"I just keep telling myself this shouldn't be happening," Jewish Chaplain Rabbi Allan Lehmann said Sunday night in front of over 200 grieving members of the Brandeis community who gathered at Berlin Chapel to mourn the death of Eliezer Y. Schwartz '04. Elie, the beloved captain of the men's rugby team, died early Sunday morning in Gloucester. He had just turned 21 on October 31.

Losing a member of the student body is normally so rare as to be incomprehensible at such a small school, and with this death coming less than five weeks after the death of Mary Jagoda '05, Brandeis has been left reeling.

The senselessness of these deaths has plunged our community into throes of grief. Not one student remains untouched by the tragedies of this semester. Two members of our own Editorial Board have excused themselves from the production of this issue to attend Elie's funeral. He was to them, as he was to many other students here, a dear friend.

Elie spent last semester in the Netherlands, an experience he enthusiastically relayed to friends this semester in between rugby practices and events of Zeta Beta Tau, the fraternity of which he was a brother.

An economics major, Elie's friends say his entrepreneurial spirit was always flowing; the New York native started a number of online business projects while at Brandeis.

More than anything else, friends speak of Elie's wide-reaching effect on all who knew him, evidenced by the number of them flying into New York City from all over the country for his funeral today.

Of Elie's family, two of his siblings studied here, Moshe '99 and Avital '02. Moshe's fiancee Aviva Sklare '00 was also a Brandeis student. We express our sincerest condolences to Elie's entire family, who are great supporters of our university. We can't begin to imagine the pain of their loss.

In dealing with that pain, the difference between sympathy and empathy often gets overlooked. While sympathy flows freely from warm hearts in times of need, the degree to which we can empathize with someone depends on our own personal experiences.

While we hope that many students cannot know the grief that the friends and families of Elie and Mary are enduring right now, we know those hopes to be in vain. Many of us have experienced great loss. And it is our collective understanding of what it means to pain that helps us in helping each other through the most trying of periods.

Few works have gained as much esteem in our community as Mitch Albom's 1997 memoir, "Tuesdays With Morrie."

One of Prof. Morrie Schwartz's famous aphorisms from Albom's book was that "Death ends a life, not a relationship." Although Elie is no longer with us, memories of him will remain forever endeared in the hearts and minds of this campus.

But Morrie's words give us just a shred of solace in this time of great loss as we find ourselves echoing what Rabbi Lehmann lamented at the prayer service: This shouldn't be happening.