Dearest friend,
You have been dead for over one year…eleven weeks…one day now.
I can’t say it has been easy learning to live without you. Heading into year two, I can say I have started to make real progress. I can talk about your death without crying. I can look people in the eye and tell them how you died. And now I finally feel like I can be honest with you. Okay, not with you, but I can be honest with myself about you.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I will never see you again. It was incredibly difficult to reconcile my desire to see you again with my belief that there is no afterlife. I used to look for you everywhere, hoping that you were watching over me and sending me signs. But I don’t need you to linger anymore. I am finally at ease with your passing.
With this acceptance, I am also trying to let go of the guilt from the promises I made and subsequently broke in the wake of your death. I have come home without visiting your grave. And I think we both know that any attempts I made to be vegan or even vegetarian in your honor were ill-fated. After much internal struggle, I now believe you never would have asked me to do those things in the first place.
Deeper than that, I have been trying to absolve the guilt attached to the things I did to you when you were alive. I had never tried to understand you. I know deeply that I am only the savior or the partner in crime that you seeks for, even if you don’t say. I am incredibly sorry that I was never as proud of you as you were of me.
It pains me to admit that I think about you more now than I did when you were alive. I stare into your negative space and fear that one day I will go twenty-four hours without pausing to remember you. As the sound of your voice grows more distant, leaving parts of you behind seems inevitable.
While it is frightening to think of what comes next, somehow, in your own way, you’ve prepared me for it. You were my first friend and my first eulogy. I think it would make you, the eternal optimist that you were, happy to know that your friendship keeps making me a better, stronger person. You showed me that I can function in the face of tragedy. You taught me the vocabulary of grief so I can comfort others when they need it. I never would have asked for it to be this way, but if this is what I can take from it, I will.
So, dearest friend, that’s all I have to share for now. I’ll raise a glass for your twenty-third birthday this summer, and, as always, I’ll keep you in my thoughts.
Love,
Jan
TECHIE'S SCRIBBLING 