Losing someone close to you can be one of the hardest things to go through. Whether it be from death, a betrayal, an argument, or following different paths, it can take a toll on life in many different aspects. These people reveal the heartbreaking way they lost the person closest to them.
He Was Such A Big Part Of His Life
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“We grew up together. We went to the same school, lived in the same neighborhood, had the same interests, the same everything. About four years ago, I found him hanging from his bedroom door at the age of 31.
I don’t know how to sum up how it’s impacted me. It’s impacted so many people. Hundreds showed up to his funeral. I’m writing a book about the year after, that’s how hard it hurt. It still hurts. His parents are just starting to get out of the daze and confusion that suicide leaves behind. He left a note explaining why he did it, but it doesn’t really explain it. Not enough. Not for us. Not for this brain that goes around and around and around with questions that no one can answer anymore. I’ve never sobbed so uncontrollably, so painfully, for so long.
He battled depression in grad school. He never mentioned his battle directly, but he’d hint at it. He’d say things like ‘depression is really common in my field.’ ‘It’s really easy to get depressed working in a lab.’ I had no idea he meant himself. And then he finished school and got a great job in our hometown with a laid-back boss that he loved. Everything got better. Until it wasn’t and he couldn’t handle the burden of depression any longer.
I spent the first week after he died trying to convince all our living friends that it wasn’t their fault. Everyone blamed themselves, myself included. I still do. Then I ran away. I couldn’t cope. We had such a steady routine together: dinner every Friday, video games every Wednesday, sports every Saturday. I couldn’t live the same life. I quit, I sold my things, and I ditched.
I’m back in our hometown, starting to get my life up and running again. It’s hard. Every day is a struggle, but I’m alive, and I keep reminding myself that being alive is good enough. My friend didn’t know that, but I’m trying to know it now.”
She Completely Betrayed Her
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“My best friend of almost a decade and I went through a lot together. When her original friend group abandoned her, I bused for hours every weekend to comfort her even though I didn’t even have money for food. When I was homeless, I crashed at her house and cooked her dinner every night and cleaned her house and bought her groceries. Whenever anyone said anything negative about her, I fought them with everything I had.
A few months ago, I got wasted at a party I threw and made out with her other best friend. I was pretty embarrassed about the whole thing and didn’t plan on pursuing it, but she assured me that they had never had feelings for each other. After a lot of coaxing on her part, I went out with him, and we dated exclusively for a few months. Her boyfriend and the guy are all old college friends, so we even took a mini weekend trip together.
Fast forward to two weeks ago, she had just gotten back from a trip where she confessed to me that she hooked up with another guy, and was dating him as well as her current boyfriend. I told her she needs to tell both of them. A couple of days later, my boyfriend comes over and tells me that I try too hard and that he’s never excited about seeing me. So we break up.
The next week consisted of my phone freezing and dying several times from all the phone calls and texts from our mutual friends detailing how my ex and bestie had hooked up for at least a year, and how they were seen hooking up when I was around. My ex and bestie always made it seem like I was the crazy one for even asking if they were into each other.
I blocked them all on every social media, so she showed up at my apartment when I wasn’t home and left a very long note detailing how horrible I was for not talking to her.
I have been drinking a lot. I have panic attacks every time I see a car that looks like theirs or a sound in my building, thinking they’re going to show up. I haven’t slept longer than two hours at a time because I keep reliving the details of what he said he lacked in feelings for me and comparing his words to the insecurities a situation like this naturally arise. I had to cut ties with almost everyone from my entire social group, mainly because I’m an idiot and don’t want to tell them the truth of what happened and, I lost eight pounds in the first three days because I couldn’t eat anything without getting sick and, of course, I seriously still think I somehow made this happen by being too much.”
“I Let His Call Go To Voicemail”
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“I lost my best friend at age 20. His name was Jamie. This kid was my life. We spent every day together; experienced a lot of the first things in my life with him. He was probably the first person I truly loved in this world. Fast forward, I went to college and he was left behind. I didn’t see him much anymore but I went down at least one day on the weekend or had him come up.
