Mourning
Grief enters with a whisper, rearranges the furniture and then asks me to sit beside it.
I was raised to believe that Death was a clear and sacred threshold: a final breath, a closed casket, a soul ascending in accordance with divine judgment. I was warned to fear sin, to prepare for Death as if it were a looming examination, and to walk the narrow path that leads to salvation. However, Death isn’t always the body decaying within the solitude of a grave, but a soul whispering through forgotten winds. Perhaps, the real dead are not those buried beneath headstones, but those walking around with tombs in their chests.
In many ways, it is not death that should be feared by man, but rather the thought of never having lived at all. We fixate on the unknown, on what comes after we pass, and yet fail to see how easily life turns on us. When it does – when reality shifts, when something breaks inside, we get stuck.
That is the moment you stop living. I know this because several months ago I died.
No one noticed. I wasn’t in the casket.
Denial
I watch the door.
Wait for the storm of it,
but Death does not kick it in.
It buzzes like a fly.
As if unsure it belongs here,
among school shoes and crayon drawings.
Maybe Death will pause?
Kindly stop –
Holding a Carriage for myself –
And immortality.
Fides omnia vincit.
Faith conquers all.
When I was a child, I believed in Heaven.
Sunday mornings were cloaked in pressed dresses and quiet reverence, the hum of hymns heard like lullabies through the church’s hollow nave. We filed into the pews like rows of small, obedient soldiers. Our knees were bruised by prayer, and our eyes – we had lifted those up to the Good Shepherd window, with his crook arced upward and the lamb’s small body curved along his neck. I believed because to question was to sin, and to sin was to fall.
I am still afraid of falling.
But I couldn’t comprehend the Latin, or the fish, or the lamb or the sorrow behind Saint Lucy’s eyes so, instead I imagined there was something above us. Heaven was up. It was tucked just beyond the clouds, behind the blue, floating somewhere close to the sun. Just up. I’d tiptoe barefoot in the backyard, gaze past the clouds towards the sky and make confession and declare my faith to God.
One afternoon four years ago, I was folding laundry on the living room floor when the phone rang on the table beside me. The screen lit up: incoming call from Grandpa, and Mum answered with her usual bright hello. It was Grandma’s voice, not his.
“Grandpa’s gone.”
The shirt slipped from my hands and crumpled onto the carpet. None of us spoke. Mum stayed with the phone pressed to her ear, as if waiting for the words to be taken back.
My grandpa always carried a quiet certainty. He believed that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
So, I clung to this belief like it could anchor me in his absence. I told myself he had risen. That he was watching. That he was waiting.
I didn’t know it then; that was the first time I began to feel the split, between what I was taught and what I felt. I mistook it for mourning, but it was something quieter. The beginning of a fracture.
Belief. God. Heaven.
It wasn’t dramatic, it just evaporated like fog lifting from glass. I started to see space not as holy, but as endless. Cold. Rational. If the universe unravelled without end, where could Heaven possibly rest? Where could my grandpa be? I couldn’t locate him in the galaxy. Couldn’t pin him to a star or tuck him behind Saturn’s curve. I was at a loss. How was I supposed to make sense of a soul I couldn’t locate? Instead, I pointed “up”, not out of faith, but desperation.
My mother once sat beneath the endless sky of the Great Plains and was told a story. A Lakota legend: when we die, our spirit walks the Pleiades constellation, the Spirit Road, guided by the stars of our ancestors. There, we become part of that shimmering trail, a new star in the night sky.
Sometimes, late at night, I find myself standing barefoot in the backyard again, like I did when Grandpa used to point out constellations. He’d trace them with his finger in the air, swearing Canis Major looked just like a sheepdog keeping watch. I look up now, searching. Not with belief. Not with hope. But with longing. Sometimes, on very quiet nights, I almost think I see him there, waiting in the stars where the old sheepdog still keeps watch.
I was eleven when I realised my parents were older than the others, marked by the day I was taunted by the other girls for bringing my sixty-year-old, “aged” dad to the school Father’s Day breakfast. While other fathers ran marathons or wore backwards caps on weekends, mine sipped Ceylon black tea and read The Age newspaper. It was never something I resented. It was a simple fact of my existence.
