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 “future-oriented being” par excellence, as the Spanish philosopher Julián Marías, perhaps the best disciple of Ortega y Gasset, affirmed, 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 it passes " to" each one 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" , into 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 that each person’s house 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 "being future-oriented ," and in the future—as well as in the present—others await us, they await our affection and our promises; because being a person is always "giving more of oneself ," or at least being able to do so, which does not 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 applies very precisely to our relationships with friends. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wisely states that “a man in solitude can reasonably hope to be virtuous, but if what he truly 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 has loved so much, but as someone "with whom I have loved so much ," because that is the deepest friendship, having loved "with" friends countless of the same things.

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

John of the Cross, the 16th-century Castilian mystic, wrote 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 with us.