Because death changes everything,
and we live in the echo of its arrival—
a quiet shift in the weight of air.

The first time I saw death,
it wore the face of someone I’d never known,
a waxen mask of emptiness.
They told me to look,
to learn to be near the absence of life,
but I left thinking death was hollow,
a thing you could touch without understanding.

Then I watched someone die.
I stood by her bed as breath turned to silence,
as something unseen slipped away.
Her body was no longer hers.
It was a doll left behind by a child who ran ahead.
And in that moment,
I learned what it meant to be mortal.

Over years, death wore many faces:
peaceful, tormented, surrounded, alone.
Each one unique,
each one leaving a fragment lodged in me,
a splinter I could not remove.

When my grandmother died,
I thought I had known the depths of grief.
But she lingers still,
in posies blooming red against the summer,
in children’s laughter,
in the swirl of milk in a cup of tea.
Her absence is a wound,
raw and unhealed,
yet threaded with the love she left behind.

Then death grew crueler—
my nephew, a stranger by distance,
a child taken too soon.
I held my sister’s grief in words that could not reach,
across oceans, across empty spaces.
The miles between us stretched tighter than a noose.

And my friend—
his death, a jagged tear in the fabric of love,
left me drowning in the unspoken.
The haunting question:
did he know how much I loved him?
Now regret writes his name in my heart,
each letter bleeding with what I never said.

The pandemic turned death into a procession—
faceless strangers,
loved ones who couldn’t say goodbye.
A symphony of zippers sliding closed,
careful hands packing bodies into cold rooms.
Meaning stripped away,
yet tenderness lingers in the rituals of the living.

How can you stand so close to death
and not feel the weight of living differently?
To witness the dying is to see yourself,
to know your time is finite,
that the only moments that matter
are the ones slipping through your hands.

Every death takes something irreplaceable,
a piece of the universe lost forever,
leaving wounds that time does not mend.
Yet these wounds are treasures,
spaces that once held magic,
a love so vast it shaped your world.

Death changes everything.
Grief carves its mark into a lifetime,
but love makes the carving worthwhile.