Brad's services have come and gone. I feel healed by it, but feel flashes of guilt in the wake of it all. Why is my grief not deeper? Why is it not lingering? When will it rear its ugly head again? And what if it never does? I know there is no right way to grieve, yet I feel my loss should be tearing me apart, as it is some of my friends.

Two friends flew into DIA and stayed here last Friday night. The three of us - two of whom had never met before - stayed up late, drinking wine, talking about Brad, sharing our disbelief that this had happened to one so beautiful and vital. It seemed to me the three of us felt immediately comfortable with one another. Our friendship with Brad, and our shared loss, bound us immediately.

Stephanie said she had letters he'd penned to her years ago saved at her home in California. She e-mailed last week to say she'd re-read them, and they reassured her that Brad did indeed have a good life.

Kimberly, however, had been visiting him three times a week before he died, leaning on him as she worked through domestic pain. Likewise with Shauna.

Brad had been propping up two of my friends, and I hadn't even known. Kimberly feels lost, still overwhelmed by her personal problems and without the rock Brad had become for her.

I worry about both of these women, delicate souls from the start, who are trying to move on with their lives. One dealing with the unknown and likely eternal "what ifs," along with the loss of support and friendship. The other whose loss is coupled with intense personal struggle.

I want to be there for them now. But I can't be from this distance. And I can never take Brad's place.

I worry, too, about Mark, the photographer who worked with him at the paper for years. Someone said last weekend that the Brad and Mark years were the paper's golden ones. I felt privileged that I had been there during those years.

But Mark suffered the loss of a girlfriend, the shocking and bizarre loss of his job, and a transfer that took him to Aspen. Aspen, he said, is not his home. Frisco, home of the Summit Daily and the cabin he still owns, is where his heart resides. Mark is quiet. His emotions stay, for the most part, underground. Brad, he said, was his brother. I wonder where his grief will go, how he will let it out, if it will stay inside and eat that gentle man to pieces.

As for me, I'm doing better than I'd have thought with it all. I was so shaky before the service I couldn't look at Brad's photos, more than a dozen of which were on display at the amphitheater in which his service was held. I tried to sign the guest book and only got as far as my name and address. The pen simply ceased to function when I tried to write in the comments section, where people had written messages to Brad.

Stephanie, Kimberly and I held onto one another during the service. We laughed as Shauna spoke, doing a perfect impression of Brad's monotone voice. We cried when she said that through all this confusion, all she wanted to do was talk to Brad about it. We cried still more when she made a personal vow to the blue sky above that she would be a better friend in the future, as he had always been. Tears rolled when Mark, normally so shy, gave a heart-rending speech and said, as he walked off stage, "I'll see you again someday, my brother."

Then somehow, after it was over, I felt calm and steady. And have felt mostly that way since.

In keeping with everyone's resolve to be better friends and stay in touch, I have reached out to some old Summit Daily friends this week. In the space of only a few days, I have seen five of them. A surprising amount of us live in the Denver metro area. Jeff, a mid-90s co-worker, and I met for a drink downtown Wednesday. Kristin, my former editor, invited me to her baby shower yesterday, where I saw three other old friends. Andy and I, after putting it off for weeks, finally will meet for that drink midway between our suburban homes.

I really hope we can all keep this up. It could be that Brad's death has the strange effect of re-igniting these old friendships that have been missing in my life (perhaps all our lives) so long and somehow assuaging the loneliness. It makes me feel guilty just writing that, however.

Somehow the most heartbreaking thing of all came Tuesday. Kimberly called to say she was in the Summit Daily parking lot at and about to go in for the first time without Brad.

"I don't think I can do this without crying. Can you talk me through it?" she asked, and she burst into gut-wrenching sobs.

My eyes, which had been tearless for days, welled. My chest ached as her pain sped across the satellite signal and wrapped itself around me. "You're breaking my heart," I told her.

I told her to cry, to run for Martha, who had been there for more than a dozen years and knew Brad almost as well as she did. These people, all of whom loved him, too, will understand, I said. She broke down, she told me later, and it was, she said, just fine.

