My best friend by Vaidehi

death phrases From Vaidehi my best friend died 2 years ago. i don’t usually tell people that, though. i tell them she “passed away”. i hate saying it. it sounds so greyscale. distanced. the way bureaucrats or administrators would talk about it. not in specifics. that it was a series of statistically unlikely events. that she didn’t get the chance to be happy (or even just content) and find a love interest and watch her brother get married and her parents grow old. that phrase is someone else’s language, not mine. passed away is a peculiar phrase. by the time you start saying “pass-”, there’s only one way that sentence ends. it gives the other person that fraction of a millisecond longer to process what you’ve said, understand its levity, decide how they want to respond. passed away is a very passive phrase, much more so than died or is dead. no hard, final sounds that you can’t come back from. you could imagine someone slipping into a permanent slumber. shimmering out of existence. going somewhere really far away from us, too far too see but not so far we might never find them again. passed away is the way you gloss over the details of death. fuzzing over the days of waiting around for someone to die once you take them off the intubator. misting over the image of her childhood best friend, now a doctor, sitting at her bedside for those final twelve hours, monitoring her for any sign of discomfort to administer more pain meds. eliding over the fact that he was the one to declare her dead. passed away is in the past tense. death was something that happened, that single moment of the final breath or heart beat. it doesn’t tell anyone about how your heart is still broken. it doesn’t convey the guilt you feel that you don’t feel sad about it every single day. that somehow, she isn’t the first thing on your mind and hasn’t been for some time. it doesn’t explain how could you just move on, how could you be okay when she’ll never– passed away gives you time to think about how you want to share the news. why you’re sharing it. it gives you the distance you need from the most horrible days, weeks, months of your life. it alienates you from the things you’re saying the same way her death alienated you from everyone because that’s what grief and loss are. that inescapable reminder that you are alone. it stops you from reliving it over again, all the feelings that you felt. the anxiety of not knowing, the existential dread of knowing. it makes it less likely that you remember watching the life literally drain out of her. my best friend passed away two years ago. i miss her.