I grew up with Albert’s older sister Maggie.

We nicknamed the 13-year-old Albert “Chubs” because of his chubby cheeks. He was what the history textbooks defined as a “Renaissance man”. Kind, genuine, and mature, he was a piano prodigy, an ice hockey star, and an excellent student. He was the darling of our piano school, admired by all for his talent and humbleness.

My piano school is something of a unique experience. The school--and it is really a school, where the walls are lemon yellow and filled with frames containing group photos at different concerts--is more like a family. The students there have a special bond, created from the hours stuck in the practice rooms and the pressures of passing piano examinations and performing abroad in countries like Spain, England, and Portugal. The yellow walls contain a second home, centering on the piano: a physical manifestation of our tight-knit community.

I’ve been a student of my piano teacher’s school since I was around 3 years old. She’s an old Russian lady, with eyes lined with dark makeup and hair always pulled back into a high bun. Her hair has never been seen down. Picture an uptight Victorian lady, with heavy jewelry, thick skirts, and staggering heels.

            Last year, the annual overseas summer concerts were scheduled to be in Italy and Switzerland. As always, the parents organized a group tour for those planning on attending. We would have a large coach bus and a private tour guide that would take us to the cities and excursions of these two countries after the concerts were over. Unfortunately, my parents decided that our family would travel by ourselves since we had visited Switzerland the year before and didn’t want a repeat of tourist attractions.

            We still attended the large group dinner after the final concert. Since our group was so large, the parents had reserved an entire room at a local bar/restaurant/local improv stage. It was the most fun we had, the euphoria of finishing all performances causing the room to be filled with a lively energy and exuberance. We laughed through the night, watching as our parents volunteered to sing songs on stage and as our dignified piano teacher got up from her seat to lead a conga line around the room. It was an atmosphere of pure happiness, and I soaked in the joy and love for my quirky musical family. My only regret is not staying longer to say goodbye properly before leaving. But then again--how would I have known?

            My family had a flight back to Italy the next morning. The rest of the group would be boarding the coach bus and driving to Lake Geneva.

            “Bye guys!” I shouted, waving “See you back in Maryland!”

            I remember giving Albert a high-five.

            The next evening, I had a sinking feeling in my gut that something was wrong. The groupchat had only three texts. One was from Maggie asking when her dad was flying to Switzerland, another from a mom responding that the adults were handling it and Maggie didn’t need to worry, and the final of another mom informing that Maggie’s dad was coming directly to the big and scary Geneva hospital.

            Who was in the hospital? I didn’t know what was going on, only that something terrible had happened in Switzerland while my family was 356 miles away in Venice, Italy. I texted one of my friends Anika and asked if it was a good time and if she could tell me what was going on.

            She responded: “Not a good time. Will explain later.”

            I said: “Okay. Is everyone okay?”

            She typed back immediately: “No.”

            The little gray bubble that shows when somebody is typing stopped after that. Uncertainty and fear spread through me, and I was terrified that something major had occurred and I could do nothing but wait helplessly for Anika to text me back.

My parents called to find out what happened. I watched, sitting on the squishy hotel bed as my mom’s face went white at the words communicated through the phone. After she hung up, my parents wouldn’t tell me what had happened. They told me to put down my phone and stop waiting for a text because it was late and I should be sleeping and they didn’t want me to worry.

So I did. Nothing dire could have happened, I remember reassuring myself.

The next morning, my mom woke me up and told me, “Albert had passed away. They were at Lake Geneva, the kids playing in the lake when Albert jumped into the water and never resurfaced.”

I don’t know exactly what I said or what I thought after that. I only remember feeling completely numb, because there was just no way that what was coming out of my mom’s mouth was true. It was some sort of horrible nightmare, but one where I couldn’t pinch myself awake. I wasn’t registering my dad’s comforting words or my brother crying or my mom’s concerned gaze. I was only aware of the boom-boom-boom of my heart in my lungs as I struggled to swallow through the hard lump that had formed because for some reason it hurt and it hurt and it hurt.

I didn’t cry for the entire morning. I went through my shower in an unsteady daze, and I don’t remember brushing my teeth and eating breakfast and putting on clothes because we still had to go sightseeing because I wanted to see Michelangelo’s David, the same statue that I researched for months for my freshman year term paper--but all of that didn’t seem to matter, and I must have gone through those actions because by 11 o’clock A.M., I looked as if it were an ordinary day of an ordinary summer vacation.

Only it wasn’t.

Only I remember my eyes finally welling up with tears as I walked through the streets of Rome, Italy, because a sudden thought occurred to me that Albert would never get to travel again and play piano again and graduate from middle school and high school and an amazing college. He was so freaking talented at everything he did.

And then, the floodgates opened, and I couldn’t stop crying, and I was so immensely grateful that I was wearing sunglasses that hid my eyes from the outside world. My mom wrapped an arm around me because, of course, she noticed, and I sat with my head in her shoulder and cried my heart out on the steps of the Accademia Gallery.

At Albert’s funeral, I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair. Listening to his mom weep on top of the casket broke my heart. I looked away. Having to outlive a child has to be the cruelest torture a mother has to endure.

I don’t know if there is a higher being up there that controls the life we live in, but I didn’t think that it was fair for that being to choose Albert. He had a future of success laid out for him, before it was abruptly cut by Fate’s scissors.

I used to think that I am untouchable. Death was an abstract idea that lurked in the corners of the YA fictional books I read in middle school and surfaced in the news of devastating tragedies on the NPR radio station my dad listened to as he drove me to school. It was always present in the world around me, but existed more as a theoretical conception that I thought of every once in a while whenever it materialized. For me, death was never tangible in the way that dug deep into my heart, leaving grief, pain, and a gaping ache that could not be filled.

That was the privilege I had. I existed in a shiny bubble where I believed that death would never fully involve itself in my life until I am much older. That tragedies would happen, but to other people and surely not me because what have I done to deserve this? What have Maggie and the rest of Albert’s family done? Absolutely nothing, but life is fickle and unfair and there’s nothing we can do about it.

I miss Albert.

I think of him often. When I go to piano class, I think about how I have never noticed someone’s presence until he is gone--before I can fully appreciate those who surround me. Now, there’s a hole within the lemon yellow walls that can’t be filled. A missing puzzle piece of genuine warmth that completed our little piano school. The sheltered worldview that had engulfed me had cracked and shattered like a thousand fragments of glass.

There are some things in life that people just can’t predict. While they’re painful and unfair, they constitute a process of growing and expanding beyond the little bubble. We accept it, we heal, we evolve, and we live life to its fullest extent.