Rest in Peace, Paul Walker

Paul Walker died in a car crash in California on a Saturday afternoon. He was 40. He was a passenger in a red Porsche that hit a lamp post and a tree at high speed, and the car caught fire. His friend, who was driving, died too.

He’d just come from a charity event for typhoon victims in the Philippines. A few years earlier, after the Haiti earthquake, Walker had started an organization called Reach Out WorldWide to help disaster victims. It wasn’t some celebrity vanity project—he actually showed up and did the work.

Most people knew him from Fast & Furious, which is fine. That’s not nothing. He was good at what those movies needed him to be. But what gets me is that he was also the kind of person who, after an earthquake, thought about the people affected enough to start something and stick with it for years. That takes a different kind of presence.

The randomness of it sits wrong. A car accident. When your entire public life is tied to cars and speed, you don’t expect that’s how it ends. Except nobody expects how it ends for anyone. You just don’t think about it until you have to.

Rest in peace, Paul Walker.