Josh Sherman
Found out I had lost another friend from the wayback machine not too long ago. We were great friends back in school and kept up online fairly regularly ever since then. I knew he was damaged goods, but I had no idea that he was considering checking out.
I’m very open about my own thoughts on life and death. Full disclosure, I’ve considered being “done” on numerous occasions. Fortunately, the concept of finality scares me more than anything else. I’m on the fence that there’s more to existence that this one life we are given so I have to make the most of this go around.
Factoring in that I have brought this amazing little human into the world with an amazing person that I’m pretty sure gets me more than I get myself has totally negated those thoughts. Not to sound indentured, but at this point I live to serve my wife and our progeny.
The sad side of things is that I’ve become very desensitized to it all over the last few years. I take a night to grieve but the feels dissipate shortly thereafter.
Even Mopesvember has been downgraded over the last few years.
What’s Mopesvember you ask? That’s what I call November, when a bunch of my personal loss had culminated for me. Some years have been really rough but this past year I realized that maybe I’ve just been learning to cope better.
Honestly though, I’m unsure if that’s a direct reflection of my own character or if it’s because the frequency of these events have been so crowded as of late that I’ve yet to process everything fully yet. The queue is backlogged, perhaps.
So to go a bit deeper, I’ve lost both of my parents (one to suicide) and quite a few friends over the last few years to both suicide and accidental overdose. Not only has each one gotten easier to deal with, but they’ve all made it easier for me to cope with my own life and everything it throws at me.
The flip side, is that I don’t feel like I am any closer to noticing the red flags. The take away for me is that this is probably a direct reflection how involved I am in people’s lives. I’d like to think that if my best friend that I talk to every single day were going through some shit, I’d be full aware of it.
Fortunately, there is a silver lining (or some sort of dismissive positive). These situations tend to bring me closer to other people in my network. Just the other day I reconnected with a friend that was in my little network with my friend that had passed.
I’m fully intent on keeping that reconnection going. Every year that the network grows smaller is all the more reason to rekindle lost friendships and embrace the friendships that you currently have.
