He saw something

Angela (an amazing twelve-year-old) writes October 22:

"My name is Angela Pupino. I met Rick a year ago at the YSU planetarium. Last fall and winter I started to go to the planetarium with my parents. Rick has to be one of the most amazing people I have ever met. He made ordinary things seem amazing. Sometimes (but never enough) I would stay after the show and talk to him. The funny thing is that whenever he talked to me I would get very quiet and not know what to say. If he would ask me a question I would mumble something quiet and my face would turn red. My mother would just sit there and laugh. All winter, Rick and the planetarium were all I talked about. My best friend Katie would laugh and call me a dork. And I was. Every freezing cold night I would be outside, pointing out stars to myself and wondering if Rick was looking at them too. Every Friday night I could I would go to the planetarium shows. This summer, Rick invited me to some Young Eagles events, and I got the opportunity to fly in his airplane. It is hard to put into words how I felt about him, but he really changed my life.

"When my grandmother told me about his passing I broke down and cried. It was like a brick wall had hit me and I wondered what it was like for the people who knew him better. I loved him like a teacher but as a friend as well. I looked online every night since then and have found some pretty interesting stories about him. I wish I could have known him longer. What he saw in me, a dorky twelve year old with glasses who couldn't speak full sentences around him, is beyond me. But what my mother is determined to prove to me is that he saw something, and whatever he saw, I hope it's truly there."

Angela added later via recover-from-grief.com, in a piece entitled The Perfect Stranger:

"It still pains me sometimes, to think about who was lost on October 15, 2008. He was a friend of mind, and a stranger nonetheless. I had known Rick for no more than a year, and yet his death shattered my world.

Rick was a technician who worked at my local planetarium. He was also a pilot, photographer, and countless other things. It may not sound like much, but that planetarium continues to be an amazing place for me.

Rick's impact on my life went far beyond the stars. I maintain, to this day, that Rick saved my life. I was nothing but a lost teen trying to find friends. I became lost during the worst winter of my life, when divorce and sadness ran rampant in my family. Suicide was constantly on my mind. And it took Rick to save me.

Rick was the kind of friend that amazed you. There was a quiet sort of magic to him, he made everything interesting, everything special. He was a grown man treating a twelve year old like she was worth something. He would talk to me after shows and interest me in things. He would smile at me and give me learning materials. He would take me up in his airplane. All things you would never expect from a perfect stranger. And he didn't even realize he was saving me from myself.

Now, when I think of him, I think of him as a hero. I hardly knew him, and yet he saved me. No amount of words on a screen can describe how I feel. He died perfectly young, at the age of fifty-five. That big heart of his didn't hold out. I didn't find out until two days later.

The pain was horrific. Never in my twelve years have I felt that way. No words can sum it up. The grief still hits me sometimes, when I least expect it to. I'll see a plane, see a star, or see someone who reminds me of him. His quiet attitude and soft smile seem to come to me everyday. His voice sits in the back of my mind.

Being only twelve, and knowing him so little, I feel writing about him to be trespassing in someone else's business. His family should write about him. His friends. Some have, and some haven't. So I guess I will.

I am only twelve, but I will never forget."

also see from Angela

The depth of the effect one person can perhaps unknowingly have upon another is so clear in 2 earlier observations by Angela, a youngster showing her elders a transparency we may have hidden away, or forgotten how to acknowledge or express:

Current mood: crushed. "These past few weeks I've been a complete mess. I can not concentrate on anything at all. On the sixteenth I was happily planning to go to a sleepover with my friends Olivia, Nicole, Logan and Kasey. I was telling my grandmother about my plans to go to the planetarium the next evening with Olivia when suddenly my grandmother said, "Honey, didn't you hear? Mr. Pirko died yesterday." I was suddenly confronted with a horrible truth. This was worse than the apartment fire I lived through this summer. This was worse than my parents divorce. This was worse than the problems with my mom's boyfriend this winter. The only person on the face of the Earth who understood me was dead.

"I spent the next few days in a fog. I looked online every night. It had to be a mistake. Rick Pirko was only in his fifties. He was too young to die. Then I was angry. How come no one bothered to tell me? I had went to the planetarium the week before and the guy who gave the show had said that Rick was sick. He could have said that Rick was in a coma at the hospital.

