My cousin Matt died early Friday morning. He was three weeks from his thirtieth birthday. He was killed in a hit and run on 149th St. and Sanford Avenue, three blocks from his house. His body had to be identified by dental records.

I want to know more. I want to know how you can kill someone with your car so that you are “nearly decapitated,” as the New York Daily News put it. I want to know how long he was lying there before someone walking his dog at three am stumbled over the body.

I want to know why he had two IDs in his wallet. That’s why the police first approached the family. They thought the body was of the other guy, and they asked my uncle’s family if Matt knew a forty-one year old named Hyun Kim. Only six hours later did it occur to them that it might be the young one.

At the memorial service, Matt’s younger sister Julee cried over the coffin at the beginning of the ceremony, cried in her seat through the service, and then cried and held every mourner in the line. When the line dwindled and disappeared, she went back to Matt’s coffin and cried over it again until her father pulled her away. She said to my mom, “This isn’t real.”

I am mad about this most of all because now he will always stay twenty-nine, laughing Matt who turned out to be too good for this world. But he wasn’t a saint, he was a person, figuring it out along with the rest of us, with me.

I was born four months before him. There are many photos of us looking like twins during our first three years of life, before my parents moved to the United States, in 1982.

He and his family moved to the United States in 1995, when he was sixteen years old. They lived with us for several years. He liked Bryan Adams, I think because he thought he seemed All-American. He really didn’t have a fucking clue about America. He asked me, “Beverly Hills 90210” isn’t really how high school in America is, is it?

I proceeded to ignore him for several years. I was busy. He never complained, he was resourceful, he made friends. He might have been the most popular Korean American in the greater New York City area circa 2000.

But he struggled too. He studied at the New York Institute of Technology, but his dreams of becoming an architect couldn't compete with the money from waiting tables in Koreatown clubs, a job for which he was truly gifted. He played with enlisting in the Army, but couldn’t do it because his English wasn’t strong enough. Still, he never complained. He got jobs doing various things, because he was charming, and charismatic, and had a way with people. He never kept the jobs. He was young, he was handsome, he was free.

He lost interest in clubbing, and promoting parties, and switched over to a similar, but less lucrative track – being the president of his church’s youth group. It channeled his innate talent for helping others, his gift for being good. Driving a vanful of teenagers home from a praise retreat, he inspired them with his confidence, his good nature, and the sense that there was nothing in life he’d rather be doing than watching over them. He was figuring out how to be a charismatic grown-up.

When we hung out, when he drove out occasionally to see me in Williamsburg, he made fun of himself and the work he did at the church. He probably did it to make me comfortable, knowing that I didn’t share his faith. He had an instinctual barometer for being non-judgmental. It just wasn’t in his DNA to dislike things about a person.

But he was no boy scout. He had a scary streak. He liked to drink to the point that he lost control of everything but his most basic instincts. But even his basest fucking instincts were good. Once, after a long night out a bunch of us ended up at a diner. Slurring, he interrogated Mauro about his intentions with me. "You want to join our family, then you better listen up," he shouted, and made Mauro, thirteen years older, squirm in his seat like a little boy.

Now this angel of a man, this sweetheart, this stupid fucking idiot twenty-something, is dead. We were helping each other figure out how to live, slowly, a few months at a time. I feel like I was helping him. Or that I was about to help him. And now I can't. It is fucking over.