When my high school best friend died in a car accident eight years ago today, something inside of me fundamentally changed forever. Part of me has never been the same, and I don’t think I will ever fully recover from that loss. We weren’t on bad terms, we weren’t on good terms – we were just on terms. And I always thought that there would be time to fix it. So when that door slammed shut forever, I found myself grappling with emotions that I couldn’t even understand, much less deal with. I have never really tried to deal with it, to be honest. It has been an open wound that I couldn’t even bring myself to clean.

A lot of things have changed in those eight years – and I have changed a lot in these last eight years. I’ve been more willing to think about cleaning my wounds. Usually when the anniversary of his death approaches, I feel an all encompassing gloom start to take over me in the week prior. However, this year, I found myself thinking, “I don’t want to feel sad all day. I don’t want to be miserable anymore”. I talked about it with my therapist yesterday and she told me simply that I don’t have to be. I can use this day in whatever way that I need to, or even not at all. It felt like a door that I had been trying to ram myself through suddenly unlocked.

Every year, I listen to a playlist that I put together, a playlist of songs that remind me of our time together and remind me of my loss. I decided when I woke up today that I would continue to honor him by listening to that playlist once again – by looking at some photos of the old days, and I found myself smiling more than crying. The anger and the confusion and the hurt from years past has lessened. It doesn’t mean that everything is fixed, it doesn’t mean that I won’t have my days – but I was able to spend time with him today in a positive way, and I was able to smile with him like I used to.

I thought that I would share my playlist with you all – it is carefully curated and may not help anyone else who is grieving, but it does help me. And I invite you to explore your grief in whatever way you may want to or feel that you need to in the comments here. I am available and here to listen.