This wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m so young. I shouldn’t have a front row seat to suffering and death. It’s not fair. I shouldn’t be in this hospital room.
And it’s not even my room.
The steady beep of the heart monitor. The labored, medicated breathing of my friend. There I am sitting next to his hospital bed, and I can’t shake the feeling that this will be the last time I see him alive. The nurse comes in and tells me visiting hours are over. I say what I feel may be my last words to him and, with tears brimming, I walk out.
Why? That one question incessantly rang through my mind. It crept into every thought I had, starting 4 years prior when he was first diagnosed with cancer, and it was still just as strong in my mind on the drive back home from the hospital.
He’s spent his entire high school career in and out of hospitals, going from treatment to treatment hoping and praying that maybe this time, something will work. Maybe this time, he won’t have cancer anymore. Now it’s his senior year, and it seems as if he’s reached the end of the road. No person deserves this, let alone a kind-spirited and gifted high school man like him. So why in the world does he have to go through this?
The next day, I get the news. He’s gone, passed away in his sleep. He wasn’t even eighteen yet, just beginning his life, about to graduate high school. Just like that, the person I laughed with, cried with, talked with for hours on end, was gone. I would never again see those eyes that were full of life and ambition.
In times of loss, everyone turns to something different: family, other friends, activities to keep preoccupied, being alone. I turned to my Christian faith, the faith that I had heard so many others speak of as being their strength during hard times. It sounded simple enough: trust God, know that He has a plan and that He loves you, take comfort that your friend was a believer before he died. This was all suppose to be my easy support, bringing me peace and comfort, but it was anything but that.
I was a wreck. I started out completely numb, unable to feel anything. Then a week later, I was body slammed by waves of emotions. Overwhelmed with grief, I would just start crying wherever I was, be it in chapel for college, in the classroom, or at a meal. I was filled with immense guilt for not spending more time with him, for not saying more, for not doing more. I was consumed with complete rage at God for letting him suffer so much and then taking him away at so young an age. I had believed before without a doubt that I would be perfectly fine because of my faith. Now, my belief was nothing but doubt.
If God loves me, then why am I in so much pain? Or why did He treat my friend so cruelly? God has a plan, sure, but if this is what it looks like, I want no part of it, I can do a better job on my own. I should feel comforted because my friend was a believer; what does it matter what he believed if this all just turns out to be a lie? Why did this have to happen?
This is what I wrestled with for months after his death. I was restless, consumed with these questions that went against everything I had believed since I was a child. My world felt like it was falling apart. I was emotionally, mentally and physically spent.
And that’s exactly what it took.
Despite all the doubts, all the questions, when I had nothing else to lose, I fell back on what I had known my entire life: my faith. My religion says God loves me; He never intended for life to be the way it is – this is a world that is the result of our own sins. He took away my friend, yes, but He loved me enough to bless me with the time that I did get to spend with him. I was blessed by the short amount of time that we shared before he passed away.
My faith says that God has a plan; I still don't know if I see that plan yet, but that doesn’t mean that there isn't one there. My belief says that I should find comfort in the fact that he was a believer; indeed, if my faith isn't real, then it is unbelievably tragic when people die, because there is no after life. But, if what Christianity says is true, I have that shimmer of hope that I can see him again. All is not lost when someone dies here.
It was after coming to terms with these thoughts that I was finally able to start recovering. I had reached the point where the only cure for my despair was my faith. Just because I had doubts didn't mean that there were not answers, or at least the beginning of answers.
But, most importantly, beyond any reason or logic to any question or doubt, I experienced something real: an inexplicable comfort that I was unable to find anywhere else. My family couldn't comfort me, my friends couldn’t, my girlfriend couldn’t. No sport, no amount of aimless driving, no activity could bring me that comfort. When all I had left was to depend on my faith and my God, I finally found the comfort I had been searching for for months.
When I lost my friend, there was an element of innocence that was lost as well. The world was no longer a positive place of opportunity. It was now a world full of potential heartache and pain, a world teeming with endless, awful experiences. This was the world I felt I had now entered, and my faith needed to catch up. The faith of my childhood was not prepared for the reality of this world. It needed its trial by fire through the death of my friend.
Now, with my faith stronger than it has ever been before, I see that even the idea of the world being full of so much evil is also wrong. The world is filled with pain, yes, but there is still a sliver of light in the darkness. The loss of my friend was one of the darkest moments of my life, but the time and experiences spent with him were rays of light that I would never want to forget or dismiss.
The way he has impacted my life has made me a better person, and that can make me that source of light for others. This world is not black or white – there is good and evil, happiness and pain, joy and sorrow. Through it all, my faith will be the only dependable support that I will ever need.
I miss my friend every single day. It doesn't hurt less that he’s gone, but I understand now that there is more than just pain that comes from this. There is growth in who I am and my faith because of who he shaped me to be. There is hope in seeing him again and in me being able to make a difference now because of how he changed me. There is compassion and an ability to be a support to others who share a similar experience to myself.
To be able to say all this, to be at the point of my life that I am now at, I owe to my faith.
