A Friend's Response

I am sure I wrote before that one of Asher's high school classmates took his own life about a year before Asher died. Not only were we devastated by that suicide, it also made us fear that Asher might have done the same thing - purposely leaped off the edge of a canyon.
Asher and that friend of his had some kind of adolescent fight in high school and never drew close again, but we have remained friendly with his mother, never thinking that our friendship would include supporting her in her grief and accepting her support for us in ours.
Just today she wrote to me in response to an earlier post of mine:
It means so much to hear people recall specific memories of Eric, even if some of them are not always entirely positive. It is as though they acknowledge that "he was here" and he was special. When people are confused and sometimes silent about our loss because there is such fear about touching it or bringing on our bad feelings, I wish we could just tell them that we are thinking about our loved one all the time. So it is only comforting to know that someone else is thinking about them too. Their avoidance is only alienating and isolating.
It's true that even negative memories of Asher are important to me. He was intense, rebellious, and sometimes extremely rude. I don't want to remember him as a little saint. That's not who he was. I would be glad if Eric were alive and, at Asher's shiva, had told us how nasty Asher was to him - because that, too, would be a living memory.
It's true that we're always thinking about our loved one, and having someone mention him is no sudden reminder of something we'd shifted to the back of our mind so we could ignore it.