Jason Collins

Jason left us on May 12th, but honestly, he's been slipping away for a while now, and we've been grieving in slow motion, pretending everything was fine while quietly losing the man who always made things fine. Jason was the kind of person who remembered your coffee order, who checked in on you before you even knew you needed checking on, and who could make a locker room full of grown men laugh until their ribs hurt. He wasn't loud about it. He just showed up — every single day, with that quiet steadiness that made you feel like the world wasn't so heavy after all. He played basketball the same way he lived his life: with an unshakable work ethic and a heart bigger than the court. Thirteen seasons in the NBA, twelve of them as a center, and every minute of it earned through sheer stubbornness and genuine love for the game. Whether he was crashing the boards for the Nets, grinding it out in Atlanta, or holding down the paint in Boston, Jason brought something irreplaceable to every team — not just his size, but his soul. His teammates would tell you he was the first one in the gym and the last one to leave, and that was before the glioblastoma diagnosis, before the treatments, before he had to fight for every ordinary morning that the rest of us take for granted. Jason was a Stanford Cardinal first, and that discipline never left him. He played college ball with fire and humility, earned his All-American honors, and carried that same intensity into everything he touched. Off the court, he was a devoted father, a loyal brother, and the kind of uncle who made Thanksgiving feel like a real celebration because he actually listened when you talked. He loved grilling on weekends, old jazz records at low volume, and arguing with his kids about whether the dog was really smarter than both of them. He found joy in the smallest things — a good conversation, a quiet evening on the porch, the sound of his family laughing in the next room. We don't get to say goodbye properly, and that's the cruelest part. But Jason never needed a proper goodbye. He just needed people who loved him to keep going. So we will. God, we will. And we'll carry every ridiculous joke, every warm hand on our shoulder, every lesson about showing up — we'll carry all of it. That's how he'd want it.