My friend died last weekend.

I was at the airport, heading home from my girlfriend’s wedding when Tex and I got the news. We had just seen him three weeks ago. Nobody knows what happened except that it was unknown natural causes, and he died at home with his parents.

I work for a solo practitioner, so I only took one day off and went back to work this week. But everything feels hard. I force myself to stuff the grief down long enough to do my job, which increasingly requires more and more hours. But I can feel it choking me as the demands and my to do list pile up and I fantasize about quitting, running away, yelling, screaming…anything but pretend my life is the same as it was before August 2, 2015.

The feeling of being overwhelmed at work will probably pass. If it doesn’t, I’ll explore options and figure something out. But my friend is not coming back. I’ll never get to go to his wedding, or invite his kids to play with mine, or watch a terrible movie and laugh about how bad it is. We won’t build his business together the way planned to. My only consolation is that he spent his life surrounded by the love of friends and family; there’s no question that he went to the other side knowing he’d be deeply, deeply missed.

And I’m still here, and Tex is still here, even though I know he’s trying even harder than I am to deal with the fact that his friend–no, really his brother–is gone.

Gone.