Both of my parents lost their fathers young.
I know this the way you know facts about your parents — as background, as something that was always true, mentioned occasionally and never dwelt on. It took me an unreasonably long time to convert it from a fact into an image.
Two people, roughly the age I am now, in a country they had not yet left, absorbing the largest loss available, and then getting up and going to work and eventually getting on a plane and starting over somewhere else.
And then never really talking about it, because that generation didn't.
They were my age.
the fear, stated plainly
Here is mine, and I do not think it is unusual, I just think people don't say it out loud:
I do not want to outlive everyone I love.
Not I am afraid to die — that one is abstract and I can put it down. This one is specific. I am afraid of the version where I am the last one holding all of it. Where every story has only one witness left and no one to check it against.
Feeling
A low-grade dread that arrives, reliably, on the drive back after visiting family.
Fact
Nothing about tomorrow is promised to me, to them, or to anyone I have ever met.
What I thought it meant
For a while this made me want to grip harder. Call more, record more, extract more, as though sufficient documentation would help.
What I learned later
It doesn't. The only actual response to impermanence is attention. Not more holding — better noticing.
why this is not a morbid chapter
Because the conclusion isn't dread. It's this:
The ordinary day is the whole thing. Not the milestone, not the graduation, not the photograph. The Tuesday. The unremarkable phone call where nothing gets discussed. The meal where everyone is on their phone a bit and it's fine.
Those are not the filler between the important parts. Those are what there is.
Give thanks while
people are still here.
If you take one instruction off this entire website, take this one and it isn't even mine:
Call your parents. Not for a reason. That's the point.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.