When You Lose Your Best Friend Before You Turn 25

Of all the many lists of 25 things before you turn 25, none ever mention about the possibility of losing your friend. By losing, I don’t mean losing touch and losing toxic friends. I mean actually losing them forever. I mean losing them to death.

When you lose your friend before you turn 25 the first thing you feel is disbelief. Disbelief that you will never make new memories again. At times you wish you have anterograde amnesia, so that you’ll only remember life before they were gone. The times where you spent being mischievous and the late night coffee talk trying to figure out where life would go from here.

You don’t want to make new memories without them in it. You’d think it wouldn’t be a memory worth remembering anyway. You just want to be there for each other, talking about your passions and dreams.

When you lose your friend before you turn 25, you would have never thought of having to stare at their lifeless body in a hospital bed. You’ve sat next to that hospital bed for days and days, telling them about your life and the awful work stress. You tell them everything as if you both were not in a hospital, because you don’t want them to think that anything has changed in your friendship.

Yeah, they’re hooked up to IVs and you help them drink their medicine, instead of chugging drinks or binging on pizza, but, really nothing has changed. Both your heartstrings are still connected to each other, because you are friends no matter what.

Losing your friend before you turn 25 would change your notion of forever. “We’ll be friends forever,” you tell each other since you were young. Though, you never know that your forever will be cut short. Your definition of forever was going through the milestones together. It was the first promotion, engagement, marriage, round-the-world trip.

It will hit you that you won’t be able to celebrate your milestones together like you used to, and that would hurt. That would send pain signals to every inch of your body. The thought of it just make you want to curl up and form a bubble around you.

When you’ve lost your friend before 25, you thought that you’d be grown up enough to handle grief. But the growing up part is really knowing that grief knows no age. Just because you’re officially a ~grown up~ doesn’t guarantee that you would understand grief.

Even as you try to continue on living, try to focus on your goals and promises to your 15-year-old self, grief can hit you without warning. The pain, the regret and the longing will haunt you. And the horrible part is, you don’t know when it’s going to end.