My friend Champy lost his father today.
And I've been sitting with that all day, not knowing what to do with it.
I didn't lose anyone. My parents are alive. I haven't experienced that specific kind of grief the one that comes when the person who gave you life is suddenly gone. And yet something about today hit me differently. Something cracked open.
Maybe it's the proximity of it. Watching someone you care about go through something that enormous, that final it forces you to look at things you usually keep at arm's length.
Like death. Like what it actually is. Like where we all go.
The question nobody can answer.
The more I sit with it, the more I realize that what scares me most isn't death itself.
It's the secret it keeps.
Think about it. We've mapped the ocean floor. We've sent machines to Mars. We've decoded the human genome. We've done things our ancestors would have called miracles. And yet not one person has come back from the other side to tell us what's there.
Not one.
Every civilization in human history has tried to answer this question. The Egyptians built pyramids. The Greeks wrote about the underworld. Christianity speaks of heaven. Islam of paradise. Buddhism of rebirth. Hinduism of reincarnation. Millions of people have believed, prayed, hoped, and theorized.
And still nobody knows.
The most brilliant minds that ever lived scientists, philosophers, poets, prophets all died taking the answer with them.
That silence is the most mysterious thing in the universe.
What it must feel like to lose a parent young.
I keep thinking about what Champy must be feeling right now. And I realize I genuinely don't know not really, not from the inside.
I imagine it's a kind of grief that doesn't have a bottom. You reach for someone who has always been there someone who was there before you even had a memory and suddenly the line is disconnected. Permanently.
No more calls. No more advice. No more of whatever specific thing only that person could give you.
I think about all the people who've lost a parent young. Who grew up carrying that absence. Who had to figure out parts of life without the person who was supposed to help them navigate it.
How do you hold something that big?
I don't have an answer. I don't think there is one. I think you just... carry it. And eventually you learn to carry it differently. Not lighter just differently.