01810: On The Loss Of Friends

I don't know where to begin, really. I feel an urgent need to write my feelings, but of course it's during moments like this when your emotions get in the way of your ability to think and it all just seems to go to pot, or whatever. But I have to start somewhere, I suppose.

A really good friend of ours died this morning, and we were at the ER at the time it happened. I don't think I want to go into detail just now, but what I can share is that given his family is based in Davao, it fell to Tobie and myself to sort of act as proxies until they could get here. Unfortunately, the earliest flight to Manila was too late.

One naturally falls into the trap of trying to figure out if we could have done more to prevent things. Could we have reached out to him more? Could we have been with him sooner had we not gone out Sunday night? Too many questions and too many possibilities. But there's no point really in running through these endless scenarios in our heads - and yet it's part of how we grieve at times. We have an extreme desire to just understand what is going on - and sometimes we will never fully understand.

But what is more important is how we move on. What is more important is how we choose to live our lives moving forward given what we learn from experiences like this. What matters more are the choices that we make and not dwell on those that had been made before.