The night of Halloween, I was supposed to pick him up to take him to the party I was throwing. I ended up getting too wasted and let his call go to voicemail. He committed suicide that night by laying on the train tracks. I remember vividly playing Skyrim the next morning. I received a text from his mom and immediately had this gut-wrenching feeling. All it said was Jamie is dead.
I spiraled much deeper into substances. How could he just give up so easily? I was in deep for about two years before I moved onto harder stuff. Ruined my life. Two traumatic brain injuries, three overdoses, burnt all my bridges, lost all my friends, and became homeless for a solid year.
I decided to go to rehab after the last overdose and waking up in the hospital with my entire family crying over me. It finally hit me all the damage I was doing. I was selfish. I got sober and it’s been about three years.
I still go and see my buddy’s suicide site a few times a month and just sit there, drink and smoke while telling him about my life.
I miss you so much, man.”
Now He’s In Jail
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“He was my best friend throughout the entirety of high school, and even a portion of college. We did everything together. I checked off the stereotypical high school bucket list of hijinks thanks to him. Plot twist – at one point, he slept with my then girlfriend, but man, I truly loved this kid with everything in me, so I forgave him. Crazy, I know.
Shortly after college started, I joined a band, which consumed a large portion of my life, and we fell off. He got into the hard stuff, stole from his mom, and eventually she got a restraining order against him. In December 2014, I got a text saying that he was arrested for the murder of his mother. He must’ve gone there for money and an altercation erupted.
As of today, he’s been sentenced to 25 years in prison. The sentencing is pretty light in my opinion, but the court took into account his deteriorated mental state.
At first, I was obviously shocked, hurt, angry, scared, you name it. But as of late, I’ve grown to feel pity for him and truly miss him. Sometimes I even have the urge to write him. I tend to shake these urges and feelings off though, and remind myself that the person I miss is the person he was 8+ year ago, not the shell of whatever is left of him these days.”
He Knows It Will Never Be The Same Again
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“We met in school when we were 11 years old. Both of us were supposed to be the smartest kid in class, and that did not go well with our egos. We fought a lot and got into trouble. After a year, we started to team up, got into trouble more, but no longer fought.
The third year, I became more and more unhappy in school. When I came home, I was angry and I had pretty intense bouts of truancy. He was more flexible, able to put on a face and charm people when they were angry with him. This is the year he first taught me to smoke, and I had my first drink with him.
I left school in the fourth year, taking a sort of gap year and hanging out with other truants. When I told him I was leaving school, he said that made him sad. Dumbfounded, I asked him why? He told me I was his friend. I will never forget that moment.
The gap-year changed me, and I came back to school feeling ready to show off my newfound confidence. We bonded again, although the school had decided that we would never share a classroom again. A pyrrhic victory for our partnership, we felt. I still got into trouble, and we played hooky together. We started going to a bar to drink. We would walk home in the early morning singing. At that point, we were 15 years old.
He graduated first, at 18. I was behind him a year because of my gap year. He moved to another city, and I visited him once or twice. He showed me his favorite bottle. We both loved drinking, talking, and women.
I followed him a year later. We became this buzzing hub of partying, listening to music, drinking and chatting up girls all around town. For at least three years, we were high on the feeling of being intellectually superior to almost everyone else, keeping up our drinking habit to avoid being able to do any kind of serious academic work. We were the smartest boys in the classroom, but also the ones with the most severe hangovers. We still played hooky, and we failed a lot of classes. His major was philosophy and mine was literature. The same, but different.
After five years in university and around seven years of intense partying, I was 22 years old and I had nothing to show for it. I dropped out, and it was perfect. As soon as I started working full-time, I found my self-respect, much like when I took the gap year. I knew that my life of partying, cheating on girlfriends, and hanging out with a variety of low-lives and floozies could not go on. And so I started working my butt off.
He did not like it. We worked at the same office, of course, him having finished his Bachelors and not wanting to do more than was absolutely necessary at work. We still drank and showed up for work with a hangover. But I started to slow down my drinking and settled down with my girlfriend.
