Robert Burns originally had a different tune in mind for “Auld Lang Syne” than the one most of us know, and although he himself realized the melody was “mediocre,” you will sometimes still hear that original arrangement.* The tune most associated with “Auld Lang Syne” first appeared in 1799 in George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice.

By then, Robert Burns was gone. He was only thirty-seven when he died of a heart condition (possibly exacerbated by his habit of raising many a pint glass to old acquaintances). In his last letter, he wrote to his friend Frances Dunlop, “An illness which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveler returns.” Even on his deathbed, Burns could turn a phrase.

Within a few decades of Burns’s death, “Auld Lang Syne” had become a popular part of New Year’s Eve celebrations in Scotland, a holiday known as Hogmanay that can trace its history back to winter solstice rituals. By 1818, Beethoven had written an arrangement of the song, and it was beginning to travel throughout the world.

Between 1945 and 1948, the tune was used in South Korea’s national anthem. In the Netherlands, its melody inspired one of the country’s most famous football chants. “Auld Lang Syne” is often played at Japanese department stores just before they close to let customers know it’s time to leave. The song is also a staple of film soundtracks, from Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush in 1925 to It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946 to Minions in 2015.

I think “Auld Lang Syne” is popular in Hollywood not just because it’s in the public domain and therefore cheap, but also because it’s the rare song that is genuinely wistful—it acknowledges human longing without romanticizing it, and it captures how each new year is a product of all the old ones. When I sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, I forget the words like most of us do, until I get to the fourth verse, which I do have memorized: “We two have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine / but seas between us broad have roared since Auld Lang Syne.”

And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past—seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I’ll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them—and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.

In 2005, Amy published a memoir in the form of an encyclopedia called Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. That book ends, “I was here, you see. I was.” Another sentence that once it becomes true, never stops being true. Her Encyclopedia came out just a few months before my first novel, Looking for Alaska. Soon thereafter, Sarah got into graduate school at Columbia and so we moved to New York. Amy and I stayed in touch and collaborated occasionally over the next decade—I played a bit part in an experience she curated for hundreds of people on August 8, 2008, in Chicago’s Millennium Park—but it was never again like it had been in those early days.