We don’t expect our friends to die. At least, not when they’re young. But this doesn’t stop them from slipping out of our lives, leaving us to grapple with what it means to grieve the loss of a friend.
In February 2021, Kelly Muller posted a series of photos with her best friend, Michele, to Instagram. In the pictures, Kelly and Michele were doing what many friends in their thirties do: drinking salt-rimmed margaritas, showing up at the office in matching outfits, getting ready for a wedding. But this wasn’t a birthday tribute to her closest friend, it was a digital eulogy. In the caption Kelly wrote, “Losing my best friend has been the most devastating experience of my life.”
Kelly was studying at university in New Zealand when she met Michele. She was working part time in retail, and Michele, who was in high school at the time, came into the store so often that Kelly eventually asked if she wanted a job. In the sixteen years that followed they did everything together: celebrating engagements, anniversaries, promotions, new jobs, along with Kelly’s wedding and the birth of her two daughters. When Michele died, they were both living in Australia, working together once again, on what would become their final project. “Michele was the first person, after our families, that my husband and I called when we had our first daughter,” Kelly says. “She stood beside me when I got married. After I moved to Lennox Head, she was who I used to stay with when I came to Sydney for work. When we built our home, she was the one sending pictures of what we should be doing.”
Three weeks before her death, Michele had spent a week in Lennox Head with Kelly and other friends. Now, Kelly and her family retrace the steps they took with Michele on that trip almost daily, feeling her footprints along a certain path they took together toward the beach. “When you’ve had a friendship for so long, even though they’re not physically here, there’s an energy that’s still around you,” she tells me. Describing that week spent together, Kelly says that, though they didn’t know it, they were all lucky to have that time with Michele. Very lucky. Despite everything that has happened since, there is an unwavering gratitude for her friend, for every moment and memory. As someone who has never had to say goodbye to a close friend, it’s overwhelming.
When Michele died after a long battle with depression, many international borders were still closed, meaning there was no way for her family and other loved ones in Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) and her closest friends in Australia to bid farewell to her at the same time. The morning after Michele passed, Kelly flew to Sydney to be with Michele’s fiancé and other friends who had gathered to help navigate the significant amount of admin that needed to be addressed. “You didn’t have time to think because everybody had something they needed to bring to the table. I don’t even know how to explain that experience.”
In death, many of us look to religion for reassurance that the people we loved most are being cared for and have found peace. For people like Kelly, who aren’t religious, tension can fill the space between your beliefs about the so-called afterlife and the reality of how it feels to have one of your most cherished people die. For even the staunchest atheist, accepting that someone, in every iteration of themself, is no more, can feel even more unnatural than a belief in God.
“I don’t believe in heaven, so I really struggled initially. I was just trying to comprehend where she was. I wanted, more than anything, for her to be okay,” Kelly tells me. “You look for signs everywhere. And whether it’s just your mind tricking you or whether it’s actually happening, what matters most is that you feel it. I could feel her around me and I felt that she had found peace. That gave me the confidence to just take it day by day.”
Without faith to provide guidance, Kelly focused, instead, on community. While she found indescribable comfort in her friends, especially those who were also in Sydney during the days following Michele’s death, she was still left wanting. Though the group of friends had each other, some often felt they weren’t entitled to be grieving Michele’s death as deeply as they were because they weren’t technically family. Looking for reassurance, Kelly searched Instagram for hashtags like #bereavedfriends in the hope of finding someone outside her immediate circle who’d gone through what she had, but she couldn’t find anything. The lack of discourse around the experience of grieving a friend’s death left her short-changed in a way she wouldn’t have been were she looking for a support group for people who had lost parents, partners, or children. But this shortcoming wasn’t exclusive to Instagram, or social media, or even support groups. It is reflective of a society-wide gap in care when it comes to people who have lost their closest friends forever.
In their 2019 study “Death of a close friend: Short and long-term impacts on physical, psychological and social well-being,”1 researchers Wai-Man Liu, Liz Forbat, and Katrina Anderson wanted to understand why the grief of losing a friend wasn’t taken seriously by employers, doctors, and others, when compared to the loss of a family member. The study found that losing a friend can be just as traumatic as losing a family member, with the health and well-being of the bereaved being acutely affected for up to four years.
