My friend died last week, and I can’t stop thinking about how fragile life actually is
Last week, a friend of mine died in a tragic car accident. I’m 20 years old and he was 21.
I had known him for about four years when we were younger. We played football together, lived fairly close to each other, and during those years we saw each other constantly. Eventually, we stopped playing football together and, as happens sometimes, we slowly stopped seeing each other too. I think it had been around six years since I had last actually seen him. He was still someone I remembered and thought about from time to time, but he wasn’t really a part of my everyday life anymore.
Then last week I heard about a terrible car accident. At first I didn’t even think much of it, until I eventually found out that he was the person who had died. I remember thinking that it simply couldn’t be true. He was 21. I’m 20. You hear about people dying in accidents, but somehow you still have this feeling that it happens to other people, to people who are older, to people far away from your own life. Not someone you used to spend almost every day playing football with.
The strange thing is that I haven’t really been able to feel as sad as I thought I should. And I feel almost guilty about that. I went to his funeral and there were so many people there, and seeing all those people who came to say goodbye made it feel much more real. But even then, I wasn’t crying or completely breaking down. Maybe it’s because we hadn’t seen each other for so many years. Maybe my mind just hasn’t fully processed it yet. I don’t know. It feels strange to say that someone I knew is dead and then realize that I’m still just going about my normal day.
But what has affected me much more than I expected is what his death made me think about my own life.
Since then, I keep getting this thought that at literally any moment, I could just be gone. I’ll be sitting somewhere, playing a game, scrolling on my phone, eating, going to university, talking to someone, doing something completely ordinary, and suddenly I’ll remember that none of this is actually guaranteed. I probably catch myself thinking about it several times a day now.
I always assumed I would live to an old age. That I would finish university, get a job, have a family, have children, travel, experience things, grow old and eventually die when I was already satisfied with my life. But now I realize that I have absolutely no guarantee that any of those things will happen. I’m only 20, but so was he almost. One completely random moment can separate someone from everything they thought they still had decades to experience.
And I think the part that scares me the most is realizing that the world would just continue.
I have always experienced life from my own perspective, obviously. Everything I do, everything I worry about, everything I’m excited about happens within my own little world, so naturally it feels enormous. But then I think about how huge the actual world is. Billions of people are living their own lives, completely unaware of me. If I disappeared tomorrow, my family and friends would be devastated, but the world itself would keep moving. People would wake up, go to work, go to school, complain about traffic, laugh with their friends, post on the internet. The sun would come up the next morning like nothing happened.
There’s something deeply unsettling about that realization, but at the same time, I think it might be one of the most important things I’ve ever realized.
Because if my time really is limited and I have no idea how limited it is, then I don’t want to waste so much of it. I don’t want to keep postponing things because I assume I’ll have time later. I don’t want to spend years worrying about things that ultimately don’t matter. I want to actually live while I’m here. Spend time with people I care about. Experience things. Take chances. Appreciate ordinary days instead of assuming I’m entitled to thousands more of them.
I wish it didn’t take someone my age dying for me to understand that.
I still don’t know exactly how I’m supposed to process it. Maybe these thoughts will eventually become quieter. Maybe this is just what happens when someone close enough to your life dies unexpectedly and you’re suddenly forced to confront something you usually push into the back of your mind.
But I think something in the way I see life has genuinely changed.
There’s a line in the Bible: “You do not know the day or the hour.” I’ve heard it before and never really thought much about it. Now it hits completely differently.
Because none of us actually knows.
And maybe that’s not only something to be afraid of. Maybe it’s also a reason to make sure that whatever amount of time we do have, we actually make something out of it.