I wonder where you’ve gone and when I do I wonder how those you loved and who loved you are wondering their own thoughts, their own pain.
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To XXXX
I am looking in and you are dead.
A month. We were getting to know each other for a month. Then you died.
I said goodbye to you on a Tuesday, told you to enjoy your day off. Then I woke up, told you were dead. That’s my story but when I walked to work that morning I thought about your family’s story—your father, your mother, your siblings, your girlfriend. I kept thinking about them and I was looking in. The city I grew up in was suddenly full of you.
I have to believe there is something better—some place where twenty-one-year-olds don’t die of a brain haemorrhage, a place where the ugliness within humanity and biology is lost.
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You died a year and a half after my grandfather, five months after my grandmother, two months after my father, a week after my uncle. You died and your death startled to rattle me in a way all the other deaths hadn’t before. You died and I started spending a lot of my time trying to rationalise death and the afterlife.
I was at a friend’s and I told him about you. He is atheist and asked me what I believe. “I have to believe there’s something after this,” I said. “I don’t know what but I have to believe it.” He said my response was more emotional than he expected. “Maybe I’m emotional about the afterlife,” I said and it felt like the most honest thing I’ve said in months. I have to believe there is something better—some place where twenty-one-year-olds don’t die of a brain haemorrhage, a place where the ugliness within humanity and biology is lost.
And that’s what death is. That’s what living has become—looking at the empty spaces you and all the others once stood in.
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I wonder where you’ve gone and when I do I wonder how those you loved and who loved you are wondering their own thoughts, their own pain. I do not know them. I barely knew you, but I am a ghost of all the people I’ve lost and as I look in, I see that the random, brutal, sudden loose of you has propelled your loved ones into this ghost town.
A few days ago I turned and expected to see you there—but you weren’t. And that’s what death is. That’s what living has become—looking at the empty spaces you and all the others once stood in. I sound angry and I think I am. Not at you but death. For stealing your life.
People tell me not to be angry, not to be angry at something you can’t change. I’m not angry at the small things anymore, that’s one thing death has carved into me, but now I get angry at the bigger things. I get angry and try to understand. And can’t. Completely.
I asked you to write me a note. A reminder. I found it the day you died. I tore it out of the book.
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Three days before you died I was thinking about mortality. Not just mine but others—life in general. My complete fear of dying and not being finished. Death itself doesn’t scare me—it’s the time I had, that life I had. Even if there is something after this, I want to achieve what I want, I want to live the life I have planned before I die.
I asked you to do me a favour.
I asked you to write me a note. A reminder.
I found it the day you died. I tore it out of the book. I put it in my pocket and kept it. Because I’m sentimental, because I felt I needed something in this weird amputation.
When they told me you were dead I thought you’d been hit by a car or murdered. I didn’t think about the obvious. You have all died out of illness or sudden bleeds, brain ruptures, clots and failures. You have all died in a way that is impossible to stop.
I don’t really know why I wrote this letter, as I said I’m looking in, barely. This is the pain of your loved ones, I am a by-stander. But your death has had an effect upon me and maybe part of me wanted to write this letter to say good bye and I hope that my dreams are true and there is some place better where you’re peaceful.
In that life, we can continue getting to know one another.
Best wishes,
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