My friend Dave was taken off life-support late Friday afternoon and died that evening around 5:30pm.

It’s a peculiar feeling to know that someone isn’t in existence anymore. It’s not like a breakup where they are still on the earth, but you just aren’t in touch. Instead, the person you once knew doesn’t exist. There is no possibility of running into them at a party or randomly at a cafe in a couple of years.

I have that feeling with my dad still. Less, but it’s there.
I often have a desire to call him, but there is nowhere to call, no search string on Google to look, no dark bar to scan.

Gone. Completely and utterly gone.

My pop used to call that unexplainable feeling the “existential heebie jeebies.”
It’s uncomfortable and ungraspable. There is nothing to hold on to.
That’s what I am experiencing.
And I do not like it.