The Loss That Froze Time

Grief doesn’t hit all at once. It seeps in slowly, creeping into the empty spaces, settling into the moments where silence used to mean peace and now just feels like absence.

When my best friend, Evan, died in a car accident, time stopped. One moment, he was here—laughing, making plans, filling the world with his sharp wit and easygoing smile. The next, he was gone.

I didn’t cry at first. I went through the motions, nodded when people spoke, accepted their condolences with the automatic politeness of someone watching their life from outside their own body. People told me it would take time, that the pain would dull, that he wouldn’t want me to suffer. I hated every word of it. They didn’t understand. They still had their people.

For months, I kept waiting for a sign that I would be okay again. It never came. Instead, I woke up each morning with the same crushing weight on my chest. I stopped answering texts, skipped work until I lost my job, stopped eating unless someone reminded me. The world felt wrong without him in it, like I had lost my sense of direction.

Then one night, I found an old note from him. A dumb birthday card, something he had scribbled on the inside. “Don’t ever let life turn you into one of those people who forgets how to laugh. No matter what happens, run toward something, not away.”

I sat with that card for hours, reading it over and over. I had been doing the exact opposite of what he would have wanted. I had been running from the pain, from the memories, from everything that reminded me of him. But all that running had done was make me feel more lost.

The next morning, I laced up my running shoes. I hadn’t run in years, not since Evan and I used to do 5Ks together just for fun. But I ran that day. Not far, not fast. Just enough to feel something again.

I signed up for therapy. It took weeks before I could say his name without my throat closing up, but my therapist helped me see that avoiding the pain wasn’t making it go away—it was keeping me stuck in it. She told me grief wasn’t something to get over, but something to learn to carry. That it would change shape over time, that I wouldn’t always feel this broken.

So I kept running. I started showing up for life again, even when it felt impossible. I talked about Evan, even when it hurt. I let myself remember him, not just in the way he died, but in the way he lived.

A year later, I ran my first marathon in his honor. At the finish line, exhausted and aching, I looked up at the sky and whispered, I did it, man. And for the first time since he left, I felt like he was still with me.

Grief never fully goes away. But now, instead of letting it freeze me in place, I carry it forward. And I keep running, remembering to live and embrace the life I have, just as he would want me to do.