This story is also featured on Medium.com (6/2/2021).

One year ago, my best friend — a guy I knew for 25 years — died suddenly from cardiac arrest. He had an enlarged heart, something like 30% larger than the average human heart, and it simply gave out. Just like that, a married father of two young children, a veteran Air Force para-rescue lieutenant, a loving son and sibling, my guy, was gone. When his younger brother called me with the news, I was watching parts of nearby Los Angeles erupt in BLM protests. George Floyd had been murdered the week before. The COVID pandemic had killed over 100,000 people and became a political flashpoint. The country was a mess. The entire world seemed to be pulled into the Twilight Zone, and now my friend was dead. It was too much to take, and while I’ve recovered from the grief, I did not come out of it the same. No one does.

I’m rounding the corner into middle-age. Forty is waving at me from down the block. I’ve lost loved ones before, but I was lucky enough to have not experienced losing a such a close friend. In my arrogance, I assumed I was decades away from dealing with that, but life humbled me. He was the first friend I’ve lost, and his passing has been hard to accept, even over a year later. Something about your peer dying hits differently, and with my friend, it had a particular sting. We were the same age. We both have an older daughter and younger son. We had just talked to each other. He called to check in and see how we were holding up two months into quarantine. He survived hundreds of rescue missions in Afghanistan only to die young at home on a Sunday afternoon. It was quick. He was at peace. His family was there. It wasn’t the horror that so many service men and women have suffered on the battlefield. In some ways, it was the ideal way a person could transition from this world to whatever comes next, but it was unexpected, and it seemed so fucking unfair.

Because this is the one-year anniversary, I’m swimming in the memories of that day and of our two-decade friendship. I think of him everyday, and of his family, who are still heavily suffering from his absence. I process these thoughts and the feelings attached to them — sadness, anger, fear — and I let them flow through me. Then, I move on as best as I can. Everyday. The same thing, and each time I wonder if this is what it means to accept loss and to go on living with a void in your heart. I believe it is.

Our lives, if we are lucky, are filled with moments that touch various points on the spectrum of human emotions. Life is blissful and challenging. It’s heaven and hell on Earth. It’s 25-year long friendships and their sudden and tragic conclusions. The point is to experience every one of those moments because when it’s all over, those moments that made us are all we really have. I know this, but it still doesn’t make any sense to me. I am grateful that I knew him. I am grateful for everyone in my life that I love, and for those that I have loved and lost.

I am terrified of the inevitable and also at peace with it. We live to love, to be loved, and to eventually say goodbye and carry on in one form or another. Life is beautiful and so damn strange. Here we are lucky enough to be living it.

Hug your loved ones and be nice to your neighbors. Make that call to that friend you’ve been meaning to talk to. Do that thing you’ve been dreaming of doing. There’s no time to waste when we could be gone in a moment.