She will only be with us through the night

​"Thank you for being a part of her life, but she will only be with us through the night."
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I sincerely hope that no one else will ever have to hear those words about someone they love. On June 12, 2016, one of my best friends died after being in a car accident; she was 22. I have repeated these words to myself and in explanation to others over and over so many times that the words don’t feel any more like I am reciting some line from a play that can’t be the truth. I wish every time I am reminded of it that it wasn’t true.

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Our meeting was one of those moments of fantastical improbability that we often joked was one of the most absurd ‘how do you know each other?’ stories to be told. When I was a fresh, young first year in university having just settled back into my dorm room after a four hour trip back to school on a thanksgiving Monday, I remembered one of my favourite comedy troupes had dome a livestream the previous night that I had missed. She was in the live comment section trying to get us to join her latest project, a group chat for people who loved that comedy troupe. Ordinarily I would never have joined, but I was alone in my dorm on a holiday and I thought, “Why not?”

She was one of the first people I told when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Still very unwell, experiencing a mixed episode which is essentially the worst of both mania and depression at the same time, she treated me like a normal person who wasn’t currently at war with their own mind. She treated me like a normal person, her bubbly, outgoing-self working wonders at distracting me from the chaos in my mind. She encouraged normal social interaction and we rapidly became study buddies over skype and Google hangouts. She eagerly told everyone who would listen how happy she was to have her Canadian friend, seeking the emigre life in Montreal far from her home state of Texas.

One night while I was helping her stay focused on her writing assignments, a task that had become a routine part of our friendship at that point, I came up with the term ‘Kat-sitting’ (inspired by my parents hiring someone to watch their cats while they were away) to describe supervising her essay writing to make sure she didn’t fall to the temptations of Facebook, YouTube, and Tumblr when she had a looming deadline. And she loved it, using that term from that day on for anyone who did the same thing for her.
The accident was sudden and I was immediately overwhelmed with a panicked sense of denial. ‘This can’t be real,’ I thought to myself, ‘Here is the post she made just seven minutes before it happened, she’s got to be back’. She was always such an avid social media user that the sudden radio silence that has followed has been deafening. There is a hole in my life where a person used to be and I couldn’t help but notice it was there, the thing that was missing. We will all leave that silent hole in the lives of those we love when it is our turn, big as the time left to know you are missing from our lives.

Losing a major support person can be a terrible blow to the ongoing maintenance of good mental health, and I am lucky to have had so many people looking out for me, some watching for warning signs of the return of depression while others were there to help me through, as happy days and sad days are a normal part of losing someone you love.

Thank you to my mother who held me while I cried my heart out, and our church sexton who held my hand when things were too much. To my dad who gave me a long hug and let me talk about my wonderful friend until everything had been said, to the boyfriend who drove out to sit on my porch with me at midnight while I tried to understand what happened and lamented all she and I would never do. And to the boss who understood that I was grieving and let me return full throttle to work in my own time, and that tears will come at inconvenient moments. Every piece of support helped me build myself back up after a devastating blow.

Kat, you never got to step foot on the soil of your beloved Canada, but we will always have that 1 nite 2 last 3ever.