In memory of a teacher, coach, mentor, and friend
We live with a quiet illusion: that there will always be time. Time for one more season. One more hallway conversation. One more laugh in the coach’s office. One more chapter of the book we are all writing together. It’s a comforting lie, this idea that the people we love will be there just around the corner of tomorrow. But death doesn’t wait for convenient moments or dramatic farewells. It arrives like a lightning strike—sudden, irreversible, devastating.
This morning, I learned that Robin has died.
Even as I write that sentence, I don’t fully believe it. There’s something in me that resists the finality of those words. Perhaps it’s because Robin has been part of the scaffolding of my life for so long—first as my world history teacher in high school, then as my football coach, then my head coach when I returned in college to coach middle school ball. He gave me my first job in education. He brought me back to my alma mater to teach summer school for Upward Bound. He mentored me as a teacher, a coach, and a man. And through it all, he became my friend.
To say I looked up to him would be an understatement. He was not just someone I admired—he was someone whose example I tried to follow, step by step. His classroom was where I first fell in love with the arc of human history. His field was where I learned to lead with clarity and purpose. His life was a map I studied, hoping to understand how to live with integrity and steadfastness.
And now he’s gone. No final game. No last meeting. Just gone.
In the stillness of that realization, I found myself returning to Benjamin West’s Treaty of Paris—a painting I’ve admired many times, but never truly felt in the way I do today. West intended it to immortalize the moment peace was declared between the United States and Britain. The American diplomats—Adams, Franklin, Jay, Laurens—are depicted with sharp realism, seated together in contemplation. But the British delegates never sat for the painting. Their absence remains: a haunting white void where their figures were meant to be. It is a painting of a historical conclusion, and yet it is not finished. It never will be.
Robin’s life feels like that today. A canvas left mid-brushstroke. A sentence stopped in the middle of a word.
What do we do with that incompletion? With a story that stops without resolution?
The Stoics remind us that death is never far. Memento mori—remember that you must die. Not to frighten, but to sharpen. To clarify. To cast life in high relief. Marcus Aurelius writes, “Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.” Robin didn’t just know this—he lived it. He was present in every moment. He didn’t waste time chasing recognition. He built lives. He told stories. He cared deeply. His actions weren’t loud, but they were deliberate. His goodness was not dramatic, but it was unwavering.
Robin was also a man of faith—something I saw not as performance, but as presence. He lived his faith by how he treated others: with compassion, fairness, and a calm confidence that things mattered. That people mattered. He walked gently but with purpose, the kind of Christian whose life was the sermon. He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t looking to impress. He was looking to serve.
And now that service is complete, though the work he began continues in all of us.
The grief I feel today is not singular. It is multiplied in every life he touched—his students, his fellow teachers, his players, his wife and children. His absence will be felt in every hallway he once walked, every lesson plan he left behind, every life he helped shape. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in On Death and Dying, reminds us:
“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss… You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same.”
That’s the paradox we are left with. We carry on, but we do not forget. We rebuild, but we are not who we were. His death has reshaped the outline of my life, and I suspect it always will. There is no blueprint for grief, no syllabus. But there is memory. And memory can be its own form of continuation.
I still see him at the chalkboard, drawing the lines of empires, turning the dust of centuries into something alive and urgent. I still see him on the sideline, calling plays with a quiet fire in his eyes. I still hear his voice, steady and kind. His singular laugh. His smile. I carry all of that with me.
And so I return again to the unfinished painting. The blankness is painful. The absence loud. But even as it remains incomplete, it communicates something profound: that some works are too expansive to be contained in a single frame. That some lives cannot be summarized—they must be carried forward.
Robin’s story will not conclude with his death. It will continue in the lives he shaped, in the teachers and coaches who carry his lessons, in the students whose lives were quietly changed because he chose to show up, every day, and give them his best.
He may not have planned his exit, but he prepared us well. With chalk and whistle, with patience and presence, he helped us become more than we would have been without him.