I really don’t want to write this, but I feel like I have to. It’s really sad and depressing, really. One of my classmates was killed this past weekend in a car accident. I never really ever talked to her, but I’d recognize her on sight. She had a lot of friends, and all my own friends knew her.

I mean, yeah, I could be really trite, and spout off about how it makes you think about life and death, and the random, often miniscule, factors that determine which is which, particularly in this field that I’m going into, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t thinking about it, and pondering the sheer arbitrariness of it all. But I’d be talking out of my ass, as usual. What do I know about life and death?

It’s all too big.

The permanent silencing of even just one voice really locks my brain up. Shit. It makes me freak out, to be honest.

I mean, it’s hard to put it all into perspective, really. Zoom in too closely, and all you can do is fear your own mortality, quiver at the viscerality of it, the horror, the grief. Try to take the big picture, and it’s hard to figure out what it all means. What the hell is the point?

Deep down inside, I am just a selfish, egocentric bastard who is fearful of my own mortality, who is fearful that I, the one left behind, am going to waste my life anyway, that, yeah, life is short and precious, but I don’t know enough to know what to do with it, that it’s all fucked up, that I’m not ready, that I can’t handle it.

Times like this, I feel like life is such an enormous responsibility.

At the same time, I don’t want to cope with this in a juvenile fashion, pretend it doesn’t matter, be hackneyed and say, we all die, it’s the nature of things, things like this happen all the time.

Yeah, well, I’ve never seen it happen yet. Maybe indirectly. One day you talk to your patient, write a note, then go home, the next, you find out they’re gone, I mean, really gone. The closest was when the floor called up my team to declare someone dead. I mean, I didn’t know the guy, I’d never talked to him, so it wasn’t as traumatic. He was already kind of gone by the time I met him, and we all knew that he was going to go.

A few months ago during M3 year, one of my classmates witnessed the death of a pediatrics patient, and while he was shaken by it, we all took this lesson that we can’t really fear it. It’s going to happen someday.

Life is so fucking fleeting. I never even knew this girl, really, and I feel stupid for being so horribly affected by it, although I know, objectively, of course it’s going to touch me in some way, and I can’t help but feel guilty with all these self-centered thoughts running through my head, how I keep thinking, me, me, me, and I don’t dare reach out to the ones who are suffering the most right now, the one’s closest to her.

No. I mean, now that I understand. I will try to be there, whatever it’s worth. I am afraid. I am afraid to reach out. But I know that I cannot fear this. I will try to be there.

Forgive me for writing this drek in this time of tragedy. I’m sorry.