Dr. Coleman, Mrs. Coleman, Shandra; President Clinton, Senator Clinton.

Being Justin's friend was – for me as for so many others – like receiving a huge and fabulous gift that is delivered out of the blue – unannounced and unexpected but incredibly welcome. And Justin's friendship was a gift that kept on giving.

Justin's destiny was to share his love, his life, his energy and his wondrous spirit with those of us who knew him. I think that Justin fulfilled his destiny, and we will always be grateful to him for that – and to his mom and his dad and his sister who surely helped make him what he was.

Whether Justin was actually on the scene or off climbing a mountain or working in San Francisco, I treasured his friendship. I certainly relished the times that I was with him, but also -- when he was not physically present, on the phone or in the voicemail or email – I was grateful for the mere fact that he was part of my life and part of my family's life. We always looked forward to the time when Justin would drop – like from the sky – into our circle again.

When the accident occurred, we all embarked on a terrible vigil and a sad journey – with Justin's family – that now ends today. During these past weeks, while recalling so many wonderful memories of Justin and our time together, I have also found myself thinking about Justin in new ways. I started taking the measure of Justin Coleman in a much more serious and systematic way. I had written a letter of recommendation for Justin when he applied to law schools, and so I was not entirely new to the process of examining and exploring and advertising Justin's qualities on paper. That letter will reflect a strong appreciation of Justin even back then, but I have found that the stock-taking of Justin Coleman's life – which has occurred in the last days and weeks – has been a very different kind of undertaking for me. I would like to share with you some of the results of my thinking.

Justin was a bundle of polar opposites that, because they were packaged so beautifully in the same person, emerged in the daylight with an intensity and a strength that was truly remarkable.

He could be driven, but he could also be carefree.

He could be euphoric, even goofy, and he could be somber

He would often seek solitude and chose to be away from people. But he also needed his friends and would reach out for them.

He could be introspective, quiet, withdrawn. He could also be outgoing, even charismatic.

He could be political and strategic and even Machiavellian, but he was sometimes so idealistic as to be dreamy.

He could live for the moment and also spend many hours contemplating and plotting his future.

He could be strong, tough, resilient, and he could be gentle, vulnerable and available.

I regret to report to you that the dualities that I have been describing with respect to these other aspects of Justin's personality and character did not extend to his taste in music. Based on my own experience driving for hours with Justin in June in the Pacific Northwest – he being equipped with his package of illegal CDs – I discerned that Justin's taste in music ran from Fifty Cent to Eminem. I explained to Justin that it was a proven scientific fact that listening to Mozart's Clarinet Concerto made you younger and added years to his life, but he was having nothing of it.

Justin was dedicated to the notion that there was always enough time to have fun in one's life. His fun-loving was truly infectious. Those of us plodding through our lives of discipline, deadlines and routines were truly grateful for a phone call or a voice mail from Justin who – by merely connecting with us – introduced the option of doing something with him just for fun. Whether it was taking advantage of a beautiful day to drop everything and play golf, whether it was going off to the Pacific Northwest to climb a mountain, whether it was to a rock concert, Justin – effortlessly, naturally, spontaneously – initiated fun and spread enormous joy as he did it. That was a real gift.

Although Justin loved to have fun, he was not a frivolous person. He was a very serious and purposeful and sometimes a somber person. He could and did do work that was demanding and taxing – for long hours, for many days and weeks, without complaint. He was ambitious for himself in that he wanted his life to make a difference. He spent a lot of time exploring his own interior spaces, examining the source of his own humanity and what lies at the root of consciousness, and trying to understand the beautiful and mystifying quirks of others. To Justin, people were absolutely fascinating.

Whitney Williams, who climbed Mt. Rainier with me and Justin and Matt Kulekowskis last June, will remember that during the day leading up to the climb, Justin was enamored with a book – probably a famous book that everyone in this room is familiar with. I did not know he book then and cannot tell you its name today. This book organizes every possible combination of human qualities and characteristics into one of twelve different categories or types of human personality – numbered One through Twelve. Justin had gone through the book and put all his friends and acquaintances into the appropriate category – based on the bundle of traits and qualities – the category – that he thought applied to that person.

He told me I was a Number Six. He read to me all the traits associated with that category and asked if I agreed. I said that I couldn't sign myself onto any single category until I had a chance to know about all the others. So we went through them. "Here is President Clinton," he said. Mr. President. I think you were a Number Nine. He read it to me. "Don't you think that's perfect?" he asked. "Here's Hillary," he said. He read her category. "Isn't that right on?" he asked. He read me the category that he believed was uniquely his – which surprised me a little because it described a much more introspective and inquiring and insecure personality than the Justin I knew. And it caused us to talk further. And we wrestled – in Whitney's presence – with two or three categories that were, we thought, most applicable to her.

Yes, a bit of a parlor game, but it was an easy way to share intimacies and add t the levels of friendship, and it was also quintessentially Justin. He was not one to slide through life. He did not want to miss the glorious complexities and wonderful mysteries of human personality in all its dimensions.