Over a period of fourteen years, the researchers surveyed 26,515 people. Of this group, 9,586 had experienced the death of at least one close friend. Their data found that bereaved friends may need both physical and emotional support in the four years following the death. The study’s conclusion notes that the loss of a close friend is a type of “disenfranchised grief,” rendering a significant impact on people’s mental and physical health, vitality, and social functioning. The study also found that bereaved women in particular experienced “more negative and long-lasting” outcomes after this kind of loss.
When I Zoom with Dr. Forbat from Australia to her home in Scotland, she describes vitality as “engagement in life.” Suddenly, the term’s inclusion in this research feels particularly painful when we talk about the repercussions of someone’s death, as if, in one person’s death, there are many lives at least momentarily lost. The phrase “I couldn’t live without you” takes on new meaning.
“There’s this really unhelpful discourse around bereavement where the first year is hard, but from there everything is easier because you’ve done the first birthday and first anniversary of someone’s death, along with any religious or cultural traditions,” she says. “But we know that’s not the case for everyone, whether you’re a family member or not.”
In her research and practice as a family therapist, Dr. Forbat is passionate about challenging the hierarchy of grief, which places someone’s biological family at the top of the pyramid, with all other relationships falling below it. Instead of “close friends,” Dr. Forbat often uses the phrase “psychological kin” to refer to the people we choose to be close to, sometimes over and above our biological family.
Having worked in palliative care and cancer research for decades, she’s seen firsthand how psychological kin—our friends—are neglected by institutions, even those like the World Health Organization, which appear to understand that both family and friends are a core element of palliative care. But despite the importance of close friendship being widely acknowledged within the medical industry, Dr. Forbat doesn’t often see this put into practice. For example, many palliative care units will send a hand-written card to loved ones of the deceased two weeks after their death, then again six months later. But these acts of care are normally reserved for spouses or adult children and very rarely close friends.
For Americans between twenty-five and thirty-four, the first ranked cause of death2 is unintentional injury, which includes poisoning and motor vehicle accidents, followed by suicide, then homicide. I ask Dr. Forbat if there’s a difference in the grief we feel following the death of young people, who are more likely to die by suicide or in a car crash, than the grief we might feel for older relatives, for example, whose death is more likely to be attributed to coronary heart disease or dementia. I’m not shocked when she says there is, explaining that unexpected or traumatic deaths, such as suicides or sudden accidents, leave the bereaved at much higher risk of prolonged grief disorder, where the symptoms of grief persist for longer than twelve months and affect the ability to function in daily life.
In Australia, employees are entitled to two days of compassionate and bereavement leave when someone in their immediate family or household dies. By the government’s definition, “immediate family” can include your spouse or former spouse, de facto partner or former de facto partner, child, parent, grandparent, grandchild, or sibling. This leave policy also extends to the immediate family of your partner or former partner, as well as step-relations and adoptive family. Of course, this kind of leave policy is vital and not to be taken for granted at a time when other countries, including the US, have no federal laws around grief, loss, or funeral arrangements. Still, it’s obvious where policies like Australia’s fall short.
I ask Dr. Forbat what she thinks it may take to change the way workplaces, and society at large, care for bereaved friends, and she takes a moment before answering. “The dismantling has to come from people challenging these normative ideas about who’s impacted by grief. But you can only start to do that through dialogue, then through shifting policies,” she says.
Dr. Forbat tells me that the previous week she’d been in a meeting at her university about Scotland’s bereavement policy. In the last few years, several of her team members—herself included—had lost a parent. Their current policy was similar to Australia’s, offering some paid leave to people who had lost a parent or spouse, then several fewer days for a more distant relative or friend. It was at this moment Dr. Forbat was able to put everything she’s learned through her research into practice, starting a conversation about the grief hierarchy within the group.
“These policies need deconstructing and, maybe, if we get to dismantle them, then we won’t have staff members being told they can only have one day off ‘because, well, it was only your best friend of forty years who died,’” she tells me. “We need to shift the tone of this whole conversation into something that recognizes the strength of a bond, rather than some random label that’s been attributed to our biological kin.” The university’s HR representative in the room took notes.
The idea that conversations like this, taking place in small meeting rooms around the world, are what will influence long-term institutional change almost feels too optimistic. But, as Dr. Forbat points out, this is often the way policy changes become a reality.
When issues are given a certain level of visibility, it makes it easier to readjust the rules. Sometimes, you just need some evidence and some stories—you need power—and then everything flips.
