A few years ago, I wrote a post about a high school classmate of mine and what our friendship had meant to me.

This fall, that classmate passed away.

He wasn’t the first of my graduating class to cross over, but he was the first that I knew well enough to feel the loss.

He had married outside of our friend circle and most of us didn’t hear about the ceremony that was held in his honor until after it had taken place. Grief circled around me with no place to land.

I heard from several high school friends the week it happened, informing me of the news. Later, one of our friends planned a gathering for a remembrance of our lost friend. It would be Thanksgiving weekend and I knew I needed to be there.

After many years of fighting a battle I couldn’t win, I’m on my second week of antidepressants and just beginning to wake up from the fog of indecision and apathy that followed me almost constantly for the past few years.

I drove to the bar where the gathering was to take place as comfortable in my skin as I’ve ever been, and as clear-headed as I’ve felt in a very long time.

I saw friends I haven’t seen or been in touch with for many years for a thousand reasons. I was as close as I’ve been in a long time to the sharp, vulnerable, and emotionally intuitive friend I had been to them when we knew each other as young adults.

I mingled at the bar for hours, catching up with friends and a few teachers from our high school, reminiscing about old times and getting updates on life. We don’t have the kind of walls we used to, at forty. We talked without defense or guile. It felt good to be accepted, by myself and my former classmates.

After the bar, we gathered at a friend’s old Victorian house, around a big kitchen island. We ate fruit from the Korean grocer. I was reminded of what it was like to be with people who had always known me, people who know how to communicate with me without words.

I headed back to my hotel room that night between one and two in the morning, way past all of our bedtimes. We had rehashed old inside jokes, made new ones, and warmly remembered our old friend. The only thing that might have made it better was if he had been there. Maybe he was. I hope so.

I have an acute pain when I see these friends because of the time lost while we were out of touch. It feels impossible to make up for that absence in their lives and mine. But I was reminded at this gathering that we can just pick up where we left off, and that it will be OK.

I hadn’t seen the friend who passed away since our high school reunion a couple of years ago. He was happy and well then. I know before he passed away, he hit a rough patch. I’m sad we lost touch, but part of me is grateful that I last saw him on a mountaintop – that I can remember him smiling and talking optimistically about his life and his future.

I know it’s kind of selfish, but I want that happy Ken to be the one I think of when I remember him.

It’s hard to lose a friend in your early forties. We are too young for this, I think. But his loss regained me several other friends I thought I had lost forever, and for that, I’m grateful. Maybe his too-brief walk on this mortal coil will help the rest of us to treasure each other and our lives, however long they last, a bit more.