Dan Cho, Rest in Peace

I was on a rare overnight business trip to Syracuse when I got an early morning phone call in my hotel room. When I saw my wife’s name on the caller ID, I figured she was worried I’d oversleep for my 8AM meeting and was calling me to wake me up. She said something had happened to Dan, and while she didn’t know what it was she guessed something bad from the tenor of all the sudden “wall” postings on Dan’s Facebook page. I could tell from her voice that she was on the verge of tears. I told her not to jump to conclusions, and that we should wait to confirm the facts. The postings to Dan and Julia’s Facebook pages were all extremely ominous and I couldn’t help but think that whatever it was that happened, it was surely not good.


I could not get the sinking feeling out of my stomach as I sat in my meetings that day. I was paying cursory attention to the discussion at hand (about medical research equipment for a new laboratory building), but instead scouring the web for news about Dan. I couldn’t bring myself to contact Julia directly, as if her writing it down would ensure their permanence, but rather e-mailed several of Dan’s friends who seemed to know more at this point asking for any information. Soon, they e-mailed me back saying that Dan had apparently died in a swimming accident in Lake Geneva, Switzerland while touring with Regina Spektor.

I had just days before spoken with Dan. Korea had just beaten Nigeria 2-1 to advance to the knockout stage in the World Cup. Dan and I shared a passion for Korean World Cup soccer, and had been trying to get to Koreatown in NYC to watch the games together before he left on his tour. Dan did not make it out due to family commitments (“things are intense at home right now”, he texted), but we exchanged numerous texts during and after the game sharing our joy and our concerns about the team’s performance going forward. I had taken the “Chinatown” bus from Albany to NYC with the sole purpose of watching Korea play, and had been rallying for Dan to join me.

Over the next day or two, the news came out to confirm the facts: Dan had gone swimming in the lake with a friend and had drowned. The e-mails were pouring out to Dan and Julia’s “walls” on Facebook expressing consolation, disbelief, shock on the one hand and love and concern for Julia and their young daughter on the other.

What can I say about Dan? He was a very talented musician. And by that, I don’t mean an aspiring one, but a bona fide musician that has toured with several very well known artists, having appeared on popular TV shows and played in many venues across the US. He was also a passionate and knowledgeable soccer fan, and was in the midst of serving as a blogger covering the Korean World Cup team for ESPN. He was a relatively newlywed husband and proud father of a beautiful daughter. The love in his heart for Audrey showed so plainly on his face whenever he was near her or was talking about her. But most of all, Dan was an incredibly kind and humble person. Despite clearly approaching near-celebrity status with his frequent tours and appearances, he was always deferential and humble when talking about his music.

Fast forward to the wake; it is a blisteringly hot day. My family has driven in from Albany that afternoon after I took the afternoon off work. We had the “talk” with Yuna about how Dan has died and we are going to view his body. This gets into the tricky question of where is Dan now and if his body is here dead, in what form is Dan? I weakly offer that Dan’s soul has gone back to God, but it is not very satisfactory to Yuna.

Dan’s death, along with the birth of my children has made it essential to believe in the eternal life of the soul. After my children were born, I realized that even a lifetime is not enough. The thought of ever being apart from my children was so painful that I had no choice but to believe in eternal life in order to function and enjoy my time here in this life. While this is comforting on some level, it is woefully inadequate when someone like Dan is taken so young, with so much of his life ahead of him and leaving behind a wife and a toddler daughter.

This young family had a lifetime of love and happiness to look forward to, and suddenly without so much as a hastily shouted “fore!” or a glimpse of a blurry object, Dan is taken away while halfway around the world. Julia has commented on how the soccer jerseys that Dan loved to wear still bear his scent, how his daughter would say “appa, appa” (daddy in Korean) and take them out. I still have texts that I exchanged with Dan following the soccer games in my phone. Dan’s blog entries are still just a couple weeks old on ESPN. Yet, everything has changed forever in an unspeakably sad way.

A lifetime later, we will be reunited with Dan and we will cry and laugh and again enjoy his presence, resume our relationships. For now, we are only left with angry and unanswered questions, lives turned upside down and shattered into a million fragments without reason or warning. We can only hope that the future still holds joy and that we can laugh together again. We’ll miss you Dan.