The creeping sense that something was wrong hit me slowly. I entertained the possibility of death early on, but only briefly; “19-year-olds don’t die,” I told myself, “stop being ridiculous.” The problem with having an incredibly responsive friend is that once, say, twenty consecutive offline-hours pass, alarm bells start to ring. Three days passed, and I continued to tell myself everything was fine. I sent her one last ridiculous text (verbatim: “fam are you alive, I have bare memes xx”) and tried to forget about it. I was abroad, anyway, and there was little I could do.
On the sixth day, her Facebook account disappeared. Her profile picture turned grey, her name changed to ‘Facebook User’, and that’s when I knew. I found the public post her best friend made about her death a few minutes later; I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to search for her name earlier, but there it was — the RIPs, the ❤︎s, the endless variations of I’ll miss her so much and she’s in a better place now. It did not feel real. It felt like a sick joke.
Describing the next few moments/days/weeks feels pointless and self-indulgent; ultimately, everyone reacts the same way to the sudden death of a loved one, and there is nothing that makes my experience unique or worthy of recounting in detail. And yet: I couldn’t breathe, I cried uncontrollably (usually in private but sometimes in public), and I blamed myself. I felt like I was suffocating and I considered suicide. I couldn’t stop thinking of her, of her impossibly kind eyes and mane of black hair, of how she loved me and told me so. I couldn’t stop thinking of how I was meant to meet her ten days before she died, but didn’t. My reasoning at the time was simple — too tired, can’t be bothered, there’ll be plenty of time later — except, of course, there wasn’t.
For the next few days, I became obsessed. I raked through our conversations, her Instagram, her Twitter, saving everything and backing it up on iCloud three times for good measure. Parts of our texts I couldn’t bring myself to read, because I knew I’d been horrible, and the crushing guilt of having never apologised properly was too much to confront. Other parts simply made me cry: she’d planned a surprise for me in August, and now I’ll never know what it was. She knew I struggled with sleep, with university work, with all of it, and always gently but firmly encouraged me to pick myself back up, and keep going whenever something went wrong. She was kinder to me than anyone else I had in my life, yet in hindsight, I deserved none of it.
June, which happened two months prior, was a strange time. I ended up in a cardiology ward after an A&E admission, missed my final exam, and filed a request to withdraw from my university course, citing stress and difficulty in keeping up with the workload. I moved back home for the summer and, lying awake one night at 2 a.m., suddenly realised that I was going to die. I spent the next few hours reading countless articles about death anxiety and Ernest Becker, with tears running down my face at the thought of inevitably losing all my loved ones. A little after 4 a.m., she popped up, and I told her.
Me: It’s okay, no worries. Warning you in advance though, I’m not super chatty right now, just spent the last few hours bawling my eyes at the idea of death and that there’s no cure, unlike for everything else
Her: That’s incredibly poetic babe. You know, I know there’s nothing I can say that will make you feel any better about all of this, because death is inevitable whether we like it or not. But what you can’t do is feel sorry for yourself because death is a natural occurrence, and the reason we are on earth is to make memories and form relationships. Whether they’re shitty or not, they are a part of you for a reason. It’s easy to think that everything will come to an end and just mope around doing nothing all day, but what you need to do is go out and make as many memories as you can. Want to form friendships with people who aren’t worth your time? Go ahead, because every little thing that happens in your life has a purpose. Everything you do will never happen again in the entire existence of the universe, so make the most of it.
So much has changed since she passed, but equally, nothing has changed at all, and that’s what terrifies me. Every now and again, I talk about her as if she were still here, and nobody notices, and it kills me. Every now and again, I search for her name on Google, see that no new articles have been put up since the day after her death, and I feel angry. I keep writing about her as if it makes a shred of difference, and I keep talking to her in my head. When I’m alone, I can feel her in the room with me; if I focus too much on this feeling, I can’t help but cry.
She will haunt me forever, and I welcome that with open arms.
