stunned.

Way, way back when I first started this journal I was upset because someone with whom I had been good friends with in high school had cancer. So you don’t have to go all the way back to read it, here’s basically the whole entry:

It’s amazing how something can happen, how you can hear one piece of news, and the world stops spinning. I never really get affected by things that go wrong in my life… I’m eternally optimistic. And I think that, for the most part, things will turn out for the best.

But what happens when a situation seems so completely hopeless that you think nothing could ever make it right?

I just found out that a guy who was one of my best friends in high school has lung cancer. Lung cancer. He has never smoked, at least to my knowledge. And I just… don’t think I can grasp the fact that this is happening. I mean, I know it is. And it’s depressing the hell out of me.

I just… I can’t stop thinking about it. I have a huge test tomorrow, plus an engineering problem set, plus a bunch of other work that should be getting done. I just keep thinking about him. And I just feel terrible. For every time our freshman year when people made fun of him and I didn’t try to defend him. For all the times in 10th and 11th grade when he liked me and I thought that I was too good for him. For all the bad things I said about him in the past year, after he decided to stop talking to me. For not giving him a discount when he came to Subway.

I’m just thinking of all the things I could have done to make his life a little better, a little happier. And how I didn’t do any of them. His life is really no better for having known me.

And this is very sad, because instead of being worried about him, I’m thinking a lot about myself and how this is affecting me. It kind of makes me feel like a jerk, even though I know that I am worried about him. I just wonder what I could have done to improve the quality of his life, which may wind up being shorter than anyone can imagine. (Apparently, if the doctors can’t cure him, he has less than a year to live.)

It’s just… hard to imagine there being a world without him. I’ve never had to deal with the death of someone while I was still kind of friends with them. When I was in 10th grade, a girl who had grown up down the street from me died of cancer, but since I had barely seen her since we’d moved when I was in 7th grade, plus hadn’t been good friend with her since I was in fifth grade, it didn’t leave a real hole in my life. But this guy…. He’s friends with some of my friends. Not to mention he lives in my old hometown. Not to mention that he did go to the same college as me, and possibly still does. I can’t imagine the idea of his death… I can’t imagine my life without him in it– even if it’s just for him to be that guy I used to be friends with, but who decided to stop talking to me.

I’ve never had to cope with the imminent death of someone I knew personally. I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle it….

He died this weekend.

I’m wondering exactly how I feel about this. I want to cry, but I haven’t spoken to him in two years. I want to go to his memorial service, which I’m hearing will be sometime this weekend, but I don’t know if that will be interpreted as me being… I don’t know. Melodramatic? Selfish because people will think I only care about him because he’s dead?

I’d really like to be there, but is there a rule about that? He was one of my better friends in high school, but not so much in college.

Honestly, I’m not looking for advice or anything… just wanted to get it off my chest because I feel very numb and conflicted at the moment. I’m trying to accept it, and I can’t. I can’t wrap my brain around it. I don’t understand how I miss him more now that he’s dead than I did when he was alive.

I’m good at making things about me when they’re not. I’m really good at thinking of myself. Why the hell am I worrying about me? Who does that?

But he was fantastic. Really. I wish you could have known him. I wish I still did.