How do you wake up the next morning knowing your friend won’t be in your life anymore?

When you lose someone you love, you may feel a lot of nothing, at first. It is a numb shock as your mind sits very still within your body and the words keep echoing over and over in empty halls. Everything outside will clamour around you with its normal, blatant brightness, while inside, in shock, you sit blindly without lights, without noise, without feeling; reluctant to understand.

I went on autopilot to survive because trying to absorb such an enormous shock was not an option. Nothing seemed real. In the beginning everyone was running around trying to make me feel better, so my grief went on hold. At times I would withdraw from talking about Azrul's death. My sister wanted to talk about him everyday, but I would often come home not wanting to talk at all. The fact is, I never want to talk about Azrul simply because my greatest fear is accepting that he is never coming home. I'll do anything in the world to make sure I'd avoid the feelings and thoughts.
But somehow it started to face me...

With all emotions and energy flying around, I weren’t sure who I were anymore, and I were channelling energy in all the wrong directions. I started to play the “what if” game in my thoughts each day. Once you let it in, it can consume you. I was not so much exhausted with the process of grief, but more about how busy my mind had become with everything but that. I would lie awake at night going over and over how, why, or what if. I became obsessed, convinced that if I worked out how, I could change that day or blame someone else, I could somehow bring him back.

Then I got angry. I got angry at those Suluks who had killed him. There are times where I hold a grudge towards them and drafted out a murder plot against them. How crazy am I for having that thought? Well at that particular time, it doesn't sound ridiculous at all.

There were guilt too, days of it.
"What could I have done that I didn't do? I've been there, the exact place where he was killed and why didn't I found out earlier of this? Why didn't I do this? Why didn't I do that?" I was wrestling with a cactus, and although, at first, the pain of these wounds might seem to overwhelm the greater agony, I knew that I mustn't let the stinging splinters stay.

Then bargaining came in. I offered everything I have, anything in the world in exchange for just one more day with him so I could tell him how courageous and great friend he is. When the bargaining has failed and the guilt and anger are too hard to maintain, we fall into depression, despair, until finally we have to accept that we’ve done everything we can. We let go. We let go and move into acceptance.

Honestly, I am not good in dealing with emotions especially when it comes to loosing someone that is close to my heart. There were days where I called my 'bestest' friend and cried like a child. He told me not to hold my feelings, feel whatever I was feeling then and now, so I could tell others in future how to handle and overcome grief.

They say time heals everything...But I'm still waiting.
Al-Fatihah to my dearest late friend, Azrul.