What You Do With All the Years Someone Was Supposed to Have
# He Played Guitar at My Wedding
In February of 2006, Sam played guitar at his wedding. His best friend got married first. Beat him to it. That was the joke between them, apparently. A race neither of them remembered starting.
Sam died two weeks later.
Twenty years on, his friend is still counting. Still marking February. Still carrying the weight of a wedding Sam played at but never got to have.
We tell ourselves friendships are different from family. Lighter somehow. Less binding. But then someone goes and the math changes. Twenty years of birthdays they didn’t have. Twenty Februaries of remembering the last thing you said. The joke that was funny then and unbearable now.
There is no protocol for this. No socially agreed-upon timeline for when you are supposed to stop counting.
Maybe the race was never about who got married first. Maybe it was about being there. Standing up at the front while your friend played guitar. Believing you would both get old enough to laugh about it later.
He never got later.
And now his friend carries both timelines. The one that happened and the one that should have. Every February is a choice: mark it or don’t. Remember or pretend you forgot. Both feel wrong.
What do you do with all the years someone was supposed to have?
Grief for friends lives in a strange space. Not quite family. Not quite peripheral. No one asks how you are doing on the anniversary. There is no cultural script for “my best friend died the week after my wedding and I have been counting years he did not get ever since.”
The world moves on. You move with it. And still, every February, you do the math.
Twenty years means he has been gone longer than you knew him. Or maybe not. Maybe you knew him for longer. Maybe the friendship was shorter than the missing. Does that change anything? Does it make the grief smaller? Does it mean you should be over it by now?
You are not over it.
Some losses do not resolve. They just become part of the calendar. Part of the shape of your year. You get married in February and your friend plays guitar and two weeks later he is gone and now every wedding anniversary is also this. Every celebration shadowed. Every milestone split.
It has been twenty years. That is a long time to carry someone. That is also no time at all.
Maybe you sit with this:
When was the last time you let yourself think about someone you lost without apologising for how long it has been? What would it mean to stop counting the years and just say their name?