I often feel that it’s sad how quickly we want Fridays to arrive (and the fact that there’s an entire restaurant chain called TGI Fridays speaks for itself), but some weeks are legitimately dismal and call for a drink by their end.

This has been one such week for me, still feeling poorly from a virus, and attending the funeral of a friend’s life partner, who died suddenly sitting in his living room chair (from a heart attack). I am heartbroken for my friend, who lost her beloved of more than 35 years with no warning or time to prepare, and for his family as well — at the service, everyone just seemed shell-shocked.

There’s not even very much we can do to help our friends under these circumstances, apart from being company through the grieving afterward, and these events have a ripple effect, prompting us to feel insecure about the safety of our own partners in the wake of the devastation we can see in our friends’ faces.

Grief is gut-wrenching and painful, but I offer you this excellent essay, The Awe of Being Alive, that I happened to come across this week. The writer talks about what value such traumatic events have in our lives, having lived through one himself. For my part, feeling deep grief affirms the love we have had for a person, or even a beloved pet, and that it was a great gift to have had them in our lives.

These events also remind us to cherish every moment we have with a loved one, because life can change in an instant, and to try to make the most of every day.

Go out and do wonderful things now, as many as you can. Don’t wait for a day in some misty future that may never come.

Don’t sweat the small stuff, or spend your time worrying about what other people think. Be true to yourself, be a nice person, in some small measure leave the world a better place than when you entered it. Those are the things that truly matter.