I’m at a funeral ground as I’m writing this. People around me are wailing and it’s vibrating through my chest even if I’m not the one mourning the loudest. Anyway, I thought scrolling through Pinterest would distract me for a moment, maybe numb the ache building in my throat, but instead, the very first thing I saw was this quote:
“Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.”
And I don’t know if it’s strange, or insensitive, or simply one of those brutally honest human moments, but I found myself agreeing with it, especially here, surrounded by loss.
This is not me romanticizing death, God knows there’s nothing poetic about the cold stillness of it, but trust me, there are losses that don’t wear black. Losses that don’t come with condolences or casseroles or people patting your back, encouraging you to stay strong. Some losses are alive, breathing and laughing somewhere else. And some, oh they still text you on your birthday.
There is this cruelty in losing someone who still walks the earth. Who still posts selfies. Who still exists in a world you can scroll into but not touch. A cruelty in watching someone you once knew, someone whose name lived in the softest corner of your chest becomes a stranger with your memories.
I’m sorry if this bothers anyone but death at least has finality. It draws a line you cannot cross. It hurts, but the hurt has shape. You can name it, hold it and just freaking grieve it.
But the kind of loss where the person is still here, where they choose a world you’re no longer in, where they let the version of you they loved fade like an old photograph? That loss is formless and so endless. It’s a wound with a pulse.
Death doesn’t ghost you. Death doesn’t forget the sound of your laugh. Death doesn’t walk past you in a grocery store, pretending not to see you, nor does it post pictures with someone new two weeks later.
You learn, painfully, that the human heart was never designed for this particular grief, the grief of someone still living but gone. And yet, it is a grief we face more often than funerals.
Perhaps, death is the kindest way to lose someone because sadly, all the other ways feel like dying slowly, piece by piece, while the person you lost goes on living whole.