My Friend Who Died

August 19, 2026

I’d like to write about a friend of mine who died. This was a few years ago, so he must have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight.

We weren’t friends when he died. We hadn’t been friends since he changed schools at the end of second grade. All told, we had been friends for two or three years, and I remember very little of what we did together. We later went to the same high school, but never spoke.

After he died, we were friends again. I found out about his death on Instagram. I took my photo album out of my closet, and found all our pictures together. In one, a group of us were posing on the school playground; he was hanging upside down, a bit of his belly exposed above his shirt. In another, we were standing together wearing Greek laurels made of cardboard; in all likelihood, we had been learning about the Olympics, which were being held in Sydney that year.

A few days after his death, I read his obituary. His obituary contained several aspects that remain mysterious to me. I’ve never talked to anyone about any of these mysterious aspects, but I think about them often. He was the second person I knew from my high school who drowned — the other was caught up in rapids during a fishing trip. My friend had drowned in the ocean, presumably. They never found his body. All they found were his paddle board and a sandal; as well as his truck, parked near the beach, with the keys left on the hood. The obituary said that he had been running a one-man woodworking business. It also mentioned that he had been struggling with depression for several years.

I was paddle boarding last week. Not on the ocean, but on a lake. I didn’t mention this to anyone, but I thought of him. I think of him whenever I go out on the water now. I think of him, and I think of the other boy who drowned — he was a year older than me, and we played the same position on the rugby team. Everyone liked him. When both of these people died, I hadn’t spoken to them in years. It didn’t quite feel right to grieve, for all I had to grieve were memories that were already long-gone. It’s likely that, had they lived, I never would have met them again. But they didn’t live.

I think of him as my friend who died, even though when he died, he wasn’t my friend. I don’t know what to make of that. A few weeks after he died, I had a dream where I met him at a party. I asked him whether he had really died, and he said, “Yes.” I spent a few moments wondering how that was possible, before new images appeared, and the dream moved on. He died so far away and so outside of the purview of my life — I still feel that I could one day meet him again, to ask if he really died.

About ten years before he died, the year after we graduated high school, I saw him at the Tim Hortons near the drug store where I worked. I was right behind him in line. I felt awkward, because we hadn’t spoken in so long, and I wasn’t sure if I should say something. If I had seen him in the hallway during our five years at high school, I never would have said hello, but something changes in these relationships when you graduate: suddenly, thrown out into the big world, we cling to our former classmates, even if we never had anything else in common.

I kept my eyes forward, and ordered my bowl of chili. As I waited at the counter, I saw him out of the corner of my eye, at the opposite counter. I looked all around the restaurant, trying to avoid recognition. Eventually, his sandwich and coffee arrived. I was between him and the entrance. As he walked toward me, I raised my eyes, prepared for a weak smile and nod of the head. But it wasn’t him. It was someone who didn’t look remotely like him. The only resemblance was that this person wore a baseball cap, and was short.

So, those are the two times in my life I accidentally conjured my friend who died: once, at a Tim Hortons ten years before his death (which, at the time, was a normal Sunday), and again in a dream a few months after his death. I conjure him on purpose every time I see a paddle board, or any time I’m on the water, or any time I hear about the place where he was living when he died. I also conjure him sometimes in a way that is both accidental and on purpose, just to wonder. I’m thinking of him tonight because Percy Shelley also died in the ocean, weeks after sending a letter to a friend asking him to procure a dose of poison.

He had real friends before he died, who feel his loss far more keenly than I do. I only acknowledged him as my friend after he was already dead. I don’t know if my thinking of him means anything to anyone. It’s hard to tell if I’m even thinking of him at all; it had been over twenty years since I knew anything about him. I don’t know what it is I’m thinking about, except perhaps the fact that people die, and sometimes they die in the ocean in ways that break people’s hearts.