Even then, I carried a fear like a stone in my pocket: that time was already slipping away. I was afraid they wouldn’t make it to the milestones, to the soft-lit futures I imagined: the white dress, the shaky hands walking me down the aisle, the Sunday roasts with noisy grandchildren and old stories told again and again. My fear was shapeless then, like mist.
Not yet Grief, but the anticipation of it.
***
“Everything flows, nothing stands still.”
– Heraclitus
…
I remember the moment as if it’s been carved into my ribs: the way my mother sat at the kitchen table, as if bracing for an earthquake only she could feel. My father, sister and I filled the remaining chairs, their lacquered legs uneven on cracked tiles, groaning beneath us like weary witnesses. The ceiling sagging above us with its yellowing paint blistering at the corners like scorched flesh, right as the bulb flickered with a nervous stutter and the table swallowed the light whole until the room felt submerged, like the last breath we took before we drowned.
The word cancer left her lips, soft and deliberate, like it might shatter if spoken too loud.
Breast cancer.
Two words. That was all it took. The world, once ordinary, flipped on its axis.
I looked at her and saw the same woman who had wiped my nose with her sleeve, who hummed to herself while peeling apples, who smelled of eucalyptus and warm laundry. Suddenly, she looked different, like her body had become an entity that could betray her. An entity that could end. I convinced myself it wasn’t real.
She tried to soften it. Said the surgery was “just a precaution.” Her mouth smiled, but her eyes spoke in parentheses, carrying what she couldn’t admit aloud. After the mastectomy, her chest was bound in bandages. She said it didn’t hurt that much, that she was fine.
The scans came back clear, and for a time I let myself believe that the worst had passed, as I clung to that word “clear” like it could baptise me in hope. But the silence that followed wasn’t peace. I was already in Heraclitus’s River, the current carrying me on, heedless of my wanting.
The cancer returned.
“It’s in my lungs. My spine. My bones.” The room went quiet after that, even though my Mum kept explaining, only a low roar filled my ears. Her hands were knotted in her lap, fingers white at the knuckles, her two forefingers locked tight around each other.
She started to disappear. Her breath became shallow; her hands trembled like leaves in winter. The space between the kitchen and the couch became a pilgrimage.
Still, she smiled.
Still, she loved.
Still, she asked me how my day was, as if the world hadn’t narrowed into the soft hush of survival. My life rearranged itself into rituals of goodbye. I held her hand through the sickness, watched as the chemo hollowed her, watched as her ribs rose like questions against her skin.
My Father once said, “Life is lived in little moments.” So, I began to hoard them, like a child stuffing stars into their pockets, afraid the night might come and swallow everything whole.
I tried to pin Time down, to press it like dried flowers between the pages of memory: the way she smelled of lavender and lemon, the softness of her voice when she thought I was asleep, the gentle click of her rings against a mug as she made a latte she could no longer drink.
Every “I love you” tucked into an ordinary Tuesday.
If I could just keep enough of her, then maybe she wouldn’t slip away into hospital sheets, into the hum of machines, into the morphine-laced silence that crept in after everything stopped.
Maybe endings were only for people who stopped believing?
Grief, I’ve learned, doesn’t always come as a scream. Sometimes it’s denial, stealing all the old familiar faces.
I remember coming home from school one Wednesday and the world began to split.
The afternoon light fell through the windows like it always had, golden and careless and yet everything felt wrong. My mother was in bed. Too quiet. Too still. My father sat my siblings and I down and told us that he was worried. Very worried.
At seventeen, I still believed my father was invincible. So, when he cried, I told myself, he was just scared, that he was overreacting, spiralling, catastrophising. My mother was going to be fine. She walked down the stairs, into the car, to the hospital. They told her, her spine had collapsed, sixty seven percent destroyed. Tumours blooming like rot through the bone. I remember thinking that she once walked on that spine. Walked. Like it was nothing. Like she was made of something unbreakable.
It’s now been made clear to me; even supernovas burn out.
In those first few days, I moved through the world as if I no longer belonged to it. I was numb. I felt like Time had stopped. I had stepped out of the current and sat beside her instead, pressing my palms into the edges of every second like I could flat iron them to keep moments from wrinkling, from tearing. I clung to them with knuckles white, bruised by hope and bandaged in denial.
