Dear Elizabeth
An old friend from university has died of cancer and I am swamped in sadness. I can't stop crying, and the thought of his funeral brings up huge feelings of grief. But I don't really understand why I feel like this because we weren't even very close when we were at university together in Durham in the early Nineties - I haven't, to be honest with you, seen him much since then. Maybe 10 or 12 times in the first three or four years after we all moved to London, and then not at all as our group of friends drifted apart and married and made our own lives.
I heard the news from an old girlfriend who called out of the blue. He died of cancer, with huge bravery, leaving a widow and a five-year-old child. He was a really lovely guy, sweet, kind, unselfish, and it is totally tragic. He was only 35. But what I don't get is why it's hit me so hard. Even as I'm writing this my eyes are full of tears. My father died three years ago, also of cancer, but I don't think it's because of that. Perhaps it's just the waste
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of a young life, and a happy marriage destroyed almost before it had begun?
Yours, Mourning
Dear Mourning
I'd like to put my arms around you. It is sad - so sad. This sweet, unselfish young man, with a wife and child, taken by cancer. He suffered - like, perhaps, your father suffered. This friend of yours was a friend from university: from a time of strength, of optimism, of promise. You saw him in the flower of his youth, played rugby or squash with him, perhaps, drank with him in the bar, talked late into the night, grew up with him at a time when life was bursting with freedom, passionate, golden, complicated, and stretching ahead forever.
Now, just a few years forward, he is gone. What has he taken? Certainty, perhaps, in the invulnerability of life. The bright promise you shared as students - that you could conquer the world, live a life unblemished, love unconditionally, forever. That bond that existed, intangibly, in the lives of your 
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