Lech Blaine was seventeen when he jumped in a car with six friends. Together, the teenage boys—five seated in the car with another two in the trunk—were making a short trip from a barbecue to the city after a lift fell through. With Lech in the front passenger seat, his friend who was driving, sober and under the speed limit, overcorrected on a bend and crossed onto the opposite side of the road, colliding with an oncoming car. The accident resulted in the death of three passengers—Will, Hamish, and Henry—and left others in induced comas and, in one case, permanently disabled. Lech was the only one to walk away from the crash unharmed. Physically, at least.
Lech, who is now in his thirties, is used to talking about the accident and his friends, though he admits to me the latter was much harder to write about. In his book, Car Crash: A Memoir,3 he explores the tensions that can arise when friendship, tragedy, grief, and loss intersect—in his case, each fueled by the potency of teenage friendship. When I speak to Lech, I expect him to articulately reflect on the accident and the friends he lost in it, as he does in his book, but what I’m most curious about is how it has shaped the friendships he has built since then, as he finished school, left his hometown, went to university, and grew up. But to get to that point, I know it’s vital to talk about what Lech lost on that night in May 2009.
“Friendship is such a convoluted thing, especially when you add grief to it,” Lech begins, echoing a message I’ve heard before. The complicated nature of friendship is, at its heart, what makes these relationships so much harder to define than others, both in life and in death.
Lech’s accident came at the end of a whirlwind summer. One of his friends had started at a new school that year on a football scholarship, and Lech had spent the months leading up to the crash making friends with the boys who had embraced his old friend. Together they’d formed a new group, defying the barrier of attending different high schools—something which anyone who has grown up in a small town is sure to agree can feel like a bigger deal than it ought to be. It was a glorious summer, despite the usual teenage insecurities, competitiveness, and a constant fear of being left out, but even in the perfect chasm in which it existed, there’s every chance that without the accident, it could have been completely forgettable. The act of making new friends has always come naturally to Lech, even as a teenage boy, when the kind of love he expressed to his friends was hardly the norm.
“I’ve always had a fairly intense approach to friendship, to the point where it’s noticeable to other people. When I was a teenager, then at college, people would make fun of me because I would have these romances with people I met and really liked,” he tells me. “Not to be flippant, but I think the reason I was in the accident is because I’m that kind of person.”
As our conversation continues, it’s clear what kind of person Lech considers himself. The kind of person who meets a group of boys from a different school and gets so swept up in these new friendships that he’s soon considered a vital part of the group. The kind of person who was so open to new friendships in his youth, it didn’t matter that his own schoolmates thought he was a bit of a traitor having this new group of friends. The kind of person who can still look back on the season in which he lost three friends and see the beauty in a million insignificant moments.
“The thing about death, especially when it happens to someone young, is that it kind of freezes a person at a point in time. And it freezes your feelings toward them. When you experience grief, it’s very easy to feel nostalgic about the people you’ve lost,” he says.
For Lech, who was mourning his friends in 2009, social media was an unexpected comfort when trying to unknot the complicated hierarchy of grief. Of the three boys who passed away in the accident, Lech was closest to Henry, who was, much like Kelly’s Michele, someone who was considered a best friend by many. After Lech learned of Henry’s death, he posted a status on Facebook and changed his profile picture to one of them together. “The main emotion I felt was regret that we hadn’t taken more photos,” he writes in Car Crash. “How else could I prove what I had lost?”
Henry and Lech hadn’t been friends for all that long, but their friendship was intense. As many teenage relationships did at the time, my own very much included, this private closeness became public on Myspace. At the time of the accident, Lech was Henry’s third or fourth “top friend.” It felt validating, he tells me, to have that reflection of their friendship suspended in time.
Top friends on social media, much like some teenage friendships in real life, could be fleeting. Now, looking back, Lech can acknowledge that while he found personal comfort in the ranking, it could have been equally minimizing for friends who perhaps knew Henry longer or considered him one of their closest friends. Even with a documented friendship ranking, there was nuance to be found when it came to determining the hierarchy of grief within the circle of Henry’s many friends.
“Within the mourning process there are fairly defined roles and hierarchies: parents and siblings, then usually a best friend or the people who are pallbearers. But then there are people who don’t quite make that cut, who are caught in limbo. It can be a very alienating and lonely experience because you no longer have that person who’s died there to justify your friendship to everyone. It’s gone,” he says. “If your friend dies during a time when you’re not quite as close to them, it suddenly throws your whole understanding of your connection into flux.”
