Yesterday marked the two year anniversary of the death of my best friend Steve Gasser.\u00a0 Steve was an amazing person.\u00a0\u00a0 He was kind, and caring, and he was always thinking of others and doing for others.\u00a0 The day he died was one of the hardest days of my life.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t write about him yesterday on the anniversary because it was too emotional of a day\u00a0for me.\u00a0 Even as I write about him tonight it about kills me to think how much I miss him.\u00a0 My heart still aches when\u00a0I think about not having him around.<\/p>\n
I was with my family at Disneyland when I got the phone call that he had passed away.\u00a0 I was in shock, devastated, angry, hurt, sad, and a million other emotions all at the same time.\u00a0 I had never lost a friend to death before.\u00a0 And his death was completely unexpected.\u00a0 He was healthy and strong and only 46 years old.\u00a0 He had just recently returned from climbing Mt. Denali.\u00a0 He was down in St. George in a bike race and he died suddenly during the race when his heart simply stopped.\u00a0 I had spoken to him right before he left to the race.\u00a0 He was his usual happy self when we talked.\u00a0 I still remember talking about how we would be excited to see him after his race.\u00a0 And then he was just gone.\u00a0 Just like that.\u00a0 No warning.\u00a0 My friend was taken from this life and my family was heartbroken. \u00a0\u00a0Steve was an amazing man and an incredible friend.\u00a0 He touched the lives of every single person he came in contact with.\u00a0 He was an angel in this life and I truly believe he is an angel in the next life watching over us today. \u00a0My son Dalton was incredibly close to Steve when I was a single mother and he relied on Steve tremendously.\u00a0 They were best buds.\u00a0 Dalton has shared many experiences where he has felt Steve\u2019s presence watching over him during tough times, especially as Dalton is out serving his mission.\u00a0 He has said that he knows Steve is his guardian angel and I very much believe that.\u00a0 I wish all of you could have known my friend Steve.\u00a0 Everyone in the world would have benefited from having him in their life.\u00a0 What a great man he was.\u00a0 I went back to my old blogs and I found the very blog I wrote the day that Steve died.\u00a0 I am going to share it again today in his memory because the message I shared that day holds true for all of us now \u2013 we should all try to be the Steve in someone\u2019s life\u2026<\/p>\n
Saturday, October 16, 2010 – BE THE STEVE IN SOMEONE`S LIFE…\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Without a doubt, tonight`s tweet is the hardest one I have ever had to write. This morning when I had just entered the park at Disneyland my cell phone rang with a call telling me that my very dearest friend, Steve Gasser, had passed away without warning today. He was riding in a bicycle race when he suddenly collapsed, never to wake up again. I don`t even know how to put into words the way I am feeling. Shock, unbelievable sadness, and a deep sense of loss. The loss of a best friend…<\/p>\n I wish everyone in the world was lucky enough to have a friend like Steve. I cannot tell you how lucky I was to have him in my life for many many years. I first met Steve when I was just 17 years old and a freshman at BYU. In the last ten years or so of my life Steve has been my best friend, to both me and my children, and eventually it was because of Steve that I ended up meeting my husband Rollin. You see three years ago Steve talked me into going on a Lake Powell trip with him that I was not planning to attend because of how much was going on with work at the time, but Steve refused to take no for an answer and he convinced me that I should go. It was on that trip that Rollin and I met and were married shortly thereafter. Steve was the guy that while I was a single mother, would come over on Sunday nights to help my son work on getting his eagle scout. Steve was the guy that would come and change your tire in the middle of the night when you were stranded in the middle of nowhere. Steve was the guy that would drop everything just to give you a hug and tell you how great you were. Steve was not only my best friend but he became my husband\u2019s best friend as well. We both loved Steve dearly.<\/p>\n Steve was the kind of friend that was always there for you no matter what. He was never judgmental of your silly mistakes or your personality quirks, he loved you unconditionally. He was always smiling, no matter what. He always found a way to make you laugh and to cheer you up from even the darkest of moods. He lived his life with absolute and total integrity in every way. He said what he believed and his actions proved his believes even louder than his words. He was generous to a fault, giving to everyone all the time, even total strangers. He loved his family. He loved his friends. Anyone who knew Steve loved him. I have never heard anyone speak an unkind word about Steve Gasser. He was a truly great man.<\/p>\n I am going to miss Steve more than I can ever express in words. Sitting here tonight I am not even sure how I am supposed to get past this. I wasn’t sure if I would tweet about this or not because his friendship and his memory is so sacred to me, but I decided it would be good for me to get out how I feel tonight, and to let every one of you know that all of us would be so lucky as to have a Steve in our lives, and even more importantly, every one of us should try out best to be the Steve in someone else’s life.<\/p>\n ~Amy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday marked the two year anniversary of the death of my best friend Steve Gasser.\u00a0 Steve was an amazing person.\u00a0\u00a0 He was kind, and caring, and he was always thinking of others and doing for others.\u00a0 The day he died was one of the hardest days of my life.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t write about him yesterday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33,34,35,32,31],"class_list":["post-1524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-friend","tag-integrity","tag-love","tag-memory","tag-steve-gasser"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1524"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1601,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions\/1601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}