We are all always premature, we are born and die too soon: we are born when we still don't know how to live and we die just when we were starting to live as we know how.

If to live is to project, that is, to be capable of the future, and the person is the “being futuristic” By antonomasia, as the Spanish philosopher Julián Marías, perhaps the best disciple of Ortega y Gasset, stated, then the duration of life, whatever it may be, is always insufficient for everything we would like to carry out, for our projects and, even more so, our projects with others: whenever it happens, we all die before our time.

Time passes, no doubt about it, but above all "us" It happens to each of us, and if we are able to appropriate it subjectively, we turn time into history and mere chronology into biography; we take ownership of it, we domesticate it, we turn it into a “domus”, in a house.

Heidegger said that “Language is the house of being” And, in a way, we could also say that “the house of being is time”And even the fact that each person's home is their own biography, and even a biography that tends towards others, and that is one of the great secrets hidden by our civilization of consumerist individualism, that we are not only biographical, but also hetero-biographical, that a good part of our best biography is built in the relationship with others and, more specifically, in those relationships that are mediated by affections, such as friendship.

That is precisely why being a person is “to be future-minded”And in the future—as well as in the present—others await us, they await our affection and our promises; because to be a person is always “to give more of oneself”or at least be able to do so, which doesn't mean so much, and in the first instance, that life still has undelivered gifts prepared for us, as that we are the ones who already carry and will then carry gifts for it and those who inhabit it.

And the above happens to us very precisely with friends. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle wisely states that “A man in solitude can reasonably expect to be virtuous, but if what he really aspires to is happiness, then he needs friends.”

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why we are so heartbroken by the deaths of those who have deserved our love and, above all, whose love we have appreciated and received, perhaps undeservedly: because they are all premature.

In the elegy that the poet Miguel Hernández dedicates to his deceased friend Ramón Sijé, he does not refer to him as one might expect, as someone he loved so much, but as someone “whom I have loved so much”Because that's what the deepest friendship is: having wanted "with" Friends, countless of the same things.

That's why Spanish, which is a sentimental language, doesn't say things like English –“he/she died”-, we say “A friend of mine died”As Hernández also expresses it, "he died to me," and that is the pain that breaks everything.

John of the Cross, the 16th-century Castilian mystic, writes that “At the close of life’s evening, we will be judged by Love, on love”Whether or not one has religious beliefs, the truth is that what remains is love. And it will always remain.