The first basketball game I ever watched was in June 2008. The game itself is a blip in my memory: The Los Angeles Lakers played the Boston Celtics. I hardly understood the game. But I watched because my brother did. His favorite player was Kobe Bryant, so mine was too.

So in a way, like he did for so many others, Kobe Bryant inspired me. I dribbled in my backyard knowing full well there was no future in basketball. But in writing this, I am still connected to the sport. There’s a remnant of what luminated off Bryant every time he took the floor, every time he improved when it looked like he couldn’t. Invincibility.

But now that person is gone. So are his 13-year-old daughter and seven others in a helicopter crash Sunday morning. Bryant was just 41 years old. Sunday was a confusing, sickening, neverending day for everyone. Syracuse basketball players displayed on Twitter and Instagram that Kobe Bryant inspired them to pick up a basketball. “Ever since I started playing basketball the only shoes I would wear were Kobe’s,” SU sophomore Buddy Boeheim said on Twitter.

But that’s not surprising, that a single person would create an entire basketball team’s spirit. That’s just what Kobe did. He wasn’t supposed to die this young.

He was the guy you knew by his first name. He was connected to your favorite team, player, school simply because of the omnipotence of his figure. His name blurted out of your mouth when you crumpled up a loose sheet of paper and eyed a trash can a few feet away. Sunday, when you heard the news, you said his name again. But this time you were confused. You hoped you didn’t hear the name correctly.

You heard about his daughter, Gianna, and how his everlasting connection to the sport he transcended lived vicariously through her. You heard how he inspired her career. And all I could think of is the guy who was at my games.

I don’t have a great relationship with death. I fear it as if it’s near. Heart disease has claimed lives on each side of my family. My father introduced the idea to me one morning under an awning at a beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Morning walks with my dad are often retrospective, and I fear it’s because of the lack of clarity that comes with the future. He’s healthy, but my 53-year-old father’s also certain: He doesn’t think he’ll live a long life.

There’s a certain feeling of hopelessness that follows hearing that. I suffer from anxiety if I feel like I wasted a day,struggle to maintain plans and teeter with personal relationships because of it. Events like Bryant’s death further challenge me: Why does it feel so complicated that a person could be gone? Do even the people you think would never die go, too?

I once thought that about my dad, that he was invincible and would never go, but it’s hard to be hopeful sometimes. “It’s life,” he would say. But when life ends, do memories die, too?

No. Of course, not. Not for Kobe. When the time comes, they won’t for my dad either. A person never dies if their legacy will live on forever. And that seems fitting.

Kobe Bryant doesn’t die, not if we won’t let him. We’ll still call him by his first name, notice his impact on the playing style of SU’s best players, and blurt out the two syllables (“Kobe!”) that defined this generation of basketball anytime we want to make an office space an NBA arena.

And maybe — just maybe — if we commit ourselves the way he did within our personal lives, we’ll reach the level of remembrance Kobe has. It will never seem real that he is gone, and maybe it doesn’t have to. Some people are truly invincible.

Published on January 27, 2020 at 11:01 pm