I was 21 years old when I saw my first dead body.

In the summer of 1989, I was an intern with an Indianapolis television station. On this particular sunny Monday morning, I was one of the first ones to arrive in the newsroom. The police scanner on the assignment desk barked out a short message about a "floater" in a drainage lake at a northside apartment complex. When the photographer and I arrived, the police were dragging the body ashore. I angled in for a closer look, and instantly wished I had kept my distance. The victim was a young roofer who decided to take a dip in the lake to cool off after work, then slipped and drowned. He had been partially submerged in the water for almost three days and the corpse was swollen and misshapen, like his body had been stuffed too full with something soft.

A few moments later, a car skidded to a stop behind us, and a couple jumped out. It was the boy's parents, and when the mother saw what had happened, she immediately ran to his side. She dropped to her knees next to the body and hid her face in her hands. The father put his fists on the hood of the car and leaned forward as if he would collapse, and the mother began to wail, "My baby, my baby..."

            I watched it all in silence. I felt uncomfortable, like I was intruding on something very private and very sacred. It was my first real contact with death. Up to that point, death had been an abstraction, something seen only on TV. The bodies at the funerals I had previously attended seemed fake somehow, sanitized props set out by the funeral director, no different than the flowers or the guest book. But this was real. The dead man was real, the mother was real and the grief was real.

            It scared me.

I think about that day as I watch the news of last night's Air India crash flash across my screen: 58 people on board, only seven survivors. As I watch the recovery crews pick through the wreckage looking for bits of steel and bone, I close my eyes and I am 21 again. I see that mother again, I see the dead man, I see myself. And I see Brad.

When American Eagle Flight 4184 soared into the Indianapolis night sky on October 31, 1994, my friend Brad Stansberry was on board. The plane was bound for Chicago, where Brad was scheduled to pick up a connecting flight to Germany. He was an engineer for Delco Electronics, finishing up a six month European assignment. The previous week, he had returned to Indiana for a friends wedding and Purdue's homecoming. When it was time for him to leave, he said goodbye to his sister and father when they dropped him off at the terminal and climbed aboard the plane. As the small twin-engine turboprop neared Chicago, it ran into an ice storm, and approximately thirty minutes later, plunged into an Indiana cornfield. Sixty-eight people on board, no survivors.

Brad wasn't even supposed to be on that flight. He was normally a meticulous person, but for some reason, on this occasion, he got careless. Brad was always the life of every party he attended, vigorously shaking the hand of everyone in the room, belting out "Soul Man" in a loud, atonal voice that we always instantly recognized. At the cookout his parents held the night before his flight to celebrate his return to Germany, the fun and festivities must have gone to his head. He misread his ticket, and as a result, missed his scheduled flight. When he later realized his mistake, he wrangled a seat on Flight 4184. It crashed in a cold rain on Halloween night, and no one saw him again.

I've always looked at plane crashes as being different somehow than other types of accidents. They shock me in a way that nothing else can, a thunderbolt to the soul, a sudden blow to the chest that leaves me stunned and confused. I can't comprehend falling 20,000 feet from the sky, and am numbed by the idea of so many people perishing so suddenly and so violently. When a large number of souls are torn from the collective unconscious in the blink of an eye, the rips in the fabric of the universe are ragged and slow to heal.

Brad was the first real friend I had lost, and I spent a long time in the denial stage of grief. I wasn't able to fully complete the equation: rationally, logically, I knew he was dead, but a tiny part of me, some sliver of my unconscious, felt he was still alive.  For many years, I imagined picking up the ringing telephone and hearing Brad's voice boom on the other end. Hey, what are you doing? I'm in town, let's go. He never called, but on some dim, detached level, I held out hope.

I don't feel that way anymore. Last week, my friend Jeff was visiting from out of state, and we decided to make a trip to Brad's grave. We wandered around the cemetery for a while, looking for his marker and I was ashamed that I had not been there in so long, embarrassed by the fact that I didn't recognize the immense new fountain that had been erected recently near Brad's site. When we finally found the place, we stood silently for a moment in the warm July breeze. I looked at his name, at the shooting stars etched into the bronze marker and waited for the rush of emotions that I usually felt when I visited his grave.

They never came.

I used to like to go outside on still summer nights and sit among the lighting bugs and the stars and look for Brad's face in the deep rich evening sky. I would wait for a sign, a word from God that Brad was okay. But that sign never came either.

I can still remember Brad. I can close my eyes and conjure him up and set him in motion, and for a few moments, he is alive again. We can chuckle about locking the keys in the car during a weekend trip to Wisconsin. We can go back to the parties he hosted in college and reminisce about pretty girls.  We can drink a beer together and sing and laugh. I shut my eyes tight and I can see his face and hear his voice and feel his presence. We are happy and young and we know that we will never die.

But when I open my eyes, he is gone again. He is not alive anymore, he's dead. Nothing else, just plain dead. I don't wait for his phone calls anymore, I don't expect him to come bounding through the front door anymore. I know now he isn't coming back. I sit and remember the sadness I used to feel when I reminisced about him, and I'm discouraged to find that the pain has almost vanished, dulled to the point of becoming tolerable.

I don't think about Brad as often as I used to. And I find that the less I think about him, the more I miss him.