This year in downtown Iowa City, a mural will be painted of a boy riding down a Mario Kart path on a scooter. The organizers of the mural wanted to raise $1,500 to complete the project, and a community came together to raise more than $4,000.

The mural has been organized by my group of friends and me as a symbol of our friend Sean Wu, known also as Scooter, who died April 8, 2017, at the age of 18.

Scooter lived down the hall from me in our University of Iowa residence hall freshman year. He chose to introduce himself as Scooter, always with a big smile.

On the last day I saw him, he still had the same smile as he waved goodbye on his way out the door.

Losing Scooter was the first time in my life I had been forced to deal with death, and I didn’t know how to go about a concept I couldn’t fathom.

But he’s only 18, I kept thinking. He will never be as old as I at any given moment for the rest of time.

On the night Scooter died, I arrived at the dorm to see an ambulance pulling out. Inside, I saw Scooter’s twin brother talking with a group of older adults. Knowing that instant who the ambulance had just taken away, I managed to keep a panic attack at bay until I got up to my room. My friends kept telling me Scooter would be fine, squeezing my hands a little too tightly to be convincing.

Hours later, Scooter’s brother called one of my friends and broke the news. Sometimes, I still hear her scream in my sleep.

For the remainder of the school year, a numbness made a home in my veins. The only thing I knew of and prepared for following death were the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Instead, I felt I began and would remain stuck on stage four.

In part, I feel my numbness came from my need to help everyone else through their pain. Someone had to go for walks with my roommate so she could talk through her feelings. Someone needed to stay up and sit with Scooter’s roommate in the early hours of the morning.

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I told myself and others helping people during this time helped me to keep my mind off everything. Eventually, though, the bags under my eyes from never being able to sleep grew so pronounced they could’ve brewed tea.

Since taking care of myself was not my priority, my grieving didn’t really start until months later, when I went home for the summer. There, depression caused me to seal myself away from the family I hadn’t seen in months in exchange for staring at my bedroom ceiling.

Eventually, as the summer progressed, I was able to come into a sense of acceptance. However, the depression sank back in as soon as I arrived back in Iowa City for school.

My life with Scooter was here, and I had not properly grieved him where I knew him.

My friends and I, who had lived on Scooter’s floor, also are now split up, living in different areas across the city and not seeing one another every day. This, though, has forced me to focus on myself in the grieving process, as I should have done right away. I finally felt allowed to heal.

Of course, being alone did not offer a smooth transition. There still were a lot of days I stared at the ceiling for hours because the thought of doing anything else exhausted my core.

Through those rough solitary moments, though, I was able to reflect on the memories, from the terrible night I waited to hear the news of Scooter’s death to how Scooter and I worked for weeks on our Academy Awards ballots.

You couldn’t meet someone more excited to live life than Scooter. I never remember him not being excited about everything, and I hope to learn from his outlook.

Connecting with Scooter’s friends and family, some of whom I’ve only gotten to meet after his passing, has also been a good step in reaching the acceptance stage where I don’t feel sucker-punched with sadness consistently.

However, it was a solitary moment in which I felt I’ve fully come into a place of peace at Scooter’s passing.

Two months ago, I walked into FilmScene, a small movie theater where Scooter used to volunteer his time. Though he talked about the place often, I had never been there before and was a bit unsettled walking through the doors.

When I sat down to watch Lady Bird, though, I looked around and felt warm, light, and something akin to walking into a church.