FOR A FALLEN BROTHER IN ARMS

“Like all of us, he had a higher calling,” Hagen said.

Moore choked up some of the hardest men in the world with a bittersweet eulogy that was so personal and candid that it seemed, perhaps, cathartic.

How, he asked, can you talk about someone so soon after his death?

“I wonder how you can say anything at all. But I know he would have taken this duty for me,” he answered himself.

The two had become so close, they planned to grow old together, “the cranky old men in the neighborhood the kids always hated,” he said. “That was our dream.

“Now I’m faced with the reality.”

Moore said he looked forward to being best man in Blumberg’s wedding, godfather to his children, Blumberg taking care of his wife when he was gone “and putting me in my grave.”

He could never imagine his friend dying.

“We’d planned it as if something happened to me. He seemed too good to leave this life.

“If you’re out there, B-berg, I love you,” Moore said in conclusion.

“I miss you.”

“I’ll never forget you.”