What Do You Do When You Get Absolute Soul-Crushing News At Work?

To be clear, this is not any kind of a tutorial. I really wanna know. How do you just go on like nothing happened. Truth is, you can't.

Today was like any other day. I was just clicking away on my keyboard, surfing the web, whatever. A friend pops on Facebook messenger, and just starts with, 'Hey man...'

That should've been my first clue. My typical interactions with this friend usually include laughing at memes, or sharing drum videos, etc. But I could tell immediately something wasn't right. My stomach fell to the floor, as he tells me of a mutual friend of ours who passed away in his sleep last night.

To be fair, the person who passed wasn't my best friend or anything, but we ran in the same circles in the Portland music scene for a couple decades. We knew all the same people; our list of mutual friends was longer than a rich kid's Christmas list. We ran into each other often, and always stopped to have a nice chat. I'll miss that forever.

So yeah.... here we are at work. Dealing with the worst kind of news. It never ceases to amaze me that there's never any fanfare. No parades. Nothing. Life just goes on. Work still needs to get done. We still need things on the website. I still gotta tell you all about whatever event we have coming up. The world just keeps turning.

So today, and every day really, tell your loved ones how much you care. Don't blow off that phone call to your mum one more day. And what I've learned today at work though, is sometimes you just have to do the things that make you happy, and I'm fortunate to have a job that brings me joy, surrounded by people who contribute to it. So I'll get through this, no problem.

And in the meantime. Godspeed, my friend. You were one of the good ones.