Kobe Bryant, grieving the loss of someone you never knew and how larger-than-life people dying forces us to look at our own mortality.

It is often said that legends never die, but one just did. His name was Kobe Bryant. The fragility of life is something we all spend the majority of our time trying to block out and ignore. With good reason. It’s terrifying. When an untouchable legend dies in such a sudden, horrific way, this becomes more apparent than ever. It forces us to look at and accept our own mortality. It does not matter how much money is in your bank account, how great a job you have, or any other measure of success we impose on ourselves. Just like that, any one of us could cease to exist in a moment.

Over the years I have had close friends, family members, colleagues and musicians whose music I listened to pass away, but this is different. Not sadder, not more gut-wrenching or devastating, but different. Kobe Bryant was UNTOUCHABLE. Larger than life. Nothing could touch Kobe. Nothing could bring him down.

If there was a single person in this world who could have survived this, it may have just been Kobe Bryant. The man who never quit. Who showed up early, left late, and dominated every single second in between. The man who made two foul shots with a ruptured Achilles, scored 81 points in a game and left the thing he knew best to go on and dominate another world, winning an academy award immediately.

I didn’t know Kobe Bryant. We never shared a laugh or talked. I never even had the opportunity to see him play basketball live. He didn’t know I existed. But that doesn’t matter. I miss him and am mourning his sudden death as if I had known him my entire life, which I did. I yelled his name thousands of times putting up shots in my driveway or shooting a wet paper towel into the trash. I hung his posters on my walls and wore his jerseys on my back. Kobe Bryant was larger-than-life, a god, a deity, an alien. He was not like us. Until, at last, he was.

All we can do now is cry a lot, mourn a lot and do our best to try to take at least a TINY bit of all that combination of joy and tenacity Kobe showed us every day and apply it to our lives. This sucks. It’s terrible and awful and that is okay.

The animated Netflix show Bojack Horseman may have said it best, when the titular character, while delivering an episode-long monologue about his mother’s passing, says “My mother is dead, and everything is worse now.”

Kobe Bryant is dead, and everything is worse now.

But it will get easier. It always does.