My Best Friend Died at 29 and I Am Still Learning What That Means

James and I had been close since the first week of college in Austin and had sustained the friendship through the different cities and phases that life applied over the following decade - two people with entirely different temperaments and entirely compatible senses of humour who had decided, essentially at nineteen, that they would be in each other's lives indefinitely and had kept that decision current ever since.

He was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer at 28 and died at 29, which is a sentence that I have written several times in different contexts and that still looks wrong to me in the way of something that should not be able to be true but is.

I want to write about what losing a peer does to you specifically, because I think it is different from other grief in ways that are not often described and that I was not prepared for.

Losing a parent or a grandparent, however devastating, is a loss that exists in the understood order of things - the generation before yours, completing a lifespan. Losing a peer has no such frame. James was my age. He had the same amount of life behind him that I had.

His death arrived with the specific information that the future I was taking for granted was not guaranteed in the way I had been living as though it was, and that information was not abstract or statistical - it was embodied in a person I had known for ten years and whose absence I encountered daily in the forms that friendship takes when you have had it long enough.

The grief was complicated by something I had not expected: guilt, specifically survivor guilt, which is not rational and was real. I was alive and he was not and the fact that this was not anyone's choice made it no less present as an emotional experience.

I spent about a year in a version of my life that was functioning and hollowed, going through the motions of the things James had expected to be present for and finding them flavoured by his absence in a way that did not lift cleanly.

What has remained, now four years out from his death, is not primarily sadness - though that is still there in the specific texture that grief of this kind leaves. What has remained is a relationship with time that is fundamentally different from the one I had before.

I do not defer the things that matter. I do not manage the people I love at a safe distance. I do not treat the future as an account with unlimited funds that I can draw on whenever I am ready. James would have done all the things. He did not get to.

I try to do them on both our behalfs.