vent below the cut (cw death)

it feels so very weird and bad to have to be preparing to write a midterm tomorrow after finding out yesterday that my former resident from when i worked as an RA at my university last year just died. and nobody has said what happened yet and i don't think they're going to, but what i've heard from my residents and the way they talk about it makes me pretty sure it was suicide and i'm just...... that whole group of kids was so wonderful, in my three years working as an RA they were my best group, they were all so kind and so tightly knit because of their circumstances - they were all first years during the height of the pandemic and there were only 50 of them total in the building, and when you mix that with a lot of the traditions of that specific residence it made them all so close, they were truly like a little family, and when you're one of the people tasked with keeping them safe and taking care of them they really feel like your kids in a way, you know what i mean?

like i met this person on the very first day he moved in, i reassured his worried parents before they left him that he would be okay and we'd all be watching out for him and all the other students, i watched him transition from an awkward, gangly, barely out of high school kid to someone so much more confident, i watched him find his footing and start figuring out who he really was now that he was off on his own away from home. i watched him and all the other kids grow closer and i took care of him on the nights he drank too much, and i had conversations with my other RA friends about how he seemed like the type of kid who would be a little reckless through university but would end up growing up into someone who was really steady and really kind. and now he's just gone, he's dead at 19, and i don't really know how to cope with that because it doesn't even feel real

and i almost feel stupid for reacting so strongly because we were never really friends in that sense just by virtue of me being so much older and being in somewhat of a position of authority over him (although honestly none of us were all that strong on enforcing the rules that year), but still i knew him, we talked about music and star trek and his classes and always said hi when we saw each other around the building, i helped him find his footing in that really difficult transition period where you've just left home and you don't know how to be on your own yet, and honestly when you're in that job you feel such a responsibility for those kids even once it's no longer your job to be responsible for them, and it's just like. how can i even begin to come to terms with the fact that he will never grow up? he will never get to become that person we saw him slowly becoming?

and god, all of my other kids - they're all still so close, like even when they moved out of residence at the end of last school year most of them moved into houses together, and now they have to deal with one of their friends just dying. again. because they just went through this, they just grieved like this because in september another one of them killed himself. 6 months ago they all got together and grieved, they watched his funeral when it was livestreamed by his parents, they worked with the school and planted a tree in his honour and added his number to the residence team's hockey jerseys and they sold masks to raise money for the organization his parents set up, and they've all still been healing from that loss and now it's happened again. they have to do it all over again when none of them should ever have to worry about something like this at that age.

and it's just so hard to even stop thinking about it at all, let alone focus on anything else, but i have to write a midterm tomorrow and i need to focus because i have to study but god how am i even supposed to just keep going like that? like everything is the same and nothing happened at all? i don't understand any of it and i don't know how i'm supposed to deal with it