It feels weird when people that I knew, people who came up on my social media accounts and pages, are gone. My mind’s still having a difficult time wrapping around the fact that a friend of mine that I knew for so long passed away. I suppose it’s the finality of it that my brain is having trouble with, as I try to avoid thinking about death or talking about it whenever possible. It doesn’t feel right referring to someone that I’d known since my youngest son was an infant in the past tense, but I’ve been telling my brain to just do it.

It feels the weirdest knowing that her LiveJournal, where she blogged until 2017, is now in the past tense.

So it’s been a little bit over a day since my friend Nichole passed away. In the end, she had no longer been able to take the various medications that had sustained her for as long as they had — she became severely allergic to so many of them, and attempting to desensitize even in the safest ways possible caused her kidneys and liver more damage, chief among those medications being the gene modulator Trifakta that had helped her stay out of the hospital for as long as it had. She painlessly and peacefully passed away surrounded by loved ones with her hands being held as she crossed over, and with absolutely no suffering. Although I do wish that she had been able to live longer than the thirty-nine years she did (which is actually kind of impressive in terms of longevity with cystic fibrosis), I wouldn’t have wanted her to linger if she were suffering prior to her passing. I’m glad that I was able to tell her that I loved her and would always remember her before that, though, and know that she received that message from me in addition to all of the other messages that her friends left her and her husband when he posted to Facebook informing us that she wasn’t doing well and did not appear to have that long — days — left. She left behind a young daughter.

I had known her for almost the entire lifespan of my youngest son, who is a bit older than her daughter.

My friend Nichole passed away painlessly and peacefully yesterday, on May 25th, at 7:20PM PT.