How The Death Of My Friend Taught Me How To Live
Tell people who you haven't seen in awhile that you miss them. Make time for people who are important to you. Don't be selfish with your praises, encouragements and apologies.Tell people you love them.
By 
Vondra Tay
I think about people dying sometimes. Not in the morbid kind of way, but about the sinking reality that anyone can leave anytime, and that scares me. Here I am, all spread out on the sofa with my dinosaur pyjamas, researching about someone I’m about to write my feature story on, when I think about you, and what happened 6 years ago.
You – a young 12 year old, bright-eyed, smart and funny girl. I knew you as the little girl who would always intercepted the phone whenever I was on the phone with your brother. You do that all the time because you knew it would annoy him to no end; and it did. In a short span of a few phone calls, we became quick friends. Sometimes when I rang your brother, you would run to pick up the phone first because you’d want to say hi before he asked you to get off the phone. We would both annoy your brother, and he’d give up and just let us have a go at it instead.
Oh, how I wished you screamed your enthusiastic ‘Hi Vondra!’ a little more often then.
How horrifying is it to wake up one morning, and to realize that everything that had happened was not a bad dream? That the person you were most afraid of losing, is gone. Forever. Nothing you do could ever bring them back, even if you tried. You have so many things to tell them, so many unsaid things left to say. You regret not treating them better, not spending more time with them because you thought you’d have many more opportunities, but now they’ll never come back to you. Given the chance, you would do it all over again.
I thought about what would happen if I lost someone dear to me. How do you ever get over anything like that? People brush it off and they say ‘Life goes on’,’Time heals all wounds’, but how do you ever get over the fact that you will never see them ever again?
I guess you don’t. So tell people who you haven’t seen in awhile that you miss them. Make time for people who are important to you. Don’t be selfish with your praises, encouragements and apologies.
Tell people you love them.
Life is simple: Love the ones you want to keep.