Lech tells me he was talking to a friend recently, reflecting on other teenage friendships they both had, which have faded with time. They wondered if, had Henry, Hamish, and Will not died in the accident, they’d even be friends today. Through the death of his friends, Lech has found himself appreciating the millions of other ways friendships can end, and how preferable each of those many options is to what he went through. “It would have been such a beautiful thing to have just been friends with these people, then drift away from them over time,” he says.
After spending so much of my life worried that my oldest friendships will change so much they become unrecognizable, or disappear forever, I find myself simply feeling thankful that I’ve never had to grapple with the finality of a friend’s death. Never talking to a friend again, even if over a petty disagreement or mistake you regret, will never be worse than truly losing them.
The night following my call with Kelly, I find myself searching online for photos of chamomile, small flowers stuffed with white petals, sitting at the end of thin wriggling stems.
The year before Michele passed away, she sent Kelly a bunch of flowers for her birthday. When they arrived, Kelly opened the box to find a scraggly bunch of chamomile blooms in place of Michele’s usual choice of peonies or an all-white bouquet. She texted her friend to tell her there must have been some kind of mistake with the order. “I sent her a photo and was like, ‘Oh mate, they’ve sent me the wrong bunch, look at the state of this,’” she remembers, laughing. “She replied and told me that they were actually her new favorite flowers and that I was just doing it wrong, then sent me a photo of them in her home where she’d put them in vases with red David Austin Roses.”
Now, every two weeks when chamomile flowers are in season, Kelly visits her local florist to buy them. She says that on every visit, the same florist remarks on how beautiful the flowers are, to which Kelly can never force herself to agree. “I hate them,” she says. “But I buy them, because it’s her. I’ve even planted chamomile seeds in the garden of our new home.”
Since losing Michele, Kelly has found ways to keep her in her life. When she first started writing Michele letters, they were filled with heart-aching concern and questions about where she’d gone. Now, the letters are updates on everything that has happened since she left, an intentional effort to keep the conversation between them going. When Kelly runs, which she does a lot since losing her friend, she finds herself talking to Michele out loud over the music in her headphones. She watches the sunrise as often as she can, and thinks of her every time. She keeps photos of Michele on her fridge. And on Friday afternoons, Kelly’s husband makes her a margarita in one of their fancy glasses, the kind Michele had a strong preference for, and they toast to her, wherever she is.
When working to help people who have experienced loss and grief, Dr. Forbat encourages them to consider who they are now that their friend has died, along with exactly what they’ve lost. “You and your best friends share stories that nobody else does. You can tell someone else a story, but it’s not the same as when the two of you think back and laugh or cringe,” she says. “There’s something really important in witnessing the loss of that connection, the loss of that intimacy and the parts of you that disappear when you no longer have the ability to talk about that story with that person. This is why loss is really hard, because you’re losing someone who knew you in a very specific way, in very specific contexts.”
I imagine my closest friends standing in a line, each holding one end of a makeshift telephone crafted with a piece of string and two empty tin cans. I imagine our memories running along the strings like electric currents. Bess and I having the police called on us, after dressing up in costumes and slinking along my suburban street in an attempt to scare our younger siblings. Tim and I spending a sleepless night in a train station in India, after our train from Agra to Mumbai was delayed by twelve hours.
With Dr. Forbat’s words in mind, I imagine each taut string being cut with a pair of freshly sharpened scissors, leaving two frayed ends flickering as one end of our shared memories disappears forever. And it hurts. Despite existing only in my imagination, just for a moment, it’s a loss that cannot be explained. There may not be a language for friendship, but every friendship has a language of its own, made up of inside jokes, secret nicknames, and invented words. This is the language we stand to lose completely when we lose a friend. Kelly’s remark about Michele’s chamomile flowers gets stuck in my head for weeks, but sharing the story with me will never compare to her laughing about it with Michele.
In Boy Friends,4 poet Michael Pedersen somehow manages to put words to this specific pain, writing of his beloved friend Scott Hutchison, who passed away in 2018. Michael and Scott had been vacationing together in the days before Scott went missing. The days spent driving through Scotland, swimming in hotel pools, and feasting on indulgent seafood platters left Michael on the police’s list of the last people to have seen Scott. The final time Michael saw his friend, he was boarding the 10:10 AM train home.
Those who are familiar with Scott, the much-loved lead singer of the band Frightened Rabbit, likely know what happened next. A number of distressing tweets from his account. Thousands of concerned fans recalling Scott’s lyrics about his own mental health and suicidal ideation. And, a day later, an update that Scott was gone, his body found by a kayaker.
