Dealing With Unexpected Goodbyes

---

One of my best friends from high school (that's grades 9 - 12, basically pre-university, for my non-US readers) was shot and killed earlier this month, but I only found out about it a few days ago.

I hadn't seen or spoken to him since graduating, as life took us in different directions. You would think this might make it easier to handle the news of his death, but it only makes it harder, and now I'm struggling.

I'm struggling to understand how one of the nicest, most fun-loving, and gregarious guys I've ever known in my life gets that life snuffed out in an instant.

I'm struggling with the guilt (undeserved, perhaps, but it's there nonetheless) that someone I spent so much time hanging out with after school, playing video games, doing projects, and just shooting the breeze, was someone I let slip out of my life. Maybe, I think to myself, if I'd been there for him, I could have done something. I could have helped. I could have made a difference.

This isn't rational--there's likely very little, if anything, I could have done. My brain is still kicking me anyway.

I'm struggling with the sorrow. I'm struggling with the sympathy I feel for his parents, his friends, his family. I grieve for his children--I know what it's like to have your father die, unexpectedly, at a young age. I'm struggling with knowing that nothing I do, nothing I say, nothing I can write, nothing I can even conceive of, can make things better for any of them.

This wasn't supposed to be his fate. This wasn't supposed to happen. When we were sitting there at his house, playing Super Mario Kart before dinner, never in a million years did I think, "You know, one of us might not live to see our 40th birthday." That wasn't the future as either one of us saw it.

What do I do? What does anybody do?

We love. We use our words and our actions and we let those left behind know that they are loved. We give meaning to the memories, because from now on, that's all we have left. We cry our eyes out, we rage for the senseless idiocy of a world he left too soon, and when we're done with our anger, our tears, our pain, we close our eyes and we hope with every fiber of our being that he's no longer hurting.

We hurt for him, and we don't hide the scars. We come together, we celebrate who he was, we celebrate that we knew him. We. Don't. Hide. The. Scars.

Good journey, Tom. These tears are just a down-payment on rainbow bridges of our own. I love you, man. No matter how many times you kicked my ass in Mortal Kombat.