The Only Honest Thing

On Death

They say it’s the end,
but I think it might be
the only appointment
none of us will miss.
Strange comfort in that
how it waits for everyone
with the patience of a mother,
never early, never rushing,
just…certain.

We spend our lives
building walls against it
gyms and vitamins and insurance policies,
as if we could negotiate
with the only honest thing
we’ll ever know.
But sometimes, in the pause
between heartbeats,
I feel it

not as enemy,
but as the period
at the end of a long, beautiful sentence
that was starting to run on.
There’s a sweetness to it,
isn’t there?
The way it makes every morning
a small resurrection,
every goodbye a rehearsal
for the final one
we’ll actually mean.

My grandmother understood.
Near the end, she stopped
fighting the tide,
let it carry her like a leaf
back to wherever leaves go
when autumn finishes its work.
She said dying felt like
remembering something
she’d forgotten at birth
a key sliding into a lock
she didn’t know she’d been carrying.

Maybe that’s why babies cry
when they arrive
not from cold or light,
but from the sudden weight
of having to be separate again,
of having to pretend
they don’t remember
where they came from.

And death?
Death is just the long exhale
after a lifetime of holding our breath,
the moment we finally stop
pretending we’re permanent,
stop clinging to the fiction
that we were meant to stay.
I’ve started to think of it
not as darkness,
but as the ultimate intimacy
the one experience
we’ll face without masks,
without small talk,
without the armor
we’ve welded to our bones.

Just us.
Finally, unbearably, completely
ourselves.
There’s a strange peace in knowing
that whatever waits
silence or symphony,
nothing or everything
it’s the one true thing
in a world that taught us
to fear the truth.

So maybe death isn’t the thief
we’ve made it out to be.
Maybe it’s the teacher
who’s been waiting all along
to show us the only lesson
that actually matters:
that we were always
just borrowed light,
meant to shine briefly
before returning
to the source.

And if that’s true,
then dying isn’t losing
it’s finally,
after a lifetime of wandering,
going home.