Mark Heylmun wrote about Mitch Lucker on 1 November, fourteen years to the day since the Suicide Silence singer died, and what he wrote is unusual for a tribute because it is about forgetting.
"I don't have any more pictures of Mitch and me to share," he began. "I've shared them all at one point or another. The more time that passes since he's been gone, the more I find where the grief of his passing lives."
He knew Lucker as a friend for seven years. The big occasions have stayed, he says: the tours, the festivals, the press runs, the holiday barbecues at the singer's house, the nights Lucker slept on his parents' couch and smoked on the porch with his father.
What has gone is everything else. "The AIM messages, MySpace messages, phone calls, conversations after practice, late-night talks on tour, jokes in the studio, or the arguments we got into. All the stuff that seemed so insignificant at the time seems so important to me now." He adds that it literally hurts to think about the memories lost.
Lucker died on 1 November 2012, at twenty eight, of injuries from a motorcycle crash in Huntington Beach the night before. Fourteen years on, the band he fronted is still working, and the anniversary is still kept by the people who were in the room.