In his memoir, Michael writes of the phenomenon Dr. Forbat and I discussed, of countless abrupt endings to conversations and plans that were either due to be enjoyed or were in the middle of being lived. “The ink is still wet on the page so there’s no way the book’s gone up in flames,” he writes. “You can’t be dead because we are still mid-conversation on a hundred relatively inconsequential things, and we’re about to pick these conversations back up and finish the suckers off like we said we would.”
Much of Michael’s Boy Friends is written to Scott, rather than for him. In the book’s prologue, he writes, “Now that you’re gone, I want to talk about you more than I care to admit. I find ways to meander and U-bend conversations into stories with you at the yolk of them.” It’s a habit I imagine Dr. Forbat would approve of.
Michael’s practice of writing to Scott, much like Kelly’s ongoing conversations with Michele, are examples of a theory known as “continuing bonds.” In 1996, researchers Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven Nickman coedited Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief,5 a book outlining this concept, which seeks to challenge predominantly Western beliefs about the modern grief process.
The concept of continuing bonds is built around the idea that we don’t have to sever all ties with people who have passed, relieving people of the expectation “to ‘recover,’ to ‘put the past behind them,’ and ‘to get on with their lives.’” Instead, those who are grieving are encouraged to continue their relationship with the person who has died, albeit in a different way from when they were alive. Many people already do this, even without awareness of this model of grief. By speaking to the dead, starting new rituals or routines with them in mind, or visiting places that meant a lot to them, we are, in some way, acknowledging that our bond with someone who has died is never entirely broken or buried—it’s still there. It’s just taken a new shape.
It’s instinctual to think of a person’s family first when you hear of their death. Walking my dog on an autumn afternoon, I saw a crowd gathered at the very end of my street. Seeing a man lying on the footpath, I hurried up, my mind occupied by the idea that I could help, living so close. Maybe he just needed a glass of water or, at worst, a towel to stop any potential bleeding. From the edge of the small group, I watched someone do chest compressions on the man on the footpath, while someone else held a phone on loudspeaker within earshot. I could hear a voice on the other end of the emergency line counting out a beat.
“He’s long gone,” a couple who were also standing at the fringe of the group told me. So I kept walking, conscious of making as little a spectacle of this stranger’s sudden death as I could.
That night, I called my mom, as I do whenever there’s an unsettling feeling I can’t seem to shake. I hadn’t done this in years, but as soon as she answered, my voice broke and I cried over the phone. I told her I couldn’t stop thinking about the man’s partner, kids, family. At the time, I didn’t spare a thought for his friends, despite the fact that he may have had no family or partner waiting for him at home that day. It’s impossible to know who will really be affected by the loss of any person, whether they’re a stranger at the end of your street, a colleague, or an acquaintance.
Kelly has considered deeply the similarities and differences between friends and family during times of loss. “Your family is your family, of course, but if you’re not close with them, there’s so much they don’t know about you,” she says. “My sister has no idea what excites me, what drives me, my favorite food, my favorite restaurants or what to buy me for Christmas.” Kelly and Michele had been friends for sixteen years—they knew when the other had the day off work or a busy week coming up. It was a kind of familiarity that could never be replicated by anything other than choosing to share themselves with each other inextricably.
Another issue with the hierarchy of grief is the way it separates those who are grieving without encouraging different groups to rely on each other for support, as is the case with ring theory. The hierarchy encourages mourning people to stay separated: Family grieves with family, friends grieve with friends. But what if this weren’t the case? What if we collectively understood that there really is so much to gain by looking beyond the pyramid? What if we all understood how much solace there is to be found by looking around to see who else is mourning the same person you are?
Tim Brennan was, in his sister Bella’s words, the most adoring big brother. At family events, kids would hang from his limbs and follow him through houses and into backyards. The day after Bella gave birth to her daughter, he appeared at the hospital with a bag full of gifts. He was energetic, fun, and charismatic. The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” was one of his favorite songs.
Bella and Tim, along with their other two siblings, were incredibly close—a “perfect foursome”—until Tim’s family lost him to alcoholism. “Tim had so much more life to live,” Bella tells me. “I just keep imagining everything he should be doing, in some parallel universe.”
