On the friendships we build at work and the one I lost six years ago today.

Six years. I think about it every September 18th, and the time passed doesn’t make it less difficult.

On that day in 2020, Matthias vanished. A violent wave off a coastline he had traveled to photograph (which is the official assumption) swept him away. He was on assignment for a role I had helped him find, doing the one thing that made him happiest, when the WhatsApp thread that had carried us for years fell silent. His photo of some improbable bird. My sarcastic volley back. His bone-dry reply. Then nothing.

Here is the detail that’s important: we met at work.

Not at school, not through family, not in a crowded bar. Across a conference table, deep in discussion about all things Quality, where two people were paid to argue with the status quo. Bonds made in that setting get filed under “coworkers,” as though a shared badge disqualifies the connection from meaning anything real. I have never bought it. A fair number of the people who shaped my life most did so on a payroll running right beside my own.

We were not alike:

Me	Matthias
Loud, passionate, all shades of grey	Quiet, stoic, black and white
Center of the room	Watching from the sideline
Led with the vision	Got us to the goal

He hated the spotlight our work kept inviting. Questioning the why behind a broken process tends to paint a target on your back. He stepped into it anyway, beside me, against all of his instincts. My fiercest critic in one breath, my most loyal defender in the next, now and then inside the very same meeting.

What changed it from a good working rapport into a genuine friendship took time, and it took Germany. As my unofficial guide there, he would collect me on Sunday afternoons to beat back jet lag with a punishing hike or a long, meandering drive through the countryside. It began as duty. He was nothing if not respectful of a hierarchy, and I was his boss. It did not stay duty. Somewhere along those drives it turned into ritual, and the ritual into trust. The pictures he sent stopped being holiday postcards and became his actual life: sunrise off his balcony, a new lens he was proud of, a work problem he wanted to bounce off of me.

That is the weird chemistry of a friendship built at work. You are not together by choice. You share the strange, lonely geography of it: the airports, the hotel breakfasts eaten alone, the exhausting wins of a “no finding” audit. Nobody back home quite understands any of it. Matthias and I once grabbed a rushed coffee in a Frankfurt terminal between connecting flights, two transatlantic lives together for eleven minutes. My husband understands this. He knows my “work peeps” are a second family.

My own family adored Matthias, he was the quirky one who turned up at holidays bearing the best chocolate anyone had ever tasted. To them he was a lovely colleague, and they could not fully feel the size of the hole he left. That gap is the loneliness of losing a work friend: the people closest to you struggle to grade the loss on the correct scale.

Here is my consolation, and it is the whole reason I write this again each year: I know he knew. I told him how much I appreciated him. Loudly, in my thoroughly un-corporate way. I thanked him for his mind, his spine, his friendship. I can still see the faintly embarrassed smile that crossed his face whenever I turned effusive.

So I try to think of where he would be now. Today I have placed him on that Namibian safari he always talked about, camera raised, waiting on the light. Or tucked into a quiet cottage somewhere in the Alps, perfectly at peace in the solitude he loved. These are the stories I tell myself, and I have decided I am allowed to.

The lesson he left is blunt, so I will hand it over the same way. Tell your people. The mentor. The work wife or the work husband. The colleague who makes a brutal week survivable. Tell them what they add to your life. Not to your metrics, to your life. Be direct. Be passionate. Be grateful. Corporate decorum is never worth the regret of having left it unsaid.

To all my peeps: you are my tribe. Thank you for being it.

And to Matthias. I still catch myself thinking of you every time I see an electric blue BMW, half-expecting your wave.