Friendgrief Is Valid — & It’s Time We Took It Seriously

Trigger warning: This article discusses unexpected death and suicide. 

My cellphone was on silent the morning that Ang passed away. I needed to rest. I hadn’t slept in days, spending most of my time in the hospital’s intensive care unit, as I had intended on doing again later that morning. 

Earlier that week, I was with Ang as soon as visiting hours started and up until it ended, holding her stiff hand as the chemotherapy in her body fought off the stage four lung cancer we had all just learned about a few days before. I was the last person she spoke with, the last person she watched TV with, and the last person she laughed with — chit-chatting, bingeing shows, and cry-laughing were what we always did together. When Ang was sedated and intubated, I’d sing her all the J-Lo songs she loved and I hated. By then, I wasn’t sure if she heard me or not, if she felt me beside her hospital bed, my gloved hands caressing her freshly manicured fingernails. But it never mattered. Ang was and is my closest friend, my soulmate, so I needed to be there for her and with her, every second that I was allowed to. 

A little after 5 a.m. that dreadful winter morning, our best friend Jenn, who had just landed in Orlando to be with us, called me. I woke up without hearing the call — no ringtone, vibration, or light coming from my phone — but my body awoke, my arms reached for the phone, and somehow Jenn was on the other line letting me know she was on her way to pick me up to go to the hospital, because Ang’s hours, her minutes, were numbered. It was happening. Our biggest nightmare would be realized, today.

When we got to the hospital, Ang’s mother was already there. Her sister came soon after. Only two guests were allowed in the room at the same time, so each of us went in and out in varied pairs for about an hour. But Ang needed the four of us in the room at the same time. As soon as the nurses gave us the okay to all enter together, our presence by Ang’s bed, the four women who were the closest to her, signaled to her that she, too, was okay to let go. With Jenn by her right arm, her sister Anne by her left, and her mom and me at her feet, Ang shed one tear and exhaled her last ventilated breath. 

The death of a friend is one of the most devastating and unrecognised forms of grief. In popular culture, there is a hierarchy of relationships, and friends are considered to be at the bottom. This never made sense to us, Ang, Jenn, and me. While relatives are tied together by blood and law, we chose each other. When we had to make big life decisions around careers, home ownership, and children, we confided in each other. When our hearts were broken by parents or romantic partners, we held each other. Whether we wanted to travel the world or go around the block for a quick bite at the lechonera, we went with each other. We chose each other every day, every time. 

“Losing a friend is minimised because friendships are minimised,” Denise Serrato, a New York-based licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist at Colibri Wellness, tells Refinery29 Somos. “As a society, we've been constructed to believe that family is only biological. But the truth is, there are many people who don't speak with their siblings, and there are also many people who refer to their friends as their sisters.”

Since we were teens, Ang, Jenn, and I referred to ourselves as soul sisters. Our whole worlds were tied together more intimately and intentionally than our other relationships. But still, friends rarely get bereavement leave, our relationships aren’t often given space on a tombstone epitaph, and there are few books, support groups, or films about the loss of friends. And this rejection of friendgrief, as it has been termed, makes the trauma of loss more confusing, lonely, and difficult to work through. 

It had been just four months since Elena Soledad’s best friend Marissa Bianco passed away on November 13, 2024 when she felt like some of the people in her life expected her to have already moved on. “Society tells us to keep moving forward, but I don't want to move forward. I don’t want to know a life that doesn't have her in it, so why would I want to move forward,” Soledad, 34, tells Somos. “People say you’re living in pain or the past, but this is the only life I know.”

While Soledad acknowledges that her family and friends in New York initially held her in her loss — phoning to inquire on her wellbeing, ensuring her basic needs were met, and offering a shoulder to cry on — she says much of this care began to wane, even if the agony continues.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I'm not sad. No one knows how sad I am because I smile, laugh, and joke. I think people think I’m dealing with it really well, like life just moves on. But unless you go through it, you don’t understand it. Every day is sad,” Soledad says.

Aliza Reynosa lost her best friend Angelique Reynero more than two years ago on November 30, 2022, and says many of her loved ones also don’t understand why she’s still grieving. 

“I feel like a lot of the people around me brushed it off, like it was just your friend. They didn’t know how deep we went,” Reynosa, a 26-year-old content creator in San Antonio, TX, tells Somos. At first, Reynosa posted about Angelique, whom she became friends with in high school, to her more than 100,000 Instagram followers daily. “But then I started feeling like, ‘dag, people are tired of me being sad and posting about my girl.’ So I stopped doing it in the open, though I still do it every day on my spam account and bring her up every day in person.”  

Reynosa has two tattoos dedicated to the memory of Angelique: the dates of her best friend’s birth and death on her neck and a butterfly with the word “Angel” on her hand. After getting the latter tattoo, Reynosa’s mother told her she was “getting crazy” with her grief and her grandmother asked what she was still sad about.

According to Serrato, what society — and even loved ones — may not understand when someone loses a close friend is they often experience a shift or loss of identity. “When you lose a lifelong companion, a childhood friend, a primary source of emotional support, a part of them dies with the passing of the friend. When you lose someone you shared intimate things with, someone who knew you deeper than family, it’s hard to reclaim yourself without that person,” she says.