The days after death move quickly and slowly at the same time. They can be foggy but also clarifying, as it becomes clear who else is sharing the weight of your grief. After Tim passed, his best friend, Hugh, was right there by the family’s side. While Hugh’s grief and Bella’s grief were different, their connection has been a light in the darkest time.
“Hugh just showed up from the beginning. And he’s never stopped showing up. Sometimes I just can’t believe it,” Bella tells me. “We know the family side of Tim, but Hugh has all the stories from high school and of them living together in their mid-twenties. We’re both gatekeepers of all the pieces of Tim. When we come together it’s almost like we’re piecing him back together as a whole.”
The day after Tim’s funeral, Hugh checked his mailbox. During a pandemic lockdown, Hugh had moved into a home Tim never had the chance to visit. Still, on this particular day, a letter arrived at Hugh’s place addressed to Timothy Brennan. He called Bella right away. The letter, it turned out, was a piece of political junk mail that might have, in any other instance, been thrown straight into the trash. After some investigating, it was found that a different Tim Brennan had lived in the home years before. Bella, who has never been religious, believes it was divine timing, a reminder that if Tim is looking down on them, he’d be stoked to see how his family and friends have come together. That day was the first and last time Hugh received anything for a Tim Brennan at that address.
After Tim passed, Bella looked for every reminder of him inside her phone. She reread their messages, watched family videos, and scrolled through her entire camera roll. But eventually, she exhausted every avenue and found there really was nothing left. Then came more of Tim’s friends. More photos. More memories. Each one a precious gift.
“I’m in touch with friends from all different chapters of his life now,” she says. “I’m always chatting to one of his work colleagues, a British guy Tim worked in recruitment with. We’re constantly in touch and sometimes he’ll just shoot me a memory of Tim. I never expected that. He brings a whole new perspective of what he was like at work, which I’d never been privy to seeing.” Tim died in November, so when his birthday came around the following October, it was nearing the first anniversary of his death. Tim’s family invited his friends to a barbecue at his dad’s house, along with his close family. With the invitation came a request that everyone wear a flannel shirt: Tim’s uniform. The group ate and played backyard cricket. Bella describes the day as a happy kind of funeral.
Just months after Tim passed, another one of his friends, Stu, welcomed his second baby and gave him the middle name Timothy. At the barbecue, Tim’s family got to meet his namesake.
At the time of our conversation, Bella is counting down to her wedding. It’s going to be a small celebration, she tells me, but it feels important to have Hugh and his wife there. “I will have my other brother James there, representing my brothers, but Hugh represents the other side to Tim,” she says. As we talk about the wedding, I think of what Bella and her family stood to lose if they hadn’t fully understood the depth of Tim’s friendships, how they shaped him, and the influence he had on the lives of people outside his family. I think of what a missed opportunity it must be for families who are unable to look past their own grief and do the same.
Before Jonathan Tjarks passed away, he wrote an essay for The Ringer, the sports and pop culture website where he worked, headlined “Does My Son Know You?”6 In the piece, he wrote about being diagnosed with terminal cancer, the boredom of waiting for PET scans, his faith, his family, and the relationship he had with his own father, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease when Jonathan was six, then died fifteen years later. Jonathan wrote that as his own death approached, he’d already told his friends the only thing he was going to ask them when he eventually saw them in heaven: “Does my son know you?”
“I don’t want Jackson to have the same childhood that I did. I want him to wonder why his dad’s friends always come over and shoot hoops with him. Why they always invite him to their houses. Why there are so many of them at his games. I hope that he gets sick of them,” he wrote.
This was a call to action for Jonathan’s friends, a request that they not only hold him in their memories but continue to play their parts as if cancer had never found its way into his body. This deep understanding of the roles our friends can fill in the lives of our family should not have felt so revolutionary to me, but such is the result of the ignorance with which we treat friendship after a death.
Because death is inevitable. No number of seat belts and safe drivers, charity fundraisers and therapy sessions, plasma infusions and blood donations can save our lives forever. And as long as no guarantee to protect our friends exists, all we can hope for is a shared understanding of exactly what we lose when we lose a friend. To truly understand the magnitude of friendship, we must sit with how it feels to have it slip away.
When I imagine my own death, should I be so lucky for it to happen when I am old, with a full life of love behind me, I hope my friends will be thought of when I pass. I hope that our closeness will have been common knowledge, and just as respected as the relationships I have with my partner, family, or children. I hope somebody asks my friends if they are okay. I hope they are fed and cared for. If they are still working, I hope, at the very least, that they are given the day off.