“The Nathan I Remember”
December 4, 2022 — Laura House
This morning, while hunting for a file on my computer, I stumbled across a document titled, “The Nathan I Remember.” Knowing what it was, I decided to take a few minutes to read it again. One of Nathan’s college friends wrote it and shared it with our family a couple of years ago. This student was a few years younger than Nathan, and the document shared the story of his involvement in the robotics club that Nathan co-founded in college.
As I read his words and imagined all of the circumstances and events that he described, tears streamed down my face —tears of love, tears of missing, tears of amazement, tears of gratitude, tears of hope. Once again I witnessed a “whole new side” of Nathan that I hadn’t been part of.
While leading the club, he mentored younger students, taught “workshops” on cool things like self-driving cars, and found such joy in encouraging others. I’ve put an excerpt from the letter below, but I fully recognize that the images of Nathan doing all of these things might not be meaningful to you. Feel free to skip to the next section!
As that group of wide-eyed freshmen started going to meetings, the robotics club instantly became a highlight of the week for many of the students. Nathan always wanted the club to be a place where you got to experience the industry-required skills that you would never learn in a classroom. He and Matthew made a list of all of the topics that they wanted to cover and traded back and forth between teaching them, and they had an even mix of mechanical skills like drafting and designing parts in AutoCAD, soldering circuit boards, programming Arduinos and robots, and basically, every skill needed to design a robot, build it, and program it. One of the coolest workshops that Nathan ever taught was how to use SONAR navigation for robot cars. His classes were often punctuated with one-liner jokes about “whoever the guy was that wrote this code” (which turned out later to be none other than Nathan). He brought in a box of SONAR sensors that used high-frequency sound waves that would bounce off of objects in its path and then return to the sensor where the car could redirect its path (not to brag or anything, but Nathan had the robotics club building self-driving cars before Tesla made it cool). He wrote all of the code and then stored it on his website (which was so cool by itself). Then after helping us hook up the power supplies, sensors, and Arduino boards that would run the code, he taught us how to edit our new creations to make them our own.
When we weren’t doing a skills workshop, we spent the rest of the time in the department-provided robotics room with the small truckload of VEX robotics parts that Nathan convinced the dean to buy us the year before. Very few of us ever succeeded in building a very functional self-driving car, but the trial-and-error lessons that we learned through designing and programming the chaotic fleet of fire trucks, tanks, and an attempted motorcycle that ended up meeting its demise by getting stepped on, guided us through and set us up to succeed in later design classes and eventually in our careers. During a particularly chaotic moment, Nathan decided to forego the use of his perfected ultrasonic detection system and opt for a push button sensor mounted to the bumper of the car. A more boring person would have opted for a slower motor, but in true Nathan fashion, he decided to make the fastest car our motors could drive and made the car rotate in a randomly generated direction every time the button was pressed (which was only done when it ran full speed into a backpack, another car, a desk, or usually an unsuspecting student working on his own project). All of the other Frankenstein-like creations have long since been disassembled, but the button car still sits on a shelf in the robotics room as a monument to the humble beginnings of the club.
I’m sharing the experience of this letter today for two reasons. First, many who read these words have not lost someone dear. In the midst of your hectic life, I want to encourage you to take a moment to sit down and write out memories of someone who has gone on ahead, then send them to those left behind. Is there a special time you were with that person? What characteristics of that person made an impact on your life? Is there a funny story to share? What is something that you appreciate about that person? When you put your thoughts into words and share them with one who is grieving, you have given a gift far beyond what you can imagine.
If you are grieving the loss of someone dear to you, then you know how special these written memories are. Ask your friends and family to write one down and share it with you. And if you have a memory of someone else’s loved one, take a few moments to write or text them with your thoughts. As you well know, they will be a welcome treasure to them.
This morning I received a gift…one that I had already opened several times before, but it keeps on giving, every time I read it.
Could you find a quiet moment this week to reflect on who you could bless with a similar gift? It won’t be like the candle that runs out or the shirt that wears and fades, but it will be a document that attests to the value of the one they love….a reminder that others also remember the impact that their loved one made on those around them.
He was an exceptional senior in many areas, but something I appreciated more than almost anything else was how patient he was with all the freshman and sophomore students. Many of the seniors locked themselves in the senior capstone room and tried to avoid contact with anyone other than the other seniors, but he was always open handed with helping students choose classes, work on homework, or figure out personal projects. He helped me see what you can do with a few parts from radio shack and a free weekend.
Words to treasure….for sure.
I Thessalonians 4:13-18 “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.”
