For Charlie.

When you finish school, you are in no means prepared for what actually takes place in the real world. You only know that the faces you once saw every day of thirteen years, will no longer be a frequent thing in your life. You know that you’re going to move on to bigger things and you know that nothing will stay the same.

What you don’t actually realize is a reality is that some of the people you went to school with, will be married, or have children – you know this is all a possibility but you imagine it won’t be for some time.

You don’t expect time to move so quickly, or that you won’t actually remember the last time you saw certain people. Sometimes you even forget your class mates until their name comes up in conversation, or you see them on Facebook.

But for all of you, I sincerely hope you never have to hear news of an ex-class mate’s death. When I left school I anticipated many things, but I never anticipated any of my classmates dying. I never expected to be hearing that kind of news about someone my age. None of us did.

I guess that is testimony to the fact that we actually know very little about the next hour of our lives.

You never expect something so wrong to happen to someone so young and you don’t expect to be so taken aback by it. You don't expect it to faze you.

The fact of the matter is that most of us spent our entire childhood and most of our adolescence living with the people we went to school with. By living I mean that you spent at least seven hours of most days/weeks/months of a year with these people. You grew up with them, and even if you don’t keep in contact with them or frequently see each other, you still know things about these people. You know some of their embarrassing stories, what kind of person they were, who they were friends with, what kind of music they listened to and thanks to social media, you can basically keep up without catching up with them.

We may have left school years ago, we may all have different lives to the ones we thought we would have, but deep down in a place we don’t even realize exists we are all still those little kids, running around the play-ground, racing to our classrooms, gossiping about each other, our teachers and dreading those hideous blue blazers. We’re still those kids who keep their timetables in their diaries, hate their uniforms, and can’t wait for recess and lunch just to have a chance to sit down and chill with our favorite friends. We’re all still there, we all still have a piece of each other with us.

We re-visit that place constantly when we see or hear news about one another, we think about it in the back of our minds, we try to picture that persons face, remember the last time we spoke to them, we jog through all the times we encountered them and then we think “how naïve were we back then, that we didn’t ever expect things to change so dramatically” – and that’s the thing about growing up, you realize more and more every day, that each day in its own way is a blessing. That there are no guarantees. We never expect that one day, when we look back on those times, that one of us won’t be existing in the same world that we exist in, that they’ll no longer be with us. That all we actually have is that memory, of when we were young, when things were simple. When you didn’t have to remember people because they were always there. You never have to face the reality that for everyone, there’s an “end”.

Today our entire grade lost a class mate, some of us were still close to him, some of us weren’t, but all of us will look back on those days, when we were still young, still naïve, still together and we won’t forget you. We will always remember you, always pray for you and always revisit our memories with you. God bless you and Rest in Peace.

Matthew 25:21

" His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.’ "