Moment:

I was on a high school trip to NYC to see a Broadway show. While I was looking out the window of the bus, a homeless man who was sitting across the street looked up at me and motioned to me to pray for him. I nodded.

Midtown, New York City

Moment:

My Grandfather had withered away to something like 70 pounds when I went to say goodbye to him in hospice care. I kind of denied that I was even looking at him, until I saw his big strong hands, which remained the same. When I had said goodbye to him, all of my cousins, my Aunts and my Grandmother had already done the same, so part of me wondered if he was waiting for me to drive home from school. So I told him, before I left that it was okay to go. Days went by and he still hadn't gone. Everyone kept telling him it was okay and that everything would be okay, but he refused. 

At that time, my father would come in to secretly see him after hours. Even after he and my Mom divorced, he kept a relationship with both my Grandparents. Helping them around the house, shopping for them when they needed stuff. Both my Aunts and my Mother hated it.  One afternoon, after spending all day with him my aunts had taken my Grandmother to church, my Mom had gone home, I was at a friend's. When my Dad was sure no one was there, he went into the hospice room.  He said "Don't worry Charlie, I'll take care of Perry."  He was gone ten minutes later.

Point Pleasant, NJ

Moment:

One time at Great Adventure, I was in line to ride Nitro, which is this really tall roller coaster. Behind me was a father and his two kids. One of the kids turned out to be too short to go, so the dad asked me if I would go on with his other son, who couldn't have been more than 10 years old. As we were reaching the tip of the climb before the steep drop, the kid noticed I was super tense. "Just relax your body. It feels better that way," he said. He was right.

Jackson Township, New Jersey

Moment:

I was sitting on the train and saw this guy sitting next to me with a cracked iphone with a picture of himself on it. I raised my eyebrow and wondered if he was an egomaniac and wondered what kind of obnoxious personality he had, then I looked down and saw the text he was typing: "Just make sure to keep God first and you'll be okay."

6 Train, East Village. New York, NY

In April 2010, the play that I was doing for my thesis at Columbia called for a specific sound effect: thousands of whispers. The play itself takes place in a world where people turn to whispers when they die and what the audience would be hearing would essentially be last words. I wanted the sound effect to be meaningful so I sent out an email to everyone I knew asking them to anonymously contribute a word, favorite place, phrase, advice that maybe a loved one would have said, or what they wished a loved one would have said before they passed away. I had them upload it into this blog. Awkward, personal, totally macabre, but I thought the results were moving.

Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Moments <----click.