He did not like it. I had saved enough money to go back to university. By then, I had developed a work ethic that allowed me to blaze through my courses, finish in half the time I had planned and even get a Masters at a more prestigious institute for public management and governance. Things were starting to look up. We still met on Fridays for drinks at ‘our’ bar, of course.
A couple of weeks ago we were there again. We talked about our jobs. I’m happy in mine, because I’m responsible for an interesting project, am trusted and respected and can make a decent living. He’s miserable because he hates the office that we both worked at. He’s still with that company, on paid leave because he feels depressed.
The next morning he called me. This almost never happens anymore. He asked me if I wanted to have a party with him over the weekend? Now I’m 21 again and feeling ready to party. This is how it always started. A night of ‘warming up’ and then a weekend of full-on binging and throwing cash around town. But I’m 29 years old now. He turned 30 this year. More than a little worried, I take him up on his offer to come over. I’m beginning to suspect he has already been drinking.
That night I finally saw that I had lost my best friend to drinking. When I came over around noon, he was barely able to climb the stairs. That night, he was only able to slur adolescent nonsense. I politely sipped from a glass of white, while he downed many different drinks in quick succession. Around midnight, he threw up, not bothering to go to the bathroom. That was part and parcel of ‘it’ he said. The occasional throwing up. He then left to visit a female ‘friend’ while his girlfriend of seven years was with her parents for the weekend. I was showed the door. I cried on the way home.
I can no longer talk to him. The friend I had is gone. When he does call me, he’s wasted and talks nonsense. When I confront him about his drinking habit, he hangs up the phone. He has professionals convinced he doesn’t need detoxing, just counseling. A laughable notion to anyone close to him.
Gradually, I’m coming to terms with the idea that we will never go back to the way we were. Somehow, despite all our long talks and my fervent insistence that life really can change for the better, he slowly, slowly disappeared. I will continue to support whoever he has turned into. But the friend I love is gone.”
He Blamed Himself For What Happened To His Friend
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“I lost my best friend when I was 14 years old. We met in second grade and he died in ninth grade. He had a heart problem from birth and had surgery for it more than once. We were supposed to hang out, and he called me to ask if he could go to this girls house instead. He was obsessed with this girl, so I gave him the go ahead. While at her house, he excused himself to the bathroom and collapsed and died in the hospital.
It was very rough. I became isolated and abandoned many friendships at the time. I was really depressed. I was already an introvert, so losing my best friend, who happened to be a big extrovert, on top of being depressed, really made me withdraw. I struggled a lot in school and started acting out a lot. Luckily, I didn’t do anything too bad. This happened in April, and the following summer I remember sleeping until 4 p.m. every day.
When it was fresh, I really blamed myself for it. I, irrationally, thought that if I had insisted on hanging out as we planned, he would have been fine. I dwelled on not being good enough of a friend, that kind of thing. It sounds ridiculous but this kind of thing can really take root in your mind when you’re young.
I just turned 30. I still go to his grave every now and then to give him updates on my life. I think about him when I have major life events. Like after I proposed to my wife on a trip to our hometown, I went out to visit him to tell him about her. It is insane knowing he has been dead for as long as he was alive at this point.
I am really introverted. That’s not a bad thing, but it means the people I am close to are few and far between. I never replaced him in my life. The fact that this happened at the start of high school probably affected me by hurting my grades and whatnot.”
“He Was More Like A Sibling Than A Friend”
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“Back in January, he was murdered by one of our other close friends. He was my best friend for about seven years, but we had kind of drifted apart the last year due to the fact we went to different colleges. He practically lived with me for about four of those years, so he was more like a sibling than a friend. Losing him has been, without a doubt, the hardest thing I have ever gone through. Having to see his parents right after they found out was heart-wrenching. It’s almost been seven months, and there still is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it. He was a great person, fun to be around, and I had never met anyone that did not like him.
Not sure why the other friend killed him; speculating it was over illegal substances. They lived together, the guy who did it claimed it was an accident, but the evidence and the fact that he discarded the weapon and hid the body for several days suggests it wasn’t.”
