Deceased May 1, 2002
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In Memory
It has taken me two months to be able to finish this tribute to my friend Ron Markovich. It is so difficult to find the right words to express the admiration and love I felt towards him. Ron passed away in a fire on May 1, 2002, three days after his 26th birthday. He will forever be remembered by the many (but not enough) who were blessed by his gifted and honest spirit.
I met Ron the day I moved into Stearns in August 1994. With uncurbed zeal, I knocked on every door of the second floor, meeting every neighbor, and when I came to room 204, Ron broke into a huge smile and right away accepted my giddily outstretched hand. We shook vigorously and laughed instantaneously. Before any real conversation, I knew and he knew the abundance of absurdities and possibilities that awaited: Four hundred seventeen-and-eighteen-year-olds, strangers, suddenly away from home and thrust together.
The next day’s teary goodbyes to my parents and brother and sister were quickly assuaged by Ron’s tall figure appearing in the doorway. My mother continued to mention throughout the years how it was the thought of Ron, standing by that doorway with his open smile, which often put her mind at ease when she worried about my being away at school. She was so relieved to see him there, this gawky but confident bowl-cut boy with a smile so toothy and irrepressible, I once told him he reminded me of Julia Roberts.
Or maybe I never did remember to tell him that. There is too much to wish for, the silly things and sober. Does he know how much I was in awe of his intellect and writing? Or how much I mirrored his ability to be joyously unselfconscious, gleefully relishing in the bizarre? “Isn’t that weird??” we’d end every other anecdote with, breaking into the kind of indulgent and uncontrollable laughter to which the young and optimistic seem to feel particularly entitled.
Such are my memories of Ron. He made me think post-high school life was going to be full of people who got me, got it, were brilliant but utterly grounded, would challenge me by exposing the hypocrisies/paradoxes/leaps in faith of philosophy, and would always hear me out. Ron had a way of listening and responding to all people with such sincerity and originality that they would feel smarter when they finished; they would walk away feeling as if they had collaborated and come up with some brilliantly novel concept.
I know now that Ron spoiled me, for I have looked and the world is not full of people like him.
His combination of humility, wit and intensity are only more rare when coupled with his profoundly, painfully earnest desire to understand or, better, to know. I believe Ron’s studies in philosophy were only in part about comprehending the content of Aristotelian thought or the set of laws regulating logic and rhetoric. His papers, unlike so many we’ve read and written, were not merely exercises in critical analysis and persuasive argument. I believe Ron thought that by studying philosophy, he would eventually know exactly what the good life was; that he could discern which were the moral choices. I believe he expected the same from the peers and mentors around him—to be invested in the project of being human and to work at it, hard.
Ron tried. He kept looking. Ron became editor-in-chief of Prism magazine; earned Peter Pouncey’s admiration as one of the best Greek scholars to come across his classroom in decades; studied philosophy at St. Andrews for a short while; was even scouted by a modeling agent; became a certified chef; and, this past spring, was admitted into law school.
Michael Kim wrote to me with the following:
“Ron was simply the best person I met at Amherst. I’ve never met anybody else before or after him who has had his combination of intelligence and humility. He was earnest, challenging and truly caring, and this came through in everything he did.
Ron stayed with me for two brief stints in the years following graduation. His openness and understanding, coupled with his willingness to try everything, to think out all possibilities, were strongly juxtaposed against the harsh realities of my day-to-day existence. He seemed to offer, through his friendship, something better, something not of this world. But he was a different person when he came to stay with me, and I knew it but didn’t want to know it. His own loss of innocence, and ultimately his death is a tragedy that is difficult to comprehend, but the grace with which he lived will forever impact my own sense of humanity.”
Sasha Blair-Goldstein, Ron’s freshman year roommate, writes, “It’s hard to explain. Ron’s just someone who seemed like a benign force for good passing a little bit above the fray.” Friends, professors, family—we all know of Ron’s gifts. Professor Jagunnathans, one of Ron's closest and most supportive friends wrote me, saying he “will remember him as this gentle, vulnerable, and innocent young man full of intellectual intensity and promise. His decline was unbelievably swift and wrenching to all who knew him. It will be a while before I can fully come to terms with our common loss.” In an attempt to do Ron's memory some small justice, I invite all of our classmates to share a memorial gift by making your Annual Fund contribution in memory of Ron Markovich.
Alice W. Huang ’98