Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 3153657" data-attributes="member: 99">Everybody is different but my experience was very similar to this when my friend Ted died.  And I agree with Nyaricus that those first year milestones are the roughest part.  To me it was the little things that sucker punched me.  I still remember when I was just going through some papers in my gaming stuff and came across one of his old character sheets and I just broke down crying.And in that first year whenever his name would come up around the gaming table ("That's just like something Ted would do!") there would be this awkward moment of somber silence.  But as time went on there was also laughter.  I think you come to grips with the pain over time and are able to laugh about the good times without it feeling wrong.After more than three years it's gotten to the point where I don't always think about him every day.  But seldom more than a couple days go by without me seeing one of his "fingerprints" on my life.  And I like that.One thing about Ted was that he was a voracious reader.  He had literally thousands of books in his condo at the time of his death.  Those of us who were his friends and family went through them and took back the ones he borrowed from us <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="(:" title="Smile    (:"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname="(:" />)) and in turn took a few that had meaning to us.  My wife had a stamp made that said "This Book Donated in Loving Memory of Ted" and we stamped all the rest of them on the inside front cover and then donated them to the public library.  I think he would have liked that.  So if you can find a similar gesture to make on Patrick's behalf then I would encourage you to do so.The one other thing that I do is to try and help out Ted's mom as much as I can.  I always liked her but since his death I've become much closer with her.  She invites my family to her beach cottage from time to time and has let us use her pool in the summertime.  In turn I try to help her with stuff like cleaning her pool and cleaning off her roof and gutters from time to time.  That helps me keep my connection to Ted as a positive thing.As always, we're here if you need an ear or shoulder.  Peace be unto you.</blockquote>

Verification