It was so sudden… He wasn’t young. He wasn’t in great health. But still, seeing this man who I had so much fun with just a week prior lay motionless on the floor was not something I was prepared for, to say the least.
When I got the bad news a couple of days ago, I felt absolutely nothing. And I hated myself for it. When I got there, I had to fake every emotion. Put on a sad face, keep your head down, act like how a normal person would in this situation. Even seeing his dead body didn’t make me feel anything. It just felt like another normal day. I kept asking myself: How come the death of someone I love so much doesn’t affect me? What’s wrong with me? Am I a psychopath?
The next day, while I was going through files on his computer, it all hit me. He really was gone, and he’s not coming back. Never again would we laugh together about some dumb movie we watched. Never again would we talk about video games we’ve been playing. Or shoot random Gravity Falls references at each other. Or argue about Lord of the Rings lore. I lost such an amazing friend, a man who gave so much of his soul to me. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard in my entire life. It’s a relief to know I’m not insane. I could barely finish writing this paragraph because I begun crying again.
One thing I learned is that five stages of grief is not just some pop-psych nonsense, It is completely real. And let me tell you: Bargaining really fucks with you. It’s an endless cycle of questions that cannot be answered. What if we met just a bit more frequently? What if I gave him this gift just a couple of days earlier? What if I’d given him a phone call on the day it happened? Is there any set of circumstances that could have saved him? And for how long? And all that blame… How much of it was my fault? All of it? None of it? I have no idea. My brain has turned into a soup of contradicting emotions. All I can do right now is to distract myself so as to not think about it too much.
I guess now I have Depression to look forward to. Awesome. I must get through this.
Don’t know why I felt the need to write this on here, but here it is. Thank you for reading.
I blamed myself for my dad’s death for a really long time and hated myself for it. I held on to that hate for a long time and didn’t care about a lot of bad things that happened to me and felt I deserved all of it. Don’t do that. There’s no shortcuts through grief but I definitely got stuck in that phase way longer than I should have or was healthy for someone to experience. I struggled finding help and after a decade I just woke up and was like “wait, that wasn’t my fault” and sort of started moving on from there. Please take care of yourself