I Thought There Would Be More Birthdays

Yesterday, my college roommate and one of my great friends should have turned 40.

Tania never got to turn 40.

She passed away in June 2024. She had been sick, but her death was still incredibly sudden. There was no real goodbye. No final conversation where we knew it was the final conversation.

We had just talked.

Then one morning, her husband called me. I remember being confused when I saw his name because everything had happened so fast.

And then the group chat just stopped.

If you’ve ever had a group of girlfriends you’ve known for decades, you know that the group chat is basically a living organism. It contains everything. Big life news. Completely inappropriate jokes. Photos nobody else needs to see. Complaints about husbands. Random memories. Plans that may or may not ever actually happen.

And ours had Tania.

For a long time, we couldn’t bring ourselves to remove her.

Eventually we had to, and I don’t know if there is an adequate way to describe how awful it feels to remove one of your best friends from a group chat because she died.

Especially when one of the things we’d been talking about in that chat was her 40th birthday.

The trip we were supposed to take

Tania wanted to do something epic for 40.

An island. A girls trip. An adventure.

That was very Tania.

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