I was ten years old when the words on a computer screen told me my friend had died. She was thirteen. We hadn’t seen each other in a while. I was seven when we met at a birthday party. Her parents knew someone there, so she had come. Neither of us were playing with the other kids. I wasn’t because it was a school birthday party and I didn’t like the kids, and she wasn’t because chemo had wracked her body and left her unable to play. Now, it was three years later and I was reading her memorial website.

Her name was Madeline. She had beat cancer in the time she’d been gone. She had moved to a bigger city to be closer to treatment. She was now dead. She hung herself. I had heard my fellow students at school talking about this sad story of how a girl had beaten cancer and then committed suicide. I looked it up. There it was, Madeline’s website. She was dead. She was completely and irrevocably dead. 

I didn’t really understand what hanging meant, so I ran a Google search, and Google informed me of how painful a death my friend had died. I couldn’t cry. It was like my brain had suddenly forgotten how to. I was stuck in a strange, logical version of my life where, apparently, crying did not exist. There were not a lot of possibilities. I could tell my parents, but that wouldn’t end well. Uncle Ted had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my dad was really only capable of handling one bad thing at a time. If he had too many, he would get angry and confused, and that meant that he would yell. A lot.

Instead of explaining to anyone what had happened, I shut the computer screen. It would be my secret, my very painful, rather large secret. Madeline was gone, but she was mine. She was mine, and I would keep her for myself. I was convinced that keeping her so neatly tucked away would make what I had left of her last longer. She couldn’t be dead. I loved her too much for her to die. Love was supposed to keep people safe, wasn’t it? That’s what Mom had always told me. Maybe she was wrong.

Dinner was nearly impossible that night. Everything was hard to chew. I almost told my parents, but I refrained, reminding myself that when Dad couldn’t fix something, he made it someone else’s fault. There weren’t a lot of people to blame for this one, so it would most likely be me. It wasn’t my fault. I loved her so much. I tried to keep her safe, but I couldn’t get rid of the guilt that had lodged itself in my ribcage exactly so that it could ruin my appetite with its dark tendrils and make my heart hurt at the same time.

What broke my heart the most was Madeline’s picture. When we met, she had only had a few strands of hair left. The picture of her on the website was from her last soccer game. Her head was completely covered in long, shiny auburn hair. It was pulled back in a thick pony tail. She looked like she was so happy she might explode. I asked myself how so much could change in that short of a time. I wanted to pull her right out of the picture and remind her a hundred times how beautiful she was and how loved she was. But I couldn’t.

The days following were a bit like a bad day at a water park. One moment I was burning up with rage so hot that a flush began to creep into my skin and the next my whole body hurt like I’d just inhaled too much water. It burned as it ran down my throat and into my lungs where it made my whole chest feel heavy. I lived in a constant mood swing, and I never seemed to feel what I thought I should be feeling.

Part of me was furious with Madeline. She had beaten cancer, a feat that many would have given their left arm to do, and then she’d ruined it. She’d given up the chance she had been given to do what she loved and experience new things. How could she do that? She wasn’t here anymore, and there were so many people who wanted her to be here. I wanted to count. I wanted my vote to count. I wanted her smiling on the soccer field, growing up. She wasn’t going to do that. Why didn’t she want that, too?

Another part of me continued to love her just as much, if not more. She must not have felt as loved as she was. I still loved her, still counted her amongst my friends, even though she had chosen to end her life. I found myself becoming angry at God for what happened. Mo had always said that God has a plan, that he knows. I kept thinking to myself that He didn’t know this time! He was wrong! He was all small and didn’t know. How could he any more than anyone else? I was so angry that he made her feel like she was done. I decided that as punishment I would go on strike. Me not believing would obviously make Him sad. I wanted Him to feel the way I was, like He’d lost someone.