I couldn’t share the bit of memory that the Glaser article had unearthed, I knew that another clod had been washed away by the sea and I was the less.