Thank you for the kind words and advice. I’ve been muddling through the stages of grief - as you say - bouncing around in no particular order - and I’ve been giving myself time to process, and I’ve reached out to the family of my deceased friend, I’ve been helping them deal with the practical sides of the loss; packing up their house, dealing with their pets, helping their kids with the loss of their mom, and also just supporting and caring and talking.

I’ve always struggled at my job to stay on task - I tend to drift off and get easily distracted, and I’ve always been able to angle that to a benefit- I’ll rapidly jump from task to task, produce results quickly on multiple things. But now this new distraction is my overwhelming sense of loss. I can’t schedule grief, and it bursts into my mind (already churning away on five different projects), and I have to try to suppress it, or step back from my desk and talk myself through it.

But it never seems to ebb completely. Always there, and any single little trigger - seeing anything that reminds me of my friend - puts me back into the misery spiral. I’m sure it’ll pass in time, and since she died (just over a month ago) I did notice things began to get a little less difficult. But then her parents asked me to take her phone and go through it and clean out any photos / references/ etc about what killed her (bad boyfriend, drug overdose) - and that process just re-opened the wound. I feel like I’m going through it all right from the moment it happened. And I find myself starting over on the grief cycle. The inability to shut it out of my mind.