Death is never something that's easy to cope with or talk about. I recently received a phone call that made my heart sink. The voice on the other end told me that one of our friends had just died due to a drug overdose. But that's not when I was hit with the initial grief. It was later, when someone else delivered some more details to me.

As soon as I read the text with those other outlying details, my chest tightened. My hands were shaking. I felt sick to my stomach and I hadn't eaten anything at that point. And I felt completely alone.

In that moment, the only thing I wanted to do was run to my mom and collapse in her arms, but she was two and a half hours away from me. So, I called her. When she picked up the phone, I was already sobbing so hard that I physically could not get words out of my mouth after "Hi, Mom." She knew something was terribly wrong because while I do cry a lot, it's rare for me to cry to the point of breathlessness. When I finally got the words out of my mouth to tell her why I was so upset, I could tell her heart sank too. She asked if there was anything she could do, but there was nothing either of us could do.

I wanted to tell her I needed her with me, but I knew it was unreasonable to ask her to come to me for just a couple of hours. Instead, she just talked to me. Calmed me down. Reminded me that I need to take a minute for myself sometimes to deal with what's going on in my mind.

Unfortunately, when I got off the phone with her, I went to a dark place. All of the "what ifs" started running through my head. What if we had talked more? What if I knew that's what was going on? Could I have saved him? Or at least tried to help him get clean again? But I knew that there was no longer anything I could do. He's gone. And then I started thinking about his family, and how I can't imagine a worse way to bury a child. As if burying a child isn't hard enough, it wasn't a freak accident or even a suicide (which is also really awful), but he chose to go try to get high, and he pushed it too far.

I know this got depressing very quickly, but it brings me to my main point: make sure your friends are okay. You never really know what someone else is going through. Not only with addiction and mental health, sometimes your friends just need you, and it's so important that you listen and be there for them. I am so incredibly lucky to have had friends nearby to talk to, people to call, and even people to text all day on that day.

So please, check on your friends. You may not know they need you unless you ask them.