“He Suffered From Severe Depression And It Just Got Worse”
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“I had a good friend when I was 16 years old. He was in his early 20s and bought me smokes and drinks. Mainly though, all my friends and I would play DnD with him all the time. for days straight sometimes. Might be strange that a 21-year-old would hang out with kids that age, but it was all about DnD, not many people played it at that time, and I think he just felt better around my age group because we didn’t have all the adult judgments that are put on you when you become 21.
He ended up accidentally hitting a little girl with his car. She didn’t die, but he never got over it. The guy already suffered from severe depression, and it just got worse. We lost track after that for a little bit. He hung himself not long after hitting the girl. I often wonder if I would have been less immature if I could have helped him, but truth is, I doubt it. I was not old enough to handle severe depression in an adult. It hit me pretty hard, but life goes on and it did.
After 20 years of thinking about it, I realized that it was what he wanted, he couldn’t live. He was in a lot of pain and nothing helped. I can’t blame him for it; I don’t know if I could live with myself if I ran over a little girl either, and depression is such a hard thing to live with. I understand why he did it.”
He’s Gaslighting Him
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“It hurts. I thought we knew each other well, and had a certain understanding of each other that was fairly exclusive.
I found out he’d been gaslighting me for reasons I’m not getting into. It sucks. This is a dude I could talk to about literally anything that came to mind, and the worst I would expect from it would be something along the lines of ‘You’re an idiot!’ with a decent counter-argument. A sounding board of sorts. And I thought I was his, also.
I’m sure I’m right about the nature of the friendship, at least at one point, but it changed. I’ve had no-contact, and honestly, when I talk to people that are mutual friends, I feel as though they are probing me to dish some information or start talking crap, which I feel pretty entitled to, but have refrained because I don’t want to escalate anything.
It has changed how I view trust and friendship and not in a good way. Perhaps more realistic now, but I miss being in the ‘bubble’ of naivety that was afforded by having a ‘best friend.’
It’s like Silent Bob finally told Jay to leave him alone.
I’m not sure I’ll ever have another friend like that. It makes me sad, but the older I get, the less I like people in person. I have friends and good ones, but there are those rare relationships you have with people that leave a lasting impact. It became one of those events in life, which are unique, that split time into two categories – before and after.”
Cancer Took Him
“I lost my best friend of 20 years to cancer in April. He battled cancer for five years, almost exactly one year after he got married. He went through three rounds of chemo. He was my closest friend and the one who cared about me the most. I can’t even count the number of times he helped me get through hard times, the number of times he would call me to just let me know he was behind me no matter what I did and the number of times he has called me on my BS. He was the kindest and most caring person I have ever known. He would remember everyone’s birthdays and anniversaries and would tell me whom to wish and when. He would remind me of everything I had to do because he knew I was absent-minded.
There is nothing in my life that he did not know about. He knew my entire family and would remember the smallest details about them. He always pushed me to break out of my shell and mingle with people. He always forced me to go to parties with him and tried to hook me up all the time. But he never pushed me beyond what he knew I could handle. His wife always felt I was her rival because he would always talk about me or he would always call me to tell me about anything he was going to do or had done. I was the first person he called when he was diagnosed. I was not the last person he saw before he died. He was in a lot of pain for the last few months before he died. The cancer had reduced him to a skeleton. And yet he kept assuring me he would be okay. He knew I couldn’t handle it and would break down. He even added me to his will.
I still cry sometimes because I miss him, and I’m a grown man. I feel lost without him like I’ve lost my anchor. I am not comfortable speaking with any of my other friends as I was with him. He never judged, always understood and was always patient with me. It is never easy to lose the person closest to you. It does get better, but no one can take that place, no one can replace that person. He was and will remain a huge part of my life and what defines me as a person.”
She Takes Responsibility For Them Losing Touch
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“She moved away to pursue her career. I got bitter and stopped reciprocating effort to still be friends and stay in touch. I’m not particularly charismatic and don’t make or keep friends easily. I’ve struggled for years with believing I was a forgettable and inconsequential person in all my friends’ lives and like a self-fulfilling prophecy that’s what I became. I don’t know the person she is anymore, but at least she is happy.
