Life Is Different After The Death Of A Friend

Life is no longer the same after the death of a friend. The grief we must face requires a painstaking, overwhelming and painful rebuilding process. This is due to the fact that many times, that friend of the soul is the only being to whom we opened ourselves emotionally and with whom the reality was much more intense, enriching and complete.

Every loss that we are forced to face throughout our life cycle is unique and exceptional. We know, for example , that our parents will leave us one day and that this emptiness will be devastating, but almost no one is prepared for it and even less to assume that fatality, the dark side of destiny, can take a friend or a friend. with which we can put words to the craziest ideas in our mind.

Harold Ivan Smith is an author specialized in grief and in that emotional and cognitive reconstruction that any loss can suppose. However, one of his best-known books is “Grieving the Death of a Friend”. As the specialist himself explains to us, losing a friendship in a traumatic way means for many people, having to say goodbye to the only authentic, sincere and rewarding thing in their lives. 

Goodbye to a friend

We know that each of us are only brief passengers in this capricious, marvelous and, instantly, terribly cruel world. Everything that we took for granted can collapse like a house of cards overnight. No more. Sometimes it is an accident, and sometimes, a terminal illness that forces us to see how our loved one fades from day to day in a hard battle.

Having to say goodbye to a friend is something that no one prepares us for. It’s like losing half of yourself and being orphaned, at which point we grope knowing that there will be no more calls, more dinners, more getaways, more after-work coffees, books to share, movies to discuss, and problems to discuss. vent between laughter and tears.

A fact that we must also take into account is that a part of the population that is usually most affected by the death of a friendship are adolescents. According to an article published in the magazine “All Psychology Careers”, almost 40% of our young people have lost a friend.

The most complex thing about this reality is that, in general, they are very traumatic losses. We only have to take into account the high suicide rate that is occurring among younger people, devastating events that have a strong impact on our boys and girls. Given these realities, it is necessary that we be very intuitive, receptive and skillful when offering support to manage these situations.

Keys to the grief of a friendship

Some keys to face the duel of a friendship are:

• : it is important to be fully aware of what this loss entails, to recognize that we will need a time of recollection to integrate what happened, to accept the emptiness, the absence … Allow your family to support you in that grief and speak in turn with your friend’s family to remind them of what he or she was to you. In this way, relief is facilitated.

• . Let that friendship and its memory be a gift to keep, to honor each day by returning to those moments of complicity and letting that person be part of you, while you come back to life again.

• . Whether we like it or not, we are going to start a different stage. We will return to our usual occupations there is no doubt, but something that can be positive is to start other habits  with which, to allow us to meet more people, to get excited again while we let that friendship that is already part of our heart sleep forever. to be, part of our personal essence forever.

That friend of the soul is now our breath, our memory and that other half that smiles at us from a more serene place, wishing us the best.