A high-pitched scream rang out from across the concourse beneath Rockefeller Center and changed my life forever. My gaze swept over the sea of people and there, sandwiched between annoyed businessmen rushing past Starbucks, stood my friend, Beth. I bolted toward her and we collapsed into each other's arms, bouncing and shrieking, as the typically unfazed New Yorkers paused to witness our spectacle.
After connecting online years earlier, Beth and I were at last meeting face to face. She had come to the city to see me and a few other friends we shared, and things were off to a wonderful beginning.
We filled the day with classic New York sightseeing and eventually landed at a pub in lower Manhattan. We swayed to a jazz trio, sipped Bloody Marys, and cackled until our faces ached. At one moment, I glanced around the table and caught the happiness radiating from my friends, and something inside me sank. Our flawless day carried a shadow none of us dared to acknowledge: Beth was fading, her cancer spreading at an alarming pace. Opportunities like this one in New York would soon vanish.
That embrace from her remains the most incredible hug I have ever been given.
Since Beth passed away last year, I find myself constantly returning to the sensation of holding her. When I shut my eyes, I can still sense the bristle of her cropped hair against my cheek, the warmth of her whisper near my ear, and the strength of her arms wrapped around me like she intended to hold on forever. People who commit fully to a hug are rare. Beth was one of a kind, and I am certain I will never encounter another soul quite like hers.
Although my friends and I understood Beth was slipping away — she had braced us for this harsh truth with her signature sharp humor and incredible poise — nothing could have equipped me for the anguish that followed her death. When that final instant arrived, the one we had all braced for, the tears poured out and wouldn't cease for three straight days. And that deep emptiness remains lodged in my chest to this day.
The sorrow of losing a friend is unlike any grief I have known.
When a friend first confides that she has been diagnosed with a grave illness, your immediate response is disbelief. You yearn to guard her, shield her, and position yourself between her and the terror gnawing at her, so you minimize how serious things are. You become her biggest supporter, lifting her however possible and concealing your own dread. After she is gone, you replay those interactions and hope desperately that you gave her what she needed during her darkest hours.
While your friend endures the grueling cycle of treatments, surgeries, and agonizing tests, you burn hours online researching her condition. You hesitate to overwhelm her with questions, but the terror of losing her compels you to absorb everything you can find, searching desperately for evidence that she will pull through. You cling to every glimmer of optimism and shove the mounting dread aside. Once she is gone, rage boils up because funding for her disease was scarce and there wasn't sufficient knowledge to rescue her.
Then arrives the moment when you sense she has reached her limit. When the weariness of her illness has seeped into her very bones, when the determination begins draining from her spirit. You decode the hidden meaning behind her Facebook updates, you catch the terror that the finish line is approaching in her expression. You sob uncontrollably into a dishcloth at your sink because you understand your time with her is dwindling. Losing a friend drives home the truth that wonderful people are stolen from us far too soon, and it is brutally unjust.
You catch yourself praying that the end will arrive swiftly, then immediately feel ashamed for entertaining such a wish. You shift from hoping she will survive to see another holiday to begging that her passing will be gentle and align with her wishes. You attempt to express what she means to you, yet language feels hopelessly insufficient. When the bedside watch begins, you simply exist alongside your grief and pray to every force that you managed to make her feel treasured. And you weep furious, scalding tears because nobody warned you that friends sometimes die.
And then your friend is simply absent. Just like that. Anticipated yet astonishing in countless ways.
I was unprepared. Not a single one of us was. We still cannot accept it.
A magnificent flame extinguished far too early, and I am left pondering how her children will ever grasp the enormity of her presence on this earth.
You observe as her loved ones bury her, striving to pay tribute through meaningful tokens and acts. Yet you get to return home to your own family, while her husband and children embark on a completely different kind of torment. A life without your friend carves a wound in you, but for them — her family — a life without their mother and wife will strip away everything they have always believed to be true.
In the days following her death, you drift. You weep. You clutch your friends and trade stories. Facebook ambushes you with flashbacks from our days in New York City, and you freeze mid-step when a memory floods over you in the supermarket aisle. The loss of a friend defies comprehension. Yet this is the cold reality: she is truly gone.
There is nothing you can do beyond honoring her memory, treasuring what you shared, and championing the cause with the insight she entrusted to you.
But it never feels like enough.
Losing a friend is its own circle of hell.
And it is absolutely agonizing.
