It isn't pain that makes us stronger. It's learning to let pain be our motivation for making things better that makes us stronger.
In life, people wander across your path like the shadows of leaves swaying in the summer breeze. Sometimes, people are meant to stay for your whole life. But other times, most times in fact, the people we come to know are only present for a small part of our lives, but yield a much larger presence when we look back and reflect upon the years gone by. Time is a tricky friend too. Being young, it seems like there is all the time in the world. But as we grow, we come to the startling conclusion that time is only a way of delaying the inevitable. We beg doctors for medication to buy us more time to live, but we throw away our time by wasting it on hopeless things such as complaining or not listening to the wisdom of our friends. Some people just don't get a lot of time. My friend didn't have a lot of time; he had 17 short years of life before his clock stopped ticking. It has been two years since I lost him, and thinking about that makes me relive the pain of losing him all over again.
Two years ago, my good friend passed away. I saw him on a Friday afternoon, just before I left to walk home from school for winter break. I hadn't given much thought to the moment as it happens all the time with everyone. We so effortlessly say, "see you tomorrow" or "I'll see you next week" like nothing is going to change. Most of the time, nothing will change. But sometimes, everything will change. I remember his smile and his wave, and then I walked away. Little did I know that I would never see his face again.
It was seven days later that I found out what happened. It was around 7 at night and I was sitting down, scrolling through my Facebook news feed when I began to see several of his friends tagging him in posts such as "I miss you" and "Rest in Peace" and "I'm sorry that this happened to you." The first emotion to make its way through my mind was confusion. I didn't understand why these people were saying this. So I clicked on his name and I went to his page. That's when I saw more and more posts filing in; some were about memories, some about how they "didn't know," and some about how much they were hurting because of this. Slowly, the reality of the situation made itself aware in my mind; he was gone. He was gone.
I began to panic and I texted a friend of mine who was close to him, praying that I was just reading this all wrong. I was praying that he was just playing some cruel joke and that in a few hours everything would go back to how it was before. I sat there praying, "Please God, no. Not him. Not him." But my worst fears were confirmed when my friend replied to my question regarding if this was all true, with "yes". The panic that was consuming my body suddenly breached the dam that was holding all of it back inside the small, logical chamber of my brain. I was overcome with horror, pain, sorrow, and guilt. All at once, I was submerged by this tidal wave that kept sucking me beneath the surface of the water, no matter how hard I tried to float, no matter how violently I thrashed about.
I found myself numb. I scrolled through his pictures on Facebook. I checked the messages that we had exchanged, searching every word, every syllable for some clue; could I have missed something? Was he crying out for help and I didn't notice? It doesn't matter how you lose someone. It's hard. It's really hard in every way imaginable. But losing a friend is especially hard when you were blind to their pain. Before break, I had no hint as to what he was going through. I sat in the cafeteria eating breakfast with him most mornings before school. We talked about virtually anything: philosophical questions, sports, school, history, social issues, politics, anything. Anything that he was hiding he had hidden deep inside himself.
It took a whole week for it to sink in that he was truly gone. The next Friday I was sitting in class, barely holding myself together. The bell to end class had just rang when I found myself clinging to my friend having an intense panic attack. The emotions I had felt when I first heard the news returned in a flash. I was in a state of disbelief, shock, horror. I went completely numb. I began to shake more and more. It became harder and harder to breath. I was suffocating. I was suffocating on the very air that keeps me alive; the air that kept him alive. I distinctly remember how the weight of the world seemed to push down on my shoulders and I crumbled downward, barely caught by a classmate before I collapsed to the floor. This friend who I had known since I was eight years old, this friend I had known for half of my life, was dead. Suddenly, all the times that I had complained that my life was moving too slowly were irrelevant. All the times I wish that the weeks would speed up became irrelevant. All I wanted was to go back in time; back to when I first met him. Back to when he still had plenty of time. Back to a time that I could help him if I knew then what I do now.
You can sit down and imagine your life without somebody in it, but until that person is gone, you can't possibly know what that actually means. For me, I lost a friend; somebody who I could talk to about anything, somebody who I admired and respected. In the moment I realized what "gone" meant, I found myself staring off into space with billions of thoughts racing through my brain as fast as light moves. I found my brain racing through the idea of eternity: eternal life, eternal slumber. Eternal, eternal, eternal; a word constantly used to describe things that last forever, or in mortal terms, a very long time.
Losing a friend to death is hard; I can't think of a word to describe the feeling accurately, so I'll settle with the kindest word to use, and that word is "hard." When a person who has such a large presence in your community, in your life, is suddenly gone, it rips you into pieces. I can only imagine what his family went through, and I prayed for them. I still do. We have all lost something that tore us into billions of pieces, something that left us shattered. But we are still here. The only thing we can do is keep the memory of the ones we lost alive. Memories fade, but stories will remain as long as there is someone willing to listen. I urge you all, love. Above all else, love. Love is healing, love is hope, love is life. I can't bring my friend back. But I have the rest of my life, whatever amount of time is left, to make sure that I love endlessly all those who cross my path because, I don't know how much time each person in my life has left.
