Shock, Grief, Loss

The thing about loss is that it’s can’t be put into words. The news hits unexpectedly, stops your breath, and the heart beats fast with nausea. It could take a few days to process these physical reactions into a recognisable emotion like grief. For now, everything is just overwhelming, absolutely everything.

I was at the library this morning when I found out, from a casual Facebook scroll through, that a University of Chicago classmate had passed away. She and I were once close, meeting during Orientation Week and sharing rooms a few doors from each other for all of first year. We went on Habitat for Humanity volunteering trips and hung out in the dorm lounge in pajama pants. We were 18, and found such joy in gingerly making trips to downtown Chicago from our campus in a somewhat dubious area. We spent too much time in the library and too much energy engrossed in the petty social bickering of our dorm. As with many college friendships, we drifted apart at the end of that year. I don’t remember the specifics that caused this friendship to fade, but they certainly weren’t meaningful or dramatic. Like two parallel lines we continued through college with an occasional chat and embarked on paths world apart, fated to never cross again. Her death, shocking as it still is, brought back the memories of two teenagers away from home for the first time that first year at college, and I’m reeling from grief.

We have different modes of grief for those who have passed on, depending on their closeness to us. We cry for days at the loss of family members and close friends, and share a moment of solitude for strangers who die worlds away in natural disasters. But how do you process the passing of a former friend, whom you had once shared so much with, but is now a stranger? Our understanding of each other’s lives halted at the summer of 2009, but how does that make her unexpected passing any less devastating? Her name has not crossed my mind in years, but now I berate myself for my eighteen year old immaturity and wonder if I could have saved our friendship had I made different choices all those years back.

I pray that she’s now in a better place. Rest in Peace.