A year ago today my best friend of 13 years ended his life. He walked to the top of a very high and very busy building and threw himself off. It was mid-morning, on a weekday. He was lucky, if one can ever be lucky in such a setting, that he didn't either injure, or worse, kill someone on his way down.

Until his death, I'd never really used the term "best friend", well not since primary school. But when I spoke about our relationship to someone who didn't know us, it just naturally spilled out. And he was my best friend. He was my brother, metaphorically speaking, the older sibling I looked up to, even though there was only three months separating us. My attachment to him was confirmed the moment I received the phone call telling me he was dead. I recall saying "Oh no, oh no, oh no". I didn't wail, or go into any kind of histrionics, I simply spoke those two words over and over again, like a revolving door of shock and disbelief.

There's no handbook for grieving (though someone has probably written one) and there's no right or wrong way to do it. Credit:Sylvia Liber

Losing someone because they've decided there's no longer anything to live for is almost impossible to rationalise. Almost. Suicide should never be the answer, yet I know in that moment, for many, it is. To have someone constantly in your life for over a decade, and then in an instant they're gone forever, that delivers a seismic shift. When my friend died he didn't just take his own life – he took a bit of mine with him too. Gone was someone I could rely on, share and laugh with. Gone were our long dinner conversations over spaghetti bolognaise, infused with politics and religion as we solved the world's problems. None of that would happen again.

There's no handbook for grieving (though someone has probably written one) and there's no right or wrong way to do it. My own reaction was to get things done, or perhaps reading between the lines, I didn't allow myself to sit still. He and I were in the middle of moving his excess possessions from one storage space to another. He had to be out by the weekend. After he died I quickly realised that time does not wait nor care for tragedy. Stuff still needs doing. With death comes practicality.