This article has been a long time coming for me. About a year ago an old friend of mine passed away just a few days after he turned 22. It had been a long time since we had last seen each other. He'd been a huge part of my life through junior high and high school, coming to my house nearly on a daily basis, but after around eleventh grade our friendship pittered off and never picked back up again.
When I heard he'd passed away, so unexpectedly, I was completely shattered. However, I was pretty uneasy about my level of despair for a long time. When a friend called me that night to give her condolences, I remember saying to her, "I haven't talked to him or been friends with him in so long. I feel like I don't have a right to be overly upset." I felt that way for quite a while. Maybe I didn't have a dog in the fight when it came to feeling entitled to sorrow when he wasn't even someone I knew anymore. But after a while, after I was making visits to the cemetery to leave flowers for him once a month, I realized something.
You have just as much a right to mourn the loss of someone as anyone else does. It doesn't matter how long you've known them, or how long it's been since you've seen them, or even if you only met them a few times. There is absolutely nothing wrong with feeling the absence of someone in the world. After all, if it were you who passed away, wouldn't you be flattered that someone who didn't know you very well was still upset at your loss? It's almost like someone telling you that you can't love someone because you didn't know them years and years ago. It doesn't matter. You love someone for who they are in that time and place, and as for me, I mourn the person I knew so many years ago because I loved who he was in that time and place.
There is no one in the world not worth missing. And there is no one in the world that you're not allowed to miss. Your heart is your own and though the more you love the more it breaks, you are one hundred percent in charge of what you feel and don't feel. Never let anyone tell you who to love, hate, or mourn. You are entitled to your own nostalgia.
