Goodbye, Marc

If you'll allow me to get serious for just a couple minutes, I wanted to acknowledge my friend Marc Kaplan, who passed away Tuesday morning after a nearly five-year battle with brain cancer. I met Marc through my friend David (one of the Playland folks), and when Marc lived in Boston for a couple years (I believe it was from 1998–1999) we became good friends. Since then, however, due to distance (Marc moved to Atlanta) and time, we drifted apart, and in these most recent years we really weren't in touch at all. Of course, it was during this time that Marc's brain tumor came back (he had been in remission), and things got progressively worse for him.

I can't say that I have any idea what it must have been like for Marc, or his friends and family, but I know it was hard. Marc was apparently taking an aggressive course of action to beat his cancer. He had moved back home with his family in New York, would get chemo and radiation in the city, and travel often to Houston for experimental treatments at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Eventually, those proved useless; Marc stopped going for treatment at the end of the summer. David told me that in his last couple months, Marc was in a lot of pain, so I take comfort in the fact that now he is at peace and no longer suffering.

While I know I could have been much better about staying in touch with Marc these past couple years, I also know it'd be too easy to post something here about regrets in that regard and turn this into a posting about me and not him. Still, to put it mildly, the news was a real bummer, and as you might expect it made me a bit sad. Let me say that when I think of Marc, I'll always remember his Life Is Good hat. During his first bout with the tumor, someone gave Marc a hat to hide his baldness. Whether it was meant as irony or reflective of Marc's optimism, I saw the hat as symbolic of Marc's positive attitude that he would beat this disease. Even though he didn't, I'll continue to associate Marc with the hat.

Marc was a good guy and he'll be missed.

(If you'd like to read more about Marc, check out the article that his employer, the United States Tennis Association wrote about him. Click here to read it.)