Remembering Tom Levine

In early March, I first heard about my friend Tom Levine's rare diagnosis of Glioblastoma, which only affects 2 out of 100,000 Americans per year.

Mutual friend Buzz Bruggeman called me about his condition one morning, a day that started a series of lucid dreams about Tom and his condition.

Today, I learned that he died last night only 57 days after he learned of his disease. He was only 56.

Tom is the third person close to me who has died in the past four months. I am still in denial, much like I was for weeks after Marc Orchant's death. It's hard to understand why such an affliction could happen to someone with such heart, soul and love.

Buzz wrote about his loss this afternoon, a blog post which shows both love and pain. When I heard that he was flying to Maine to see Tom, I realized that time was not on his side.

I thought about Tom daily. Only two weeks prior to his diagnosis, he emailed me saying we'd have dinner in a couple of weeks on his next trip to the west coast. Over the past several months, he spent a lot of time between coasts recruiting sponsors for the annual PopTech conference where he was President.

For those who knew him, this news can only feel like a tragedy that should never have happened or maybe something we just read about in some 17th century novel.

Unfortunately, we can't control the events in our lives. Our time on this planet is short and before we come face-to-face with our own mortality, its worth thinking about how we're spending the hours in our days and who we're spending them with.

Despite knowing that the chances of recovery were slim, I prayed that Tom would be one of those rare freak survival cases we could all talk about later. While on a bus in Israel last week, Robert Scoble yelled over his shoulder: "Buzz is on Twitter and wants you to contact him right away."

My heart raced, certain that he had horrible news about Tom. When it wasn't the case, I went back to the hope that Tom would break through the odds and surprise modern medicine.

Tom was a dear friend to me as well as a mentor, although he probably never knew how and why. He believed in me and saw golden nuggets that only close friends see right away. We shared stories over the years and talked about our less traveled roads from the past and those we wanted to travel through in the future.

Sadly, Tom will never travel those roads among us in the form we knew him, but he is not lost, nor is he gone. The light of Tom's soul will remain among those who loved him and we will forever be touched by his eternal presence.