I've been chugging colonoscopy prep fluid and sitting on the toilet playing a video game, Hades, waiting for the evacuation process to complete before my colonoscopy later today.

I'm ready to go. The last couple of days I've been on a low fiber diet, nothing but white pasta, jello, salmon, that kind of thing. It's been a bit of a haze.

Last night after the first round of prep, as the machinery of my bowels slowed and allowed me to actually do something with my mind for a while, I started reading Annie's book. Annie is the sister of Ari, my old high school friend. She wrote a book about his death called Forever Your Sister about ten years after he died. I bought a copy, put it on my shelf, and promptly tried to forget about it. This would have been four years ago at this point. I wasn't ready to read about his death and the grief it caused.

And that's what the book is about: Coming to terms with the grief of losing a loved one. Specifically, a sibling.

I'd periodically look at the jacket and think I should give it a go. Then other things would come up. The usual things: work, personal care, marriage, my dog. And the usual avoidances, too: video games, movies, napping, escaping.

Reading the book is like returning to a place I haven't been to in a long time, this sphere of existence in my past where I had more friends, better connections, higher highs and lower lows. That's what connection does. It gives you skin in the game, makes you more present. Sometimes I think I had more empathy back then.

I wonder if the empathy hasn't left me, though. I miss Ari. He should still be here.

Annie's a terrific writer. Forever Your Sister is a book about loss and coping.

So of course I read twenty pages, reconnected with the part of me that hadn't gotten over the loss, and then immediately decided it was too much for me and started to play Hades instead, using as justification the continual demands of my volcanic innards, erupting again and again.

Ari died when I was thirty four, the same age as me. There was a time after his death – his murder as my friend Boyar would say – that I thought about him every day. I'd go for long runs outside and imagine him along side me, cheering encouragement in his way, saying things like pain is weakness leaving the body if he felt like imitating a drill sergeant, or maybe even being more sincere, which he did sometimes, just to surprise me.

I remember when I told him I was going to move all the way to San Francisco to try to get my first job as a computer programmer. My own family expressed disbelief. My father doubted me the most, wouldn't give me any money for the trip – I drove the three thousand mile distance in my fourteen year old toyota with a hundred and twenty thousand miles on it and slept in abandoned lots off the highway. You can't just move to a new place without a JOB! What are you going to do if you can't find anything?

Instead Ari said: You can do this. I know you can because you're Tobias, and I chose you as a friend. My friends can do whatever they make up their minds to do. It'll work out fine. If shit really hits the fan call me and I'll see what I can do to help.

He'd say things like that and, incredibly, he'd mean them.

Like me, Ari was a worker. He tried to love and support people around him, and succeeded more than anyone I knew. We went to high school together and the first year we started hanging out regularly, my sophomore year, I couldn't believe he could be bothered to spend time with me. Surely he was only friends with me by proxy, because he was actually connected with Cal. Cal and him, they grew up on the same street. They had a deeper connection. My deeper connection was always Boyar.

But somehow we all became better friends with one another, the more we all spent time together. Funny how that works.

We saw each other periodically throughout our college years – we both went to schools in the same city. I remember him telling me he was going to join the Army and I was just floored. Why would you want to do that, I asked him.

I want to do something good. I can help people.

And he did. He joined the army and became part of a group of infrastructure specialists, building access to clean water for small towns and tribes in Afghanistan. I guess when you are as smart as Ari was, they don't want you on the front lines.

A suicide bomber killed him with an improvised explosive device – they call this an IED in the military. Ari went out to see what this guy was doing so close to his group and the bomb went off.

I remember going to his funeral and everyone said the same thing. I hope it was quick. The casket was closed. I wondered what was in there – what was left of him – and then stopped myself from wondering because I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want to think about his last moments and if there was pain or suffering or just a blast and then nothing. I still don't. It makes me feel sick inside.

I don't even know where I'm going with this. What I do know is that it's easier to build a life where I don't think about anything important, a life where I sit on the toilet and play a dumb video game, than it is to think about the past and the people in it that I used to care so much about.

And as has been noted by so many before me, people tend to take the path of least resistance. I'm no different, most of the time. I remember Ari being proud of me when I chose the harder paths, to go to college even though I didn't have the support of my family, who wanted me to stay close to home. To enter a field that I knew was going to be challenging. To try, always, to do good in the world, or, at the very least, to pick options that weren't too bad for it. And to stay up to date on current events. He read the news religiously and cared deeply about international relations, whereas my interests always seemed much simpler and selfish.

I am not sure I'm going to finish the book. By the time I am ready to read again, something else will happen. There will be a crisis at work, or my mother will fall ill, or Penny will demand that we go on vacation because she is sick of everything and I'll get busy planning that. I'll rise to the occasion and provide support, and then, fatigued, I'll choose another mindless form of entertainment as a form of recovery.

Ari, I believe, managed an interesting trick in his internal world – recovery for him was connecting and helping, instead of retreating into himself.

I wonder sometimes if I'll ever learn that bit of mental gymnastics myself.