When you’re a student, you feel invincible. Grief hits you like a thunderbolt

I didn’t know Grace O’Malley-Kumar or Barnaby Webber, the two 19-year-old students murdered in Nottingham last week, but I’ve known grief at that age, and what I remember most is how absurdly incongruous it felt

More than anything else, the sight of the flowers being laid in Nottingham’s Old Market Square struck me with the electric force of a livewire.

Student after student came forward, gripping their bouquets tightly before placing them on the baking-hot concrete of the sunlit square. Their young faces broke with emotion as a powerful, kinetic sense of grief burst from the sad scene.

That life is fragile and brief and small and beautiful is a silly thing to read into each little bouquet of flowers, but it gave me some solace as thousands of people mourned their terrible loss.

I didn’t know Grace O’Malley-Kumar or Barnaby Webber, the two 19-year-old students murdered in Nottingham last week, but I’ve known grief at that age, and what I remember most is how absurdly incongruous it felt. Shouldn’t the summer sky have darkened? The roads emptied? Why is the pollen still falling? Life is strange.

When you’re 19, you believe that you’re invincible, or at the very least you haven’t considered the alternative. Death is a distant stranger – the kind of thing that strikes down elderly relatives.

You get through more vodka than should be humanly possible, forget to call your parents for months, stagger home from clubs at 4am just as the birds start chirping, arm in arm with friends you think you’ll know for life. You make plans for your endless summers. That first year of university is charged with anxiety and excitement, bliss and breakups, late nights and early mornings and all that raw, limitless potential.

What’s not meant to happen – what you spend less time thinking about than even your reading list – is that it can be taken away from you. Almost exactly this time of year a little over a decade ago, my phone rang while I was at Glastonbury Festival, trying to work out how I’d found myself watching Elbow alone, and I was told that my dearest friend Jonny had been hit by a car and had died.

It was not the single worst moment of my entire life, because that was the funeral: the small coffin; the sheer, awful pain of his wonderful family. I’m told I spoke but I have absolutely no memory of what I said, which is probably just as well. That this kind of thing shouldn’t happen, shouldn’t be happening, not to someone so young, is my overriding takeaway from occasions such as these – and the sooner details of the funeral fade, the better.

In such moments, family and community and friendship are all that get you through. The incomprehensible might of fathers and mothers mourning their babies with such grace should move the earth. Sinead O’Malley, Grace’s mother, told a crowd of thousands: “Be kind to each other. Look out for each other. Don’t have hate in your hearts. Say prayers for my baby girl.”

What do you say to someone who has suffered such loss? There are words that hurt and words that help when you lose someone, words that you want to hold onto for dear life, words to pull around you and nest with, words that you want to hurl away or tear in two. Words like “grief is love that has lost its home”, which is a very nice phrase, but one I wanted to wring the neck of. Love is the one thing I never lost in grief. The best thing you can do is stay close.

I remember laughing a lot that summer – even on the day of the funeral, as Jonny’s friends poured into my life like sunshine. He comes back to me a lot; not as much as I’d like, but in dreams, in little moments.

He’d been my best friend for seven years. He was cackling, mischievous and utterly brilliant and I miss him all the time. He also had an immense gift for making friends – something I’ve tried to be better at ever since. To never lose a friend again, to make as many as I could, to always keep those I love closer than they’re probably comfortable being. And, God knows, I love them all.

We are fragile, brief and beautiful. We must lean on each other; in the best times and the very, very worst. Those words again are a truism: “Look out for each other.” Because what more is there to life – strange as it is – than that?