Every few months I have dinner with my friends from high school. For the past couple of years, we have been trying to reconnect even though we are all different stages in our life. It has been fairly easily to pick right up where we left off and it is always a time I enjoy.

Sometimes I wonder if people forget, if they don’t realize what they are saying, or realized what they said afterwards and are like “Oh, shit.”

I didn’t say anything at the time but the conversation made me very uncomfortable. As you know if you read this blog, I lost my brother several years ago to an untimely and unexpected death. It has been incredibly hard for me. I know what it is like to lose a sibling, a sibling that was my only sibling growing up.

Anyway, I don’t think my friends even realized what they said when they were casually mentioning how they don’t know how they could go on if they lost their parents and how we were getting to that age where this would start happening with our friends. They couldn’t even imagine.

{uncomfortable agreement and feelings from me}

I don’t know what it feels like to lose a parent. But I sure know  hard as hell what it feels like to lose a sibling. To watch your parents suffer in agony over the loss of a child. This maybe one of the most painful and gut wrenching experience of my life.

Trust me, I don’t want to face the inevitable fact that my parents will eventually die. I definitely don’t wish dying before them upon them. I don’t think either one of them could survive losing another child.

Yes, I know how it feels to lose a sibling. To lose that one and only person that knows what kind of crazy childhood you had. To lose a sibling that never had a family of his own. To lose that special bond with.

My parents are my best friends and we are incredibly close. I feel lucky that they were young parents so hopefully I have still have many, many years before I have to worry about losing them.

But did they even realize how that sounded to someone who had lost someone very close to them? I doubt it but I wouldn’t wish them understanding that feeling either!