In his last days, the great essayist and observer Oliver Sacks wrote these words in an essay titled "My Own Life":

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I'm in mid-seventies, experiencing the same thing. Recently a friend and colleague from the days of business bankruptcy practice, Pat Neligan, died. Two months earlier his wfe emailed me a request for a memory I had of him for compilation into a book she was compiling for his 70th birthday. I sent her this: 

Pat! I send felicitations on the occasion of your seventieth birthday!

It was a privilege and a pleasure for me to have practiced bankruptcy law with you as we and other fine lawyers of the bankruptcy bar represented our respective and sometimes adversarial clients in our beloved Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Texas over all the years of the Golden Age of Bankruptcy, the late 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. (I retired in 2017, after the Golden Age had ended.)

What I remember most is that you were always the calm at the center of the hurricane. Contentions, arguments, raised voices, and a general cacophony swirled around us, the lawyers, in the hallways outside Bob’s, Harold’s, Steve’s and later Cooter’s, Barbara’s, and the younger judges’ courtrooms—but you were always seemingly unaffected, unpeturbed by sharp words, obivious to the pandemonium, and just always pleasantly talking, conferring, and seeking for any common denominators in the angular positions of the parties that would, thanks to you, become the basis of deals, compromises, and settlements, which are what make bankruptcy practice both rewarding for the practitioners and effective as a legal dispute-resolving and restructuring process for the clients. I smile when I think of you in those hallways!

Now it is time to celebrate! It is your birthday, No. 70!

All the best,

Josiah

He left, to quote Sacks, "a hole that cannot be filled."