Death hurts.
There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it.
It hurts when a pet scurries off to the great big park in the sky. It hurts when a sick family member slips away. It hurts when a celebrity’s spotlight turns off after the last bow. But there’s an entirely new sensation to experience when a classmate loses their life.
Of course, it hurts. But there’s something far more quieting about losing a peer. It reminds us how fragile we are.
How easily it could have been us.
There’s a common generalization that adolescents and college students feel invincible — and to be honest, I have to agree with the sentiment. Between frequent all-nighters, diets typically based on caffeine and sodium, incredible amounts of stress brought upon us by demanding school schedules and a common need to maintain a job, a lot more partying than many of us would like to admit and the constant reinforcement of the idea that these years are the “selfish” years for us to exploit, there isn’t a lot of leeway given for our bodies.
We can get hurt. We can get sick. And, as hard as it is to come to terms with, we can die. Or, even worse, we can be the ones left to say goodbye.
Sometimes, all it takes to become one of the good that die young is a single step in the wrong direction to help a friend while hiking, or the courage to follow a dream of traveling to the City of Love. It’s not always a drunken pileup on the freeway or a gunman running rampant across campus that takes our friends. It’s not always the big-news headlines and story-like drama.
It’s real. It’s hard.
You don’t have to have known someone personally to mourn their death, and you surely don’t have to follow a timeline for grieving if you did. As heart-wrenching as losing one of our own is, the silver lining to that little black raincloud is the automatic community you’re built into.
Every single one of us has lost someone this year and shared the experience of processing it. More accurately, we are in the experience of processing it. So, look around. See the crowds. Feel the pain, but know that you’re included in the 49er family by nature of your relationship to this campus. You’re allowed to need help saying goodbye, and there are people here who can give that help.
The Counseling and Psychological Services center on campus offers 24-hour access to counselors via phone and in-person counseling sessions, which include crisis intervention, from 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Monday-Friday. CAPS does not charge students for these services, as fees are covered in general tuition already, and can offer services on campus or refer you to a facility off-campus that can assist in different ways.
If resources are available to you and you feel like you could be helped by them, I beg you to go use them. They’re designed for days like these and there’s no shame in going in.
It’s all part of saying goodbye.