To a friend I may not have met yet,

When you’re a little kid you kind of feel like you’re invincible and that your parents can protect you from anything and everything. Even as much as everyone wants this to be true, this idea just isn’t realistic. Life happens, the good and the bad whether we like it or not.

Nobody will really understand what you were feeling or what was going through your mind when you found out. One second you were doing everything right, leading an ordinary life with your ordinary friends and ordinary family. Then, at the blink of an eye everything changed. Life as you knew it was broken and just didn’t make sense anymore. Anger, confusion, and sadness envelop and suffocate you until you can’t really feel anymore. “Why? Why did this have to happen to me?” is a question that flows through your mind on a daily basis and never seems to get answered.

When you lose a sibling it’s like a piece of you has gone away. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that you will never get to see this person again, hear their voice that one last time, see them smile or even fight with them over who’s turn it is to watch TV. It really sucks when you have a dream where they’re still alive; everything is perfect, and then you wake up and realize it wasn’t real and they are still not apart of the physical world.

The worst is when you’re walking down the street and you see someone that looks like or reminds you of your brother or sister and for a split second there’s a sense of hope that this entire mess was just a bad dream. But, then you snap out of it and feel completely immobilized and as if the wind has been completely knocked out of you. Sometimes you can even see them in your actions and through your words and that’s kind of scary because you can almost feel them in the room, nodding their head in approval or smirking at you for making the same dumb mistakes that they did in the past.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have never lost my brother. To have never experienced such an immense loss that seriously tipped my world on its axis, causing me to question what’s really good within it. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him, but there is so much more to him than just his death and what has occurred as a result of it and I’m sure that all holds true for you.

If my brother never passed away, I’d probably still just be an ordinary girl enjoying life, going to school and playing basketball. Don’t get me wrong, I still do those things, and you still probably do things that you are passionate about, but our lens on the world has definitely changed. The whole situation as a whole sucks, there’s really no other way to put it, but it just forces you to become a stronger person. You become a different person after the death of your sibling and a decent amount of that has to do with just growing up in addition to how you develop as a person because of this hardship. Now, you live every single day to the fullest since you really don’t know when your last could be (even though that sounds so extremely cliché, it’s true). I find that now, it’s easier to take the time to really get to know a person. I mean it’s so easy to just write somebody off, but really taking the time to connect and know a person and seriously valuing those relationships take a lot more effort, which most people aren’t willing to do. You really find the simple things in life that are often overlooked and appreciate its beauty and presence in the world.

Unfortunately, you have unwillingly become a member of a club that nobody really wants to be apart of. You have to know that even though you may feel so alone and trapped, that there are people out there that understand what you’re going through. They get that the pain never goes away and how important it is to honor and respect the memory of your brother or sister. Taking this all in you have to trust and believe that wherever you go, your angel is right by your side.

Love,

Your friend who understands xo