When Your Dead Friend Teaches You How to Live

By Andy — 2026-08-23 — Literary News

I was nine years old, cutting out an obituary for homework. Something about the date of birth and death made it click—this person was like me, and now they weren't.

My father was reading on the couch.

I told him I'd figured out death. He said, "Yes, but not tonight." It's a good answer. It didn't take.

In a new essay for Literary Hub, E.K. Schrader describes the moment she realized something similar—but she also tells the stranger story of what happened when she met Max Ritvo five years later.

Ritvo was a poet who chronicled his terminal cancer in work that was both humorous and honest. He was diagnosed at 16 with Ewing's sarcoma, went into remission, then had it return during his senior year at Yale. He died at 25 in August 2016.

Schrader hadn't met him yet when the diagnosis hit her like something personal. She cried about it waiting for the train. At dinner. She was embarrassed about crying over a stranger, but there it was.

They ended up teaching together that summer at Columbia.

What's peculiar about Schrader's account is how quickly the abstraction dissolved. Ritvo wasn't a dying person to watch from a distance. He was someone who made you laugh. Who helped you photocopy things when you were late. Who encouraged you to get a tattoo. Who, when you mentioned you were afraid of flying, told you instead about the time he'd nearly choked on a burrito in middle school and survived.

Actually, that's not quite right—the fear didn't disappear. It just got more complicated.

Ritvo saw humor not as something separate from illness. He rejected the idea that he was a victim of disease—especially a heroic one. At his wedding, he banned words like "inspirational" from the speeches. When he talked about his cancer in interviews, he could joke that death was like "a prank your body plays on life," and he meant it as wisdom, not deflection.

There's something almost defiant about that.

Schrader spent years with a panic disorder—convinced any new ache meant she was dying. Life became something to cling to rather than live. But watching someone actually dying, someone who wouldn't soften the truth with false hope, changed the mathematics somehow. She still had the fear. She has it now, ten years after Ritvo died. But she learned it from him: that you can laugh at something horrible and not be disrespecting the sadness. You're just making it deeper, more real.

This matters for anyone who knows they're dying, which is all of us, only some people get the deadline in writing.

Schrader says she wasn't ready for everything Ritvo had to teach her when he was alive. She read his interviews, his poems. But parts of it felt too scary to sit with. She told herself she could come back later, when she was ready. Turns out there's no later. There's just the rereading, and the slow understanding that some people don't die the moment their heart stops.