I wanted to believe there was a life beyond this ache, where things go back to normal. It would be a spring afternoon again; she would pick me up from school, and I’d see her hand reach out to turn down the old Bollywood cassette that never left the stereo. Singing the lyrics under her breath. Something inside me knew, I couldn’t waste what was left because that future I prayed for, it didn’t exist. So, I lay down beside her and held her hand through the blur of afternoons and the ache of dawns that came too fast, as her body curled inward, smaller each day, ribs pressing forward like prayer hands.
Anger
Motherhood never taught me
how to parent while perishing.
To sing lullabies
with a traitor’s tongue,
each note bruised
by the body that betrays it. And still,
Death pockets my pulse.
spins it beneath the lamplight.
“Look here,” it murmurs,
and my heart obeys,
naïve,
applauding the magician
while forgetting
it was in my pocket
to begin with.
The trick was never in the flourish.
It was in the theft.
The vanishing
of everything I meant to keep.
I started living in a haunted house, only the ghost was Grief.
The floor became tiled with eggshells as the walls stitched themselves together with strands of hair, and peeling wallpaper that pulsed like bruised flesh. Ceilings sagged with mould.
So, I locked the doors, boarded the windows, drew the curtains until the rooms bled black. I ran from room to room with duct tape and desperation, trying to hold the seams together with shaking hands. But Death kept throwing stones, chipping at the foundation, fracturing the walls, cracking the floorboards. No matter how fast I moved, I couldn’t stop it.
The house began to collapse.
Before Death could enter, Grief did.
It came early, uninvited. It didn’t knock. It seeped through cracks in the plaster, lingered in corners, whispered from the wardrobe. It curled up beside me in bed, pressed its weight into my chest, and filled my mouth with dust.
Then asked:
What will you do when she’s gone?
It wasn’t about losing her. It was about watching her leave, slowly, while still holding my hand. I was learning how to mourn a living person. How to hold someone so tightly while knowing I couldn’t keep them.
I tried anyway. Because love isn’t logical. It claws at Time.
And in those final weeks, I began to realise…
I hadn’t noticed the last time I pretended to be asleep in the backseat, just to feel my mother lift me up and carry me inside. I hadn’t noticed the last time the rain came and washed away the chalk cities I built on the pavement while she watched from the porch. I hadn’t noticed when I left the plastic play phones unanswered, no longer waiting for her voice to answer back.
I hadn’t noticed when the monster beneath my bed stopped whispering in the dark and started appearing in the mirror. At first, it was just a flicker in the corner of my eye, a shadow that refused to follow when I moved.
Then it stared back, fully formed.
I stared too, fists curled. Its hair was a nest of serpents, coiling restlessly across its scalp. Its skin was pocked like eroding stone, and its eyes gleamed with a glassy, venomous light. I remember wanting to scream at the monster, to drive my fists through the mirror until the gaze itself shattered to dust.
Instead, my hand hovered, useless as her eyes locked mine.
The room fell silent.
I couldn’t move.
Already the weight had gathered in my ribs, heavy, unyielding, as if the mirror had begun to calcify me where I stood. It settled in my bones: the disappointment, the regret, the heaviness. I ached to crack the surface, to break that stone.
It couldn’t be fair. It couldn’t be my fault. I blamed Time. I imagined it hid cowardly somewhere just out of reach. I wanted to drag Time into the light and make it look me in the eye. I wanted to put Time on trial, to interrogate it. Where had you gone? Why so fast? Why so cruel? I had wanted to sit at Time’s grave and read its epitaph until the stone eroded, and the carved words faded into nothing. I would have stayed there, whispering questions into the dirt, until the etched letters on the gravestone faded and Time’s fallen hand was defaced.
Inside her room, what little light dared to enter was swallowed whole, consumed by the walls like a grey sponge gone dry. The bed was a low altar. Skin papered thin, shadow pooling beneath her cheekbones, as the scent of antiseptic lotion clung to the air, and tubes curled like vines along the side of the mattress. I couldn’t sit. I didn’t speak. It seemed to me that the room had become a mouth, half-open, waiting to swallow anything that dared to enter.
So, I stood in the doorway, unsure whether I was meant to enter or kneel.
Then, I heard it: the Death rattle. That broken rhythm of lungs preparing to leave. The body collapsing inward. That rhythmic sound that filled the silence like a ticking clock winding down.
I moved through the house like a shadow, sitting beside her, checking her pulse, watching for the moment the thread would finally snap.
