It strikes me as a poignant irony that the entirety of our existence can be encapsulated by just two significant dates: the day we enter this world and the day we depart from it.
I’ve often pondered this notion to the point where, if it were possible, I’d have engaged in a dialogue with death itself.
If death were personified, I imagine he would possess a certain finesse in his approach, akin to that of a skilled lover. Each touch deliberate, each movement measured.
He wouldn’t hasten towards your body, nor would he reveal his intentions outright. No, death would allow you the illusion of autonomy.
His seduction would be relentless, playing upon your fears and vulnerabilities until you find yourself pleading for his embrace, unable to bear the anticipation any longer.
Even when you finally surrender to his advances, I suspect he would prolong the anticipation. It is the element of suddenness that defines his essence.
He would bring you to the brink of ecstasy time and again before ultimately departing, leaving you with lingering thoughts as you lay dead.
Regardless of one’s status, age, or gender, we all have an appointed time to depart from this world. Just as we do not choose to be born, we are equally caught off guard by death’s arrival.
What remains in the end is a mere hyphen that attempts to symbolise the span of our years.
Perhaps the hyphen exists because a tombstone is too small to contain the scribblings of the entirety of our lives. Or maybe it serves as a sad reminder that life persists even after our chapter concludes.
The truth remains unchanged: irrespective of how we lived, there will always be someone who mourns after we die.
We possess the ability to impact at least one person during our time on this earth, yet even the ones that mourn us don’t mourn us forever; life marches on.
It has been said that grief is unexpressed love; a collage of memories and emotions met with the silence of absence. We swallow it down like a bitter pill, only for it to resurface, overwhelming us until we can no longer contain it.
I am not comfortable with the fact life has to go on when I lose someone that means the world to me.
I expect life to pause. To acknowledge the loss, even if it can’t grieve with me, it should not just continue replacing who I lost with other people to bandage my pain.
How many memories can our heart hold? How many people are we to meet in a lifetime, and how long should we keep being comfortable starting again?
I think it’s its arrogant way of showing us how replaceable we are.
The pain we feel when we lose someone is a confirmation to the fact that to live is to leave a mark. We write our story as we live, and we pass our legacy on, with an empty page for someone else to write on.
Time gets the praise for a surgery love performs. Love you got from the one you lost, and the love from the other people that are there, in the now, with you.
In all, I’ve learned a valuable lesson; to cherish each moment we have because every connection and memory we create in life holds importance.
We can use the remembrance of those we hold dear remains as an inspiration to live better for those to come. That is the only true way we can leave and live in this storybook called life.
Maybe the hyphen isn’t a span but God’s ellipses showing us we can make the story better.
We are all connected after all. Everything in the universe beats as one. Therefore, our love should be stronger when life tries to keep us apart. Whether alive or dead.
Don’t build connections that become unstable in the absence of the people you built them with. Reach out to that friend you once loved but fell off because of distance; remember a fun memory you shared with someone who passed.
It may not be easy, but this can be the first sentence to a beautiful paragraph.
We are not as irreplaceable as we think, but we have the immortality of memory. Why then do we use it to feel sad?
Have you ever lost someone close to you? How did you deal with the pain?
