Last week was a bad week as far as my friends are concerned. The Saturday before this one just past, one of my friends lost her young brother (age 20) to a fatal car accident. Then on Wednesday another friend’s 24-year-old husband committed suicide.
I never met either young man, but I feel so badly for my friends. That’s how death is, of course, it’s hard on those who are left behind.
The car accident prompted me to immediately remind my own little brother how much I love him, and to remind him to be careful. We’re supposed to have our siblings all our lives but we take that for granted, and it shouldn’t take something like this to remind us that they’re mortal too, but it does.
It chills me a little to recall talking to that friend months ago about whether her brother would get into as much trouble as mine did immediately after turning 21, because he’s never going to, now.
Actually, although I feel bad for the friend who lost her little brother, I’m far more worried about the friend who lost her husband. Unfortunately, this is the friend I mentioned in this post. So not only does she have her husband’s death to deal with that makes her a widow shortly before she turns 25, I’m sure she’s also going to feel a whole lot of guilt. (The guy in that post is shocked and upset too, ftr, and I’m beginning to suspect he didn’t know about the affair comment.) I guess it’s a small blessing that she didn’t cheat on him, but having considered it has to be bad enough.
Even I feel a little guilty, because while I’ve never said anything to her, the other friend in this thread and I wondered if she might not be better off leaving him because things were going so roughly, and it didn’t seem like either of them were going to make the effort to work through things. But we didn’t want him to die! Amicable divorce, maybe, not this. This is so much more final than anyone ever thought of.
It’s just shocking, even though she said he was depressed. I don’t know how to explain it, but in a way his death seems to come from out of nowhere even more than the car accident.
I hope she gets through this okay, but I won’t see her for two more weeks since we’re on vacation. Besides giving her permission to call me whenever, I told her about someone she can talk to professionally if she’s interested. I don’t know what else there is to do.
Tell someone you love them, okay? The past week or so has been a vivid reminder that you never know when it’ll be too late to do so.