Listening.
Waiting.
Afraid to blink.
By 7:30pm she was nearly gone. Her voice had long since retreated, dissolved into garbled syllables, not quite words, not quite breath.
Still, I kept searching for something to hold onto. A final I love you. The light catching her eyes one last time, some small sacred punctuation to this unravelling. But Death doesn’t write endings. It erases. It isn’t a chapter that ends with a full stop, but a sentence that fades mid-word. It was within this erasure; I began to seethe.
No one tells you how quiet it is, how the body forgets itself in stages, how breath becomes something you count like prayer beads, closer and closer to stillness. I thought it would be more cinematic. Instead, it’s waiting and in that waiting, I kept looking, desperate, for some proof that she was still there. Some fragment of the woman who once held the whole world in her hands. She wasn’t gone yet but she was going.
I wanted to scream at Death, at the useless machines in the corner. I wanted to shake her and demand she stay. I hated myself for being still. I hated how the world kept moving.
Going.
I thought if I held on tight enough, she might stay. That maybe God would bargain with Grief. That if I prayed hard enough. Loud enough. He’d send her back.
But there was no thunder. No miracle. Just a quiet room. Just a body slowly letting go.
Going.
At 8:32 PM, she was taken.
Gone.
I wanted to scream at the sky, dig my nails into the warped oak floorboards, tear apart the white cracked plaster walls just to find where she’d gone.
It didn’t make sense, how the woman who had been my mother for every breath, every scraped knee, every whispered lullaby, could suddenly be gone. She had been fading slowly, yes, but even a slow disappearance doesn’t prepare you for the emptiness it leaves behind. For years, she was my constant, her voice the background hum of my world, her presence
was my anchor. I kept waiting for her to call my name from another room. The silence didn’t break.
It settled.
I raged at the world, for not pausing. At my father, for being too quiet.
At her for leaving. At myself for letting her go. Against the dying of the light.
Telling family over the phone felt like dragging reality through barbed wire, like forcing something sacred through something cold and mechanical. Like a blunt instrument. There was no grace in it, no ceremony. Just the brutal simplicity of truth.
Sobs, sharp, immediate. Guttural. Then screams. That was the moment Death became real. Not just a shadow hovering in the corners, but its arrival. Its permanence.
I wanted to reach up, tear the hourglass from whatever cruel God put it there, and shatter it. Then let the sands scatter like bone dust across the floor. If Time couldn’t be kind, then it didn’t deserve to go on.
***
Memento Mori, Mors Vincit Omnia.
Remember you must die, Death always wins.
A phrase carved into the history of humanity. Roman generals, even at the height of their triumph, were shadowed by a servant’s murmur. A reminder that their laurels would one day wither. Centuries later, medieval artists smuggled death into their canvases: a skull balanced in the corner of a banquet, a bone half-hidden in folds of silk, beauty already rotting in its frame. Across the Atlantic, Puritan gravestones bore the winged skull, chiselled deep into granite as though the earth itself insisted on speaking. To live, it seemed was always to dwell in the company of mortality.
What kind of peace is there in surrender? What kind of wisdom is it to simply accept that we are all ticking clocks waiting to stop?
We don’t get to choose the hour. There is no warning bell, no pause button, no gentle descent. Just a quiet internal mechanism buried somewhere deep, beneath ribs, beneath memory, counting down. Then one day, it just stops.
8:32 PM.
Time of death. Time of ending. Time of theft.
That number lives inside me now, fossilised into the framework of my world. It doesn’t pass like the others do. It waits. Hangs in the air like a taunt. It flickers back at me from microwave screens, from car dashboards, from the fluorescent faces of digital clocks, as if daring me to forget.
How dare Time keep moving after she left?
No one prepares you for the fury that comes with loss. The injustice of it. The helpless, directionless anger that seeps into your ribs. Everyone talks about sadness, about healing, but no one warns you that Grief has teeth. It bites.
So, when the clocks strike 8:32, I clench. I’ve shattered seven of them, ripped them from walls, hurled them to the ground, smashed their glass faces just to convince myself they were lying. That Time hadn’t moved on. That she wasn’t really gone. Death didn’t come gently. It didn’t ask permission. And I wasn’t ready.
If Death is the victor, why am I the one left hollowed, like a house after the fire’s gone out?