For all those who have lost someone they love, my heart goes out to you and the book itself is dedicated to you, but the honor goes to my two best friends who lost their lives at such an early age. As well as to the others I have lost along the way. The three men whose stories I tell here are not the only loved ones of mine who have passed on and out of my life, but their lives and even their deaths had the most impact on my life, my soul and my spirit.
Living with them, learning about them and loving them made me mostly what I am today. Living through the losses of these three guys that most of us loved but all of us admired has also had a great impact on the relationships our circle of friends’ shares. As we mill about in our daily lives even to this day perhaps some do not realize that we have attained a higher plateau in the friendships we have in common. We have seen how one another lives, how we love, how we play and how we survive but there were days when we had to witness in each other how we grieved. As close friends of course we have the tendency to shelter or protect the people around us from some of our hardships and pain but in those days around those incredible losses we suffered we witnessed in each other our own personal of lowest moments. Questioning your mortality is likely not a first time thing for most people, even some of the youngest ones, but doing so while seeing the same bleakness reflecting from the eyes of your strongest and closest companions is perhaps somewhat of a forced moment of reckoning. One of those timeless minutes where at once we realize that indeed, we are all in this together.
Nowhere in these pages will I pretend to understand exactly how you feel. No one knows that but you. I will however, take you on a journey through life and death, and with the deepest of wishes, hope that you will understand things that may have been out of your reach before this book found its way to you. Let these experiences help you grow, instead of hindering you.
Life is a fragile thing to all of us. Sometimes it takes a tragic loss to bring this point home to you. I will not preach my beliefs to you, or try to tell you that it will get better with time. Better? It’s not likely that the word better will ever come to describe this difficult phase of your life. But with patience and some good coping skills the pain will become more bearable as time carries you through new memories and comforts you with the old ones.
In this book I will tell you three stories of personal losses I have lived through, from age 17 to age 27. It will seem hard to believe but in each and every one of those stories is a smile, a warm feeling and an all encompassing feeling of peace. It may have taken me years to reach them in some cases, but each and every moment of pain that I suffered short of the losses themselves, was worth it. In the end of this book I will share those moments, the ones that brought me to my knees in happiness and peace that I searched so hard for from the day I lost my first friend. I am writing it in hopes that my hard earned lessons will ease your transition as well. Things it took me 10 years of struggle and pain to learn can be shared here with you. If I save one person one moment of unnecessary pain, then I am satisfied and the deaths of my friends and the lessons I learned from them were never in vain. I want to show you how to look for the things that may comfort you and give you the closure you may need now, and exactly where to find them. I will not pretend that it is easy. As a matter of fact I want to make it clear that this is likely the hardest journey that life has ever taken you on. I will however pledge one thing, that you will come to the end of this passage and be a different person then what you were before you faced this loss. Death does different things to different people. We are not all so lucky as to have a wonderful counselor by our sides. We are not all so lucky as to have a guidebook with which we can decipher our emotional tribulations in facing such tragedies. One thing we are all lucky to have though, is friendships and families that endure these heartbreaking trials. Even though these things should be enough to carry us through the heartbreak, occasionally we need the wisdom of an outside voice, one that isn’t so close to the heart. I only hope that no matter what you learn from the following pages, that you take from it a lesson that I have learned. In doing so, you will be saving yourself a lifetime of relative despair. You may be saving yourself worlds of pain by just reading these words and trying to feel yourself within them.
Although it might seem to be, the following pages are not about my individual pain in particular. They are about human pain, human suffering and the very human emotion of love. The most important thing to go into this book with is the awareness of one truth. Just because you have lost someone dear to you, it does not mean the love is gone. Indeed, the love has not even been altered, it lies within the very same place that it did before you suffered this loss. The only difference is that right now, it lies beneath a place that is aching with emptiness. That place is your heart, spirit and soul. That place deserves to be uncovered and cherished just as it was when this life that you valued so much was available to you as it sadly never will be again. It is of utmost importance to appreciate the entire journey, before you can learn to value the destination, the end of this journey you never wanted to embark on. Let my mistakes help you to understand why the pain seems to be intolerable, but that in the end, it is that very pain that will help you to gain the knowledge that will carry you through the rest of your life past these devastating days of loss to a place that is more comfortable and enduring. Under that hollow aching pain in your chest you still have a heart, soul and spirit that needs to be uncovered and sent back to work in the world that so desperately needs it.