Dark nights of the Soul when a dear friend has died

There is a particular darkness that arrives after a dear friend dies. Not the darkness of the death itself. Not the darkness of the phone call, the text message, the hospice update, the social media announcement, or the funeral. These mechanics of the death process come without warning, but you can handle these parts in community, even when the loss is not a local friend.

The darkness I am talking about comes later. When everyone else returns to their regularly scheduled programming. When the world seems strangely comfortable moving forward without someone you deeply loved in it. Add the fact that the person isn’t in close proximity and the strangeness multiplies exponentially.

That is when the questions arrive, quietly and relentlessly, like waves. And if you are anything like me, they tend to show up around three o’clock in the morning.

• Did I do everything I could to show my friend she was loved as she entered the end of her life?
• Did she know?
• Did she really know?
• Did she know that every text mattered?
• That every memory mattered?
• That every ordinary conversation became sacred once I realized there might not be many left?
• Or did I assume there would be more time?
• Did I save things for later that should have been said sooner?

I replay conversations. I reread messages. I search for evidence. As if love could somehow be measured retroactively. As if grief were a courtroom and I am both the prosecutor and the defendant.

• Did I respect the role of the people closest to her?
• Did I honor the fact that family members sometimes have to make decisions I would not make?
• Did I respect their right to intervene, to protect, to limit access, to shape the circumstances surrounding the end of a life?
• Or was I secretly resentful because I wanted more?

More updates. More information. More access. More opportunities to say goodbye.

Grief has a way of exposing the places where love and entitlement become tangled together. Sometimes what feels like advocacy is actually our inability to let go. Sometimes what feels like righteousness is heartbreak wearing a disguise.

And so I ask myself difficult questions. Not because I enjoy self-interrogation; because death has a way of stripping away our excuses. Then come the questions that hurt the most. The questions about the people still here. The people walking beside me in this strange landscape called Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC) — my fellow travelers, my cellmates in a prison none of us volunteered to enter.

Did I show genuine love to my fellow MBC havers? Not performative love, not reflexive platitudes, not social media love, not awareness-month love; real love. The kind that listens, the kind that checks in, the kind that celebrates a stable scan and mourns a bad one, the kind that remembers names and birthdates, the kind that stays even when someone is a little less easy to love, the kind that stays when someone goes silent.

Did I make room for their suffering while carrying my own? Or did my own fear consume too much oxygen?

Living with terminal illness creates a peculiar gravitational pull and the diagnosis can become the center of everything. Understandably, reasonably; but still, the dark night of the soul asks difficult questions: Did I remain curious about other people’s pain or was I too occupied surviving my own?

And then comes perhaps the most complicated questions of all: did I reveal too much or not enough?

Those of us living with MBC walk a narrow bridge.

Reveal too much and someone accuses you of oversharing. Reveal too little and people misunderstand the reality of the disease. Tell the truth about your fear and someone worries you’re giving up. Speak about hope and someone assumes you’re doing fine.

• How much honesty is enough?
• How much vulnerability is too much?
• Did I adequately communicate the weight of this life?
• Did I allow people to see the cost?
• Or did I protect them from it?
• And if I protected them, was I protecting them or protecting myself?

The truth is I don’t know, I suspect most of us don’t. I think we are all improvising, trying to tell the truth without becoming consumed by it, trying to remain hopeful without becoming dishonest, trying to be known without becoming defined entirely by our suffering. The dark night of the soul does not offer easy answers, that’s what makes it a dark night.

It is not a courtroom where verdicts are delivered, it is a wilderness, all consuming; a place where certainty goes to die, a place where humility grows. Eventually, after enough questions, another realization begins to emerge. Perhaps the purpose is not to determine whether we did everything perfectly, but simply to remain willing to ask, to continue to wrestle with what is and what could be.

To remain teachable, accountable, soft, open; because none of us will love perfectly. None of us will advocate perfectly. None of us will navigate friendship, illness, grief, community, and loss without making mistakes. We will say too much, or too little. We will miss opportunities, will misunderstand intentions and we will carry regrets. That is part of being human.

But if grief teaches us anything, it is this: love, true love, is rarely measured by perfection, it is measured by presence. By showing up, by trying, by staying. By being willing to sit with uncomfortable questions after the person we love is gone.

And perhaps that is what these sleepless nights are really about. Not punishment, shame, or self-condemnation, but love. Love continuing its work long after death has arrived. Love asking whether there is still something left for us to learn. Love refusing to let our hearts become hard. Love reminding us that while we cannot go back and change what we did, we can allow the people we have lost to shape who we become next.

And maybe, in the end, that is the closest thing to an answer we will ever receive.