"Rick was literally all I had for a long time. For months I was a friendless loser who was in a world of fighting and crying at home. No one cared about me. And then there was Rick. Here was this crazy nerdy guy who treated me like I was worth something. He would ask me to stay after to talk. He would give me CDs of that night's show. He even gave me textbooks one night and told me that some on the best learning took place at home. Of course, I went it to a shell every time he talked to me. I would mumble or say the wrong answer if he asked me a question. Even when Rick asked me my name and I mumbled Angela, I said it so quietly that Rick spent the next two weeks thinking my name was Valerie. I was shy around him. It became a joke between my mother and my friend Katie that I had a crush on Rick. They would laugh and say Angela Pirko. Then I would (nervously) laugh and say that they were ridiculous.

"Even on the day of his memorial my mother still teased me. She asked me why I was so nervous about going. Truthfully, I was afraid that I would break into a fit of nervous laughter at the memorial (I have a habit of doing so when I am uneasy or worried). My mom laughed and said, 'Are you nervous about meeting Rick's wife?' Then she laughed and said 'The mistress and the wife meet for the first time.'

"I can not say that I feel any better about Rick now. In fact, I missed school today because I am so stressed about life that my face swelled up like a giant balloon and is covered in hives. But life does go on, whether you want it to or not. Rest in peace Rick Pirko." November 5, 2008.

Current mood: bummed.  "The past few weeks I have been a mess. School is a chore to me, and I bet that Mr. Pupino swears that I forgot how to play the alto saxophone. The same three words that my grandma said weeks ago keep echoing through my head. Mr. Pirko died. It has to be a lie. It isn't. One part of me wants to think that he is still alive. The other is slowly falling apart with grief. My parents seem to expect me to move on. 'It is a shame about Rick,' my father said on the sixteenth, 'but everyone dies sometime.' He didn't mean it to sting so bad, I'm sure, but those words hurt.

    "It hurts that I never told him how much he changed my life. Saved my life, that is a better way to put it. I don't know where I would be today if I hadn't met him. That is the thing that know one seems to understand. Rick Pirko saved me from myself this winter. And he had no clue. I went crazy the day I found out about his passing. I commented every blog I could find about him. I usually have a way with words, but I lost it for a while. There is a stack of letters about two inches thick in my desk drawer that I wrote to Victoria. I never could make them sound right. So I never sent them. Whether I do or not depends I guess.

"What really bothers me is that there was a Young Eagles Rally on the 27th that he had excitedly told me about. My mother had just had a baby, and my father had to work. I couldn't go. I spent that whole day feeling terrible about it. He was probably waiting for me. It stabs me every time to think that the rally would have been the last time that I saw him.

    "I went to the planetarium that weekend, hoping to apologize to him. The man who gave the show said that Rick was sick. I thought he had the flu. I pondered in the days after that if I should email him an apology. But then I thought that people don't check their email when they're sick. I thought of calling him. Maybe he was bored or lonely. That idea worked for all of two seconds when it occurred to me that he might actually pick up the phone. (At that point I put the phone down.)

    "I was always incredibly shy around him, something that I have come to regret now. My mind would go blank just looking at him. Even flying in an airplane with him I was thoughtless. He was talking away  about airplanes and flying and I was thinking, "Oh crap, I'm in an airplane with Rick. Angela, don't do anything stupid."  I will never forget the one day I went to a Young Eagles rally and one of the men there smiled and said, "You must be Angela. Rick talks about you all the time." I was shocked. That was kind of thing that your grandparents do, tell their friends about people they know.

    "Reading the stories that people have posted about him, I am not sure whether I should laugh or cry.I will never know the Rick Pirko who stole bibles from hotel rooms or horrified people with laser pointers.I am feeling a little better now about him.Rick didn't suffer. I wondered for a while why I was so upset. Other people didn't get as upset as I did about it. Then I thought that I'm only twelve. I guess I handled it okay for a hormone filled twelve year old. He managed to live one hundred years worth of life in fifty-five years. That really says something about him. Life moves on, and in time so will I." November 10, 2008.