So I post on here pretty openly with my experience with sexual assault.
I don’t really talk about losing my best friend about two and a half years ago. We’d been friends for eleven years. He had Duchenne muscular dystrophy which is a progressive muscle disorder. I kinda knew when he went into the hospital that he probably wasn’t going to come out. I went to see him as much as I could before my graduate year took off and it was about another five months before he passed.
I don’t think I’ve really accepted his death. And I carry a lot of guilt with me. The last three years of our friendship I was distant. I shut him out of everything. I never told him about the self harming it the assault. I think part of it was to protect him but I think the rest of it was me expecting him to look and feel differently about me.
So there’s a lot of regret and guilt there. I regret shutting him out and not seeing him more and I feel guilty because he didn’t deserve that. He was honestly one of the brightest people in the planet,I swear this kid could light up a room by himself.
I just wish I could say sorry. I wish I had spent more time with him.
I understand where you are coming from. I lost a friend who was closer to being a big sister. We were raised together for about 10 years. I had known her since I was 3 but had not seen her in years. She drank herself to death at 35 about 18 months ago.
I had spoken to her just a few weeks before and we were making plans to get our daughters together to meet for the first time. The heavy guilt on my soul from not seeing her crushes me under its weight some days. All of the “what ifs” that my mind is constantly running through. If I could have helped her. If I would have insisted. If I had paid more attention. I would have shared the burden that she carried if I could have.
I don’t have any advice but I do understand what it feels like to wish for time.
this is going to sound like some really cruddy advice but there’s nothing you can do about the past. there is a lot of things i regret doing/not doing but it’s too late now. it can be hard to live with some things but that doesn’t change that you have to. things happen. i know it’s hard for you to forgive your self because yeah, it sucks that you didn’t spend more time with them, people take other people for granted. it’s just what we do. people die, an everybody ends up feeling this way at some point. there’s nothing you can do to change that. i’m sorry for what you’ve gone through and what they had to go through. you can’t change the past but you can change what you do with it.
You need closure. You should know that all life is energy and energy may seem to dissipate. Yet the truth is it transfer elsewhere from one place to another. I wouldn’t be surprised that in one form or another that your friend may still be around.
(Let it be known that I am a pagan and an agnostic.) The theists in my chosen path believe many things. The common thing is Summerland. It is a reality where it is a place similar to earth where after one dies goes to hash out all the issues of their lives and prepare for the next. It is called Summerland because only the best of all good things exist in this place. Think of it as a limbotic paradise that you may prepare to abode before transferring to your final destination (or next life). If it exists then when you pass you’ll get to express everything you desire to the ones you never got to.)
I’m sure your friend already knows that you were going through a lot of things. I’m sure he forgave you or didn’t blame you for what went on.
I think the closure you want to find is in accepting what happen and to try to forgive yourself since you blame yourself. (IMO)
I hope you find closure and better times coming your way.