Grieve Leave Community Blog: 15 Years After Drew Died, His Friends Are Still My Friends

By Jenni Brandon

I met Drew Everson in our first year of college at Duke University, through our shared love of watching basketball– something incredibly important to many of us at Duke. Basketball was (and still is) kind of like its own religion at my college (seriously), and Drew and I were both obsessed. 

Drew and I were selected to be part of a group of twenty of the most diehard Duke basketball fans at school. We were in charge of organizing cheers and fans for the Duke basketball student section in Cameron Indoor Stadium (everyone calls us the Cameron Crazies). We were even in charge of overseeing a makeshift tent city where Duke students camp out for tickets for our rivalry basketball game against the University of North Carolina. (That tent city is called Krzyzewski-ville, named for our famous Men’s Basketball Coach.) 

Drew was fun, funny, and LOUD, which made him perfect to lead cheers in Cameron Indoor Stadium, always wearing a plastic Viking hat (there was no real significance to it– he just liked wearing it). We traveled together to the college basketball championships in Indianapolis when Duke made it in 2010. Once we managed to hide our friend Zach’s car inside a tent in Krzyzewski–ville. (I wish I had photos for proof, but because this was the early 2000s, they were on my digital camera that was, unfortunately, immediately stolen in Krzyzewski–ville. So you’ll just have to believe me.)  

Though Drew and I spent a lot of time together in the world of basketball, often he would tell me, “You need to come by my house more. You would love my friends.” 

It was shocking and heartbreaking when Drew died on Oct 23, 2010 in a tragic accident. I vividly remember finally walking into his house, filled to the brim. There were so many faces in the room I had never seen before. 

I whispered to our car-in-a-tent friend Zach, “Who is that?” It was Drew’s roommate. It turned out that Drew had a whole life I didn’t know. These were the friends that he’d always wanted me to meet– I just never, ever imagined I would meet them like this. 

A few days after Drew passed, Bradley, someone that I only knew briefly before Drew died, came up to me in the hallway. 

“Drew talked about you all the time. He said we would be great friends,” Bradley told me. 

I smiled, “He always told me the same thing about you.”

Those days after Drew’s accident are seared in my memory. I went from barely knowing Drew’s friends to spending every moment with them. Huddled together, we clung to each other for protection, as if to somehow prevent the waves of grief from hitting us all. 

But of course they still hit. I remember crying, furiously scrolling my phone and Facebook for any photo of me and Drew, knowing that we would never take another. (I was devastated that our Krzyzewski-Ville car theft photos were gone forever.) 

And Bradley, who I had barely known before, suddenly became one of my best friends– along with so many new “Drew Friends.” 

That was fifteen years ago. I knew Drew for three years. He’s been gone five times that long. 

Drew and I will never make a new memory together. That is a fact I faced long ago. But the wild, magical, precious thing about Drew is that he gave me so many new friends in his passing. And it’s through his friends that we get to keep making memories together. I have fifteen years of text messages, of phone calls, of photos, from them. My first memories with so many of them are because of Drew and those first few brutal days, so our friendships  are intermixed and sprinkled with grief. But the beautiful thing is that the memories keep getting made.

When Duke basketball made it, once again, to the championships in 2025, I went to watch in-person, after a long time of not feeling up to doing so, with all of my Drew Friends. I roomed with Alexis, someone I barely knew before Drew’s accident, but who has become one of my closest friends. While it was hard to watch Duke basketball for years without feeling overwhelmed by grief for Drew, fifteen years later I can love Duke basketball again– and I’m sure Drew loves that. 

 Even though we lost the game (no, I don’t want to talk about it), I can wholeheartedly say that I enjoyed every minute of that weekend– and that is not to say that grief wasn’t there on the trip with us. Of course we talked about Drew and 2010, with bittersweet joy. 

Drew would love our Duke basketball (and football!) group chat. He would get such a kick out of how close the Drew Friends all are. How we still tease Pat about being King of Hearts freshman year, and Lauren is still the loudest (even louder than Drew was), most glittery one there. Some things never change…even when it all kind of does. 

15 years after losing my friend Drew, I am surrounded by his friends every day. Grief is not all that defines our friendships anymore, even if it began them. But there is also an understanding and depth, a sense of unspoken closeness to those friendships, that I have with no one else. Because they were all there when Drew died. They remember him. I do not have to explain myself to them, and that is a gift that no one understands if they are not part of “the club.” 

I would trade all of those friendships to not have to ever lose Drew. And yet, Drew was right all along – I do love, love, love his friends. Our friends.