Justin possessed a remarkable combination of total innocence with total insight. Even with so many incredible experiences at the White House under his belt, Justin still went through this world wide-eyed and wondering. He was always in awe of what he should have been in awe of – whether it was the Presidency as an institution or whether it was the fact that he, Justin Coleman, worked for and was friends with the President and the First Lady, or whether it was a huge beast of a mountain covered with immense glaciers and massive crags. He was always innocent enough to be awestruck.

At the same time, Justin's ability to understand situations and to perceive the core truth in those situations was staggering. I was the beneficiary of that understanding when he gave me a full briefing, during my second day on the job in the White House, about each and every one of the various personalities on the senior White House staff, complete with recommendations about who was difficult and why, about who was really important and who was not, and who the President relied upon and why, and how I should try to deal with each one – or not to deal with them, as the case may be.

One visible component of Justin's insight was his resourcefulness. Justin knew that the world was an exciting place, and he wanted to be part of that excitement. That desire, in itself is not unusual, even in the most devoted couch potato. At some level, everyone wants to be part of the action. But Justin had two additional qualities. First, he was prepared to commit the enormous time and enormous effort – whatever was necessary – to get oneself physically into the action. And Second, he understood human nature so well and was so successful at figuring out how human institutions actually worked in real life, he was able to strategize and organize his young life right into the middle of the action. For Justin, it was not good enough to be watching from a distance. He wanted to be right next to the excitement if not in the middle of it.

If the Dave Matthews Band were giving a concert at the Patriot Center, Justin would not settle for any seat other than the front row or in the VIP section. But even that would not be enough. Justin would somehow, some way get a Backstage Pass that would get him closer to the private lives of the performers and give him a view of the action that very few others would have.

If the President of the United States were signing an arms control treaty with the President of Russia, it was not good enough for Justin to watch it on CNN. Justin wanted to be the guy that handed the document to the President to sign, and then, after the President had signed the document, the person to walk it over to the President of Russia for his signature. Getting to that location took some long term planning and it required an investment of many, many hours of hard work on Justin's part.

If Sammy Sosa was going to sit in the Senate Gallery with the First Lady at the State of the Union speech, it was not good enough to watch the event on television. Justin would be sure to be on hand to meet and shake hands with Mr. Sosa on the steps of the White House and to welcome him to the White House.

That same night, I had left my own office in search of solitude to work in a small office hidden away at the very top of the Old Executive Office Building. Only Justin knew where I was. I wanted to work on my presentation to the Senate because, you will recall, the President's trial resumed the very next day. I really and truly wanted to be alone to work on that presentation because it was important. But around Midnight, there was Justin knocking on my door. He said, "The President wants you to come over to the residence to meet Sammy Sosa." Whether the President really wanted me to come over or not, I never knew. I did know that Justin wanted me to at least have the option of meeting Sammy Sosa since that was an opportunity that would not come my soon again.

If there was going to be a trial in the Senate of the President of the United States for only the second time in the history of the country, it was not enough for Justin to assist one of the lawyers on the team defending the President. Justin himself became part of that team and went to the Senate every day. He was one of our group, and he was on the floor of the Senate every day of that trial. He was a crucial, hard-working member of that team. It was a Dream Team and Justin was part of it. On that occasion, Justin was not only near the action, he was part of the action.

That same desire to understand and to experience and to discover was also evident in Justin's reaction to mountain climbing. In ways that I had predicted to him when we first talked about mountain climbing in 1998 and in conversations that Justin had with Nancy Hernreich's husband, Lewis, who was a very serious climber, Justin found mountain climbing to be a life-changing experience. Justin took to it with a real fervor, and his mountain climbing experiences transformed his life. He was in awe of what he saw, and in awe of what he was able to do. If climbing the highest mountain in Europe—Mt. Elbrus – was such an amazing and challenging adventure, climbing the highest mountain on each and every one of the seven continents could only be that much better. And that, at least for a while, was Justin's ambition.

In the difficulties of the mountain-climbing experience, Justin found toughness and fiber and strength that he had not expected to find. He found a capacity to overcome pain and hardship that he had never known before, and he showed a courage and determination that surprised even him.

I actually think that we, his friends, knew these things about Justin before he did, that he was strong and brave and good. We had watched Justin grow from the boyish, eager intern into a full-fledged -- quasi-grown-up -- member of the White House staff who served the President of the United Stats and the American people with great dedication and distinction.

And so Justin, you are gone, and we are all sad that you are no longer with us. The loss has been so great and so sudden, I find that these excerpts from W.H. Auden's poem – Funeral Blues – capture at least this aspect of my mood.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone; Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone; Silence the pianos and with muffled drum; Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good.

And then I catch myself. I realize that, while this poem is perfect in its description of our grief, it is just dead wrong when it says "nothing now can ever come to any good." That is not what Justin was about, not what Justin would want and not what Justin has bequeathed to us by sharing his life so generously with us. The end of Justin's life is not the end of Justin's legacy, and it is wrong to think that he is gone.

No, Justin, you are not gone. Everything, everything that you did in your life, Justin, lives on in each of us. And what you meant to us, Justin, lives on in each of us and will live on as long as we are alive. And your amazing love for us, Justin, and all that you gave to us, and all that you did for us, that, too, will live on.

Thank you, Justin.