My friend died exactly one year ago as of one hour ago. He died here, at his family’s lake house, despite — as his father said at his wake — the heroic efforts of three of his best friends, who were also there. Despite his dad trying too to get his heart to start again.

He was around my age. He’d just finished school. He’d just started really taking care of himself.

I am still so, so angry that this is what happened. So angry, and it is purposeless, a vicious shout into an uncaring void, and the vile thought — was this always what was going to happen? When Brian was six, sixteen, twenty two, thirty — was he always just going to die like this?

I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in Heaven, Hell, purgatory, any kind of peace-giving afterlife beyond the beauty of the actual cycle, organic matter turning to new things, electric impulses released into that same — and it can be comforting — uncaring, unhating void. Yet still, I catch myself at it: was this just always going to happen?

The year before he died, I said a joke that only he laughed at: “Crazy how every year, you pass the day of your death without comment or recognition.” I said this at the lake, possibly even on the day of his death, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Brian was morbid, full of gallows humor and intensities softened by the give-no-shits attitude common in someone who’s been burned by their own bleeding heart. Of Husband’s friends — all college graduates, all philosophical thinkers with big ideas and families similar — Brian was the first to appear human to me. Gender-strange and raw at the edges, he had a way of narrowing in on where others kept their wounds. He didn’t demand anything once he found them; just sat by you while you gnawed at the pain.

I didn’t realize how much I’d miss him. I didn’t think about him as someone who could die; not really. Who dies, after all? I still ask that, despite all the loss that stands behind me like sentinels of pasts I cannot return to, homes that have sank down now into new things. I remember my childhood home; the huge expanse of the yard, the trees enormous, the slab of granite in a vine-ridden clearing we used to pretend to sacrifice each other on. The creek cutting the line between wilderness and the neighbor’s property. I think back to sticking my feet in that creek, poking gently at pill bugs to watch them curl, the whole world damp decay and bright fresh green. I think about that and wonder: were they all always just going to die that way?

When Brian’s mom asked us all to still come to the lake, I understood why immediately. I’m here. We’re all here. Candles are lit, and the house is quiet.

I’m awake.