Reynosa, for instance, has given up making music, once a passion and artistic outlet. “Music just isn’t in me anymore,” she says. “After I spiralled in my anger, I got caught up with chasing and becoming the person I was before, but I’ve had to realise that I need to become a new person, that’s how I'll survive, because the old me isn’t here anymore.” 

This identity loss is especially true for racially and ethnically marginalised women who find refuge from a discriminatory and harmful world in their friendships, comrades with whom they can be their most honest, complicated, and vulnerable selves with.

For Soledad, that was Marissa. An Andean woman, Soledad was adopted in Peru by a white American family as an infant. Raised in Brooklyn, her adoptive mother befriended a Puerto Rican mom with a baby at a park when Soledad was six months old. The baby was Marissa, and the two have been best friends from then on. The pair often talked about how Soledad’s mom may have sought out Marissa’s mother because she wanted to find someone who her daughter could relate to culturally.

“Marrisa brought me safety and love. She was the least judgmental of all my friends. If there were times when I didn’t want to tell friends something, I'd still tell her. She’d thank me and catch me,” Soledad says. “For so long, her friendship meant that I was alive, because I literally don’t know a life without her. Her friendship was everything.”

Currently, the loss of friends, especially close friends who become platonic life partners, is being experienced more intensely than in the past. Globally, fewer people are getting married. And according to the American Psychological Association, about 40 to 50% of people in the United States who do tie the knot end up getting divorced. Moreover, a shift in family values has fuelled family estrangement in the country. As a result, more adults are living with nonrelatives than in the past. Instead, friends are buying houses together, starting businesses together, and raising children together. 

“Friendships allow you to be seen, grow, and feel free. They help you see yourself differently, oftentimes better. A lot of us see ourselves negatively, but our friends see us incredibly. Sometimes our friendships are our sisterhoods and our motherhoods,” Oludara Adeeyo, a Los Angeles-based therapist and author of self-care books for Black women, tells Somos.

In 2011, Adeeyo lost one of her own friends, Scarlett Hubbard, while they were seniors at Hofstra University. They met as sophomores. Soon, they were spending most of their time outside of class and work together. “She was very bubbly, her authentic self, which is what I think attracted me to her," Adeeyo says. Scarlett had cystic fibrosis, and knew she wouldn’t live a long life. “She was so joyful and nonjudgmental. She approached life as it was short because she knew hers would be short. In my 20s, that brought me so much perspective, and that still guides me now [in my 30s].”

Every year, millions of people experience the death of a friend. Many of us, like myself, lose life partners. Their deaths destroy us, alter our entire lives, and confuse a society that demands us to dry our tears, snap out of it, and move on because they weren’t our child, parent, or spouse. Others lose acquaintances, colleagues, or friends whom we were close to at another time in our lives. The news of their loss may come to us days, weeks, months, or even years after the passing, leaving us feeling guilt alongside our grief. Increasingly, young people are losing friends to gun violence, school massacres, and suicide; they are losing the few peers they feel they could be their whole selves around, the few peers who they believe understand them. 

When Antreise Lacey received a call from her best friend Cyan Pratt's dad informing her that her closest companion had died by suicide in July 2018, just a month after turning 20 years old, Lacey felt like she lost the person who had enlivened her. Before Cyan transferred to Lacey’s Colorado elementary school, Lacey didn’t speak in class. Confident, outgoing, and adventurous, Cyan helped Lacey, the shy girl with her head always in the books, find her voice, build her self-worth, and have fun.

“I remember when she was new in school, she’d say, ‘my name is Cyan, like the color.’ And after she passed, I was like, ‘you literally were like the colour in so many of our lives,’” Lacey, who made a short film to honour her late friend’s life, tells Somos.

Similarly, when Farah Pockels’ best friend since middle school Paola Miranda-Rosa went missing in Central Florida in December 2021, she lost her confidant and protector. "She was so pure, so honest, so amazing," Pockels, 34, tells Somos. "When I was in a toxic relationship, she literally confronted the person who was hurting me and helped me get out of it. Now that I'm dealing with my mother being sick, I just wish I had her, her advice, her support. She got me. She always did.” 

It’s with our homegirls where we feel most at home, where we can build the loving, nourishing, safe home we need together, and among each other. And that’s why it’s important for many of us to continue to nurture these friendships even after death.

Soledad honuors Marissa by listening to Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, an album she knows her best friend — an activist-scholar around Puerto Rican liberation — would have loved. Reynosa nurtures her relationship with Angelique with an altar, regular conversation, and a song she’s written for her favourite girl. Adeeyo holds on to Scarlett by keeping a prayer card with an image of a guardian angel that resembles her sweet friend in her wallet. Lacey carries on her friendship with Cyan by maintaining close ties to her family and providing sisterly counsel to her best friend’s younger brothers. Pockels feels close to Paola when she goes to the beach, looks at photos of the two of them together, and speaks about her.

As for me, this week would be Ang’s 35th birthday. Like every year since my soulmate passed away, I’ll celebrate her day with her closest family and friends. This year, the theme of the party is Angelica, with her baby face on a cake, photos of her with her loved ones hung throughout her home, and a cutout of our girl standing tall. To be honest, it’s a theme Ang herself might’ve picked for her birthday celebration if she were here with us physically. But since she’s not, this is how we honour her and maintain our relationship: together, sharing memories, eating her favourite foods, singing her favourite songs, watching her favourite films, and telling her beautiful daughter all about how her mother was an angel even when she was here with us.

This article was originally published in Refinery29 US.