I have regrets, but I don’t feel remorse about it. Some people change; others stay the same. It was natural for us to drift apart given the circumstance but I would be lying to myself if I didn’t take personal responsibility for it. I know I could have saved the friendship if I had tried harder, but I didn’t. I was hurt, I felt abandoned and lied to. We were like family, but my relationship wasn’t enough for her to stop the move, and I never forgave her for leaving me.
I could throw down a whole list of reasons about why the breakdown of our friendship isn’t my fault, and produce evidence that supports my claim, but that won’t change the past, and still doesn’t absolve me of my part in things. I miss her sometimes, but I miss who she was when we were friends, not who she’s become. Truth be told, she is a completely different person now and I’m not. I don’t like the person she’s become, and our personalities no longer synch up comfortably.”
He Lost A Brother
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“Grew up in a really crappy home with a screwed up family, dead father, mentally unstable abusive mother. My high school teacher came to be like a really close brother to me. We hung out every single day. Stayed friends for years after graduation. He was literally the only positive influence in my life.
One day someone overheard me say to him ‘I’ll call you later.’ I still looked young I suppose, they mistook me for a high schooler, and they thought he was having an inappropriate relationship with one of his students. They reported him. He told me we couldn’t speak anymore – was really kind of cold about it.
Honestly? Now I go through my life without anyone that I identify with. It’s been ten years and it hurts me every single freaking day. I go into a depression for 2-4 days every month going over everything in my head again and feeling absolutely peeved/betrayed/confused. I lost a brother. But I also lost the freedom of being able to live my life without being weighed down by pain and resentment.”
Her Drinking Separated Them
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“We met online back in the AOL days when we were teenagers. We shared a favorite singer, so we talked for months about them. By Christmas, we were out of ideas, so I think it may have been me who asked where she was. She was in cold, snowy Minnesota, and I was in warm, sunny Florida, so talk turned to weather, our hometowns, and just life.
After three years of talking, her family came to Florida. Got an awkward talking to about her and my intentions from dad. My answer was literally something along the lines of ‘No idea dad, she may hate my guts by the end of the weekend.’
At that point, she was 16 I was 18. I had a buddy who worked at Disney and gave me a pair of his employee passes so we got to go to Disney for free. I hate Disney – it’s just not something I enjoy. Expensive, long lines, and just everything. But seeing the parks through someone who has dreamed of going was amazing.
We went to the beach and swam near Main Street Pier despite it being October. The waves were like nine-foot monsters at the end of the pier and the water was in the mid-60s, way too cold for this Florida boy but I swam till my fingers turned slightly blue and took that as a cue to leave. I sat on the beach next to the lifeguard stand and was worried sick about her being in the ocean alone despite the fact that she was the only one in the water (so the lifeguard was definitely watching) and she was a varsity athlete on the swim team. Three months later, I went to visit her family just after Christmas.
In 2010, I started playing adaptive ice hockey. I think it was 2011 when we played a tournament in her hometown. The day the NHL schedule came out, we figured out that the Lightning would be playing her beloved Wild while I was in town for the tournament. She bought us tickets.
I purchased my plane ticket 10 months later and stayed with her. She’d become a drinker and I had no indications from 1,300 miles away. Sober, she was the same friend I’d always had. Wasted, she was a terrible person. My teammates hated her and told me so. I attempted a defense and even tried to talk to her about it. She misunderstood and thought that I had been saying all the terrible things and stopped talking to me.
Within months of that, my parents bought a condo on the beach close enough that I could see the Main Street Pier where we had gone swimming 12 years ago.
Two and a half years after the fight Christmas Eve night I had one of those serendipitous moments and randomly checked my email on my phone. She emailed me an apology out of the blue not 10 minutes before.
She had broken off the engagement since I’d seen her, met someone else, gotten engaged, and left Minnesota (the engagement was broken off by her fiance). She’d basically lost everything and wanted to apologize.
We sent a few emails back and forth over the next 36 hours. I told her teenage me loved her and would absolutely love to have his friend back. Adult me was terrified she’d rip his heart out like she had done three years ago, but was willing to attempt to repair our friendship if she was willing to try.
She never responded. It took me a few years to recover. I have no idea where she is or if she’s even alive.”