Thursday, October 8, 2009

Tribute to Ben Sklaver, Cabbagetown Run Club

An article by Tim Sullivan for the Cabbagetown Newsletter.  I have ran with Ben with the Cabbagetown Run.  This article truly describes who Ben is.  Thank to Tim for sharing this with us...

If you care to read it, I wrote this piece for the Cabbagetown Newsletter below.  Ben’s family is looking to collect all personal recollections, stories, photos etc. to create an album.  Please submit any you may have to benjaminsklaver@gmail.com –Tim

About Ben                                                                                                                10/6/2009I had a sinking feeling late Saturday afternoon when Jake Herrle knocked on my door.  He was Ben Sklaver’s next door neighbor on Berean and his best friend in Cabbagetown so the worst immediately leapt into my mind.  Then just as quickly I talked myself out of it.  Maybe it was just a neighborly drop-in??   Ben did that all the time.  But then I could tell Jake was shaking a little bit and my heart bungee jumped.  I grabbed him a beer and braced myself for what I knew was coming.  Ben was killed while on patrol in Afghanistan.Kristen and I met Ben at the Christmas Crawl party in 2005.  We discovered that he and Kristen both went to Tufts University and that he and I grew up not too far from each other.  He was almost impossibly good looking but I couldn’t hold that against him because he was also gracious, smart and one of the sharpest wits I had ever met.  We invited him out to the Cabbagetown Run Club we had just started up and he obliged.  Dinner parties and the like ensued and we became fast friends and before long he seemed like an old friend, like someone we had known for a very long time. I last heard from Ben a week  before he died.  He had limited access to email and even less time but he found a way to congratulate Kristen and me on the birth of our daughter.  He said he was between Helmand and Kandahar provinces and that he wouldn’t be able to make it to the Chomp
& Stomp Festival this year but that he hoped to be here in 2010.  I thanked him for the well wishes and asked him about his safety and what he was doing over there.  I knew full well that his next email would ignore those inquiries because they always did.Ben risked his life daily in the bravest of humanitarian capacities, and even though I would have been riveted with attention to every detail, he preferred to check in on the run club or how a neighborhood cleanup went.   He’d given me snippets of the civil affairs work—building wells, roads, schools, relationships--but when it came to his safety he didn’t care to offer much more than to say that he was working with a fantastic group of guys.  He believed in his mission and he believed in these men.  In an understated fashion so typical of Ben, he made this crystal clear when any of us tried to get him to consider finding a way out of this second deployment.  He just wasn’t going to leave his guys and that was that.  He had Grandpa strength under that helmet—the kind that wants to hold onto any pressures, fears and worries of life’s most grave situations lest he burden someone else with them.Ben kept himself in excellent shape and could have easily run side by side with our run club speedsters each week but he always chose to run at a conversational pace.  Whoever he was running with, whatever their conversational speed was, that was the pace he ran.  He preferred to ask more questions than he answered but when he did open up a bit he spoke so glowingly about his family that I always figured he’d be moving back north sometime soon.  He was such a good guy that I admired his parents Gary and Laura even though I had never met them and he was always excited for the next time he would be able to see his siblings.  He assured me that Sam was the funny one in the family and he adored Annie to no end.And then there was his fiancée Beth.  I met Beth when she came down to visit for last year’s Romp and Stomp 5k.  Ben and Beth came out at the crack of dawn to help set up the race course and then he proceeded to pace her to first place in her age group.  Beth’s happiness was infectious and Ben was beaming that day and that had nothing to do with race results.  If Cabbagetown was going to lose Ben to New York, it couldn’t have been for a better reason.  It doesn’t come as a surprise that so many news outlets have picked up on this story.  The AJC, The Hartford Courant, The Boston Globe and so many others have relayed the story not only of his death but of how Ben was moved to found the Clearwater Initiative after his first deployment to the Horn of Africa.  His notion was straightforward and simple; bring clean water to people who need it.  It’s that sincere, selfless work ethic that tells me that as a few tears splash my keyboard so many more are being shed around the world.  Tears are falling in Connecticut and New York, they are falling in Boston and Washington DC.  They are falling in Afghanistan and in Ugandan villages where he was known as “Moses Ben” for the new life he provided to them via clean water projects.   It’s quite possible that Ben will prove to be the most influential person I’ve ever personally known.Kristen and I were heartsick that we couldn’t be there today but I’ve seen some photos and have heard an account of the funeral in his hometown of Hamden CT.  The outpouring of sympathy, grief, love and strength has been superlative.  I mourn for his family and for Beth and for whatever other great things he may have accomplished had he been given more than a mere 32 years.  I’ve received so many emails and phone calls in the past few days from people who are grief stricken for certain but beyond that everyone feels compelled to DO something and they don’t mean just baking a pie.  This was a guy we all would have loved if he were a couch potato but Ben’s spirit has touched a chord in so many people that his legacy will be how many people he has motivated to, in some small way, make the world a better place.  And for those uncertain on what that might be, he’s taken care of that too.  We’ll have a booth set up next month’s festival to celebrate Ben’s life and work and give people an opportunity to get involved in Ben’s passion.  Better yet, go to www.clearwaterinitiative.org today and see how you can help quench Ben’s thirst.  I stand humbled by his death but I am inspired by his life.  I know I am a better person for having known him as a friend.Tim Sullivan 

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