So now, I move on, without as much sorrow as I think I should feel.

Certainly, it has residual, even strangely comical, effect.

When I arrived home last Sunday night, I tossed my packet of daily pills by the sink - my antidepressant, my mood stabilizer, my multi-vitamins, calcium and acne treatment. As well as my herbal sleeping pills, which I failed to notice were still mixed among them.

The next morning, I swallowed them all and got ready to make the 45-minute drive to my boss' home.

I stood to leave and felt overcome by dizziness. It was, I swore, a variety of dizziness I'd never felt before, extending from my head to my toes and leaving nothing between untouched. My brain did not want my limbs to move. My brain wanted only to lay my body down. I felt, or perhaps imagined, my left arm tingling.

I'm dying, I thought. I'm having a heart attack and I'm going to die here in my bedroom. I'm going where Brad has gone, only 10 days later. Why couldn't I have died at the same time, I thought. It would have been so much more convenient for everyone. How many of these people will return for my funeral; surely, only a handful. And who will find me? How long will I lay here?

Somehow, I convinced myself that rather than laying down, I should head for the office.

If I die on the highway and have an accident, I thought, at least I'll be found immediately. Hopefully, I won't take anyone else with me. Hopefully, I'll just drive off the edge and pass away at the steering wheel. Someone will stop. They'll grab my cell phone and begin notifying everyone.

But I did not die. Instead, I drove to work fighting the urge to nod off. Nausea set in. My head began to throb.

Slowly, I started to think I might not be dying after all.

My boss was concerned. She fed me crackers and hot tea. She asked if I needed to go home.

"No, no," I reassured her, feeling brave in the face of this potentially terrible illness. "I'll be OK."

An hour later, I felt dramatically improved. Only then did my brain recover enough to think back on my morning's dose, to remember it had seemed like an unusually tough swallow, to realize my Valerian pills had been nestled in among all the others.

I did not admit this to my boss.

I was not dying. But neither did I feel as Brad wrote that he did in a letter he penned to a friend several years ago. He was in a tent far from civilization in the middle of a frenetic lightning storm. If he were struck that night and died, he wrote, he would be content. He had lived a good life, seen many places, loved many people. Brad survived the lightning storm and lived many more good years. This letter, I think, comforts his family and friends deeply.

But I don't share Brad's sentiments. Only in the last few years do I think I've begun the process of giving to others, of becoming less selfish and feeling that I can make a difference.

I want to see my son through every fascinating phase of his life, to be the best influence I can be and continue to help form this amazing young person into the fine adult I already know he will be. He needs me, this child. Even if I felt ready to go, he is not ready to lose his mother.

There are a million places I want to see, and experiences I want to have. I want to share my life with a man, perhaps a man with children. Have I lived alone too long? Am I too spoiled by my own good child to take on someone else's? Perhaps. Yet nature beckons me toward that lifestyle; it's a yearning that begs to be satisfied. I want to be a better friend, a better sibling, a better daughter, a better mom. I want to take more chances. Damnit, I want to try that Indoor Skydiving thing down by the mall. What the heck is that anyway?

What it all boils down to is, I cannot write the words that Brad wrote in that tent. How many of us can?

Last eve, Robby and I were kicking a rock across a parking lot and I noticed it would have been a perfect skipping stone. Out of the blue, I remembered skipping rocks with Brad at a pond while we were en route to some story, and Brad trying to teach me the proper wrist flick. I never did get it.

The memory did not pain me, as I thought it should. It was only a thought of a pleasant sunny day with Brad, one of many nice times we'd shared. Those moments were never over-the-top - Brad was a man of moderation in all things - but never anything less than nice. They simply were.

And so, I guess, is that memory. It was not a knife to my heart, which - thank to the forces-that-be - continues to beat strongly. It was a gentle reminder of a dear and now-departed friend that, thankfully I believe, did not fill me with yearning, regret or angst about my own mortality.

It simply was.