Death does not end on a two-way highway like most things. We feel its depth only when we lose someone. Because the other end of it involves us passing far away, and from there, no one reports back.

When someone we simply know dies, we take a breath, mourn for a moment, and within minutes we are back to our to-do list. Life resumes before we even notice.

Then there are people we know closely enough that the news pulls us into a brief, quiet reckoning. A moment where the maze of this world becomes briefly visible before closing again.

And then there are the loved ones.

That kind of death almost tears us apart. The smile we saw, the conversations we had every day are simply not there anymore. An odd silence fills the room, fills life itself, and everything starts to seem meaningless. We do not disappear from the world. We simply stop involving ourselves in it. The world keeps revolving. The clock does not stop. Time keeps ticking and slowly, maybe after weeks, maybe months, we find ourselves adjusting back into the rhythm of living. But there are still moments when the heart quietly hits a wall. The realisation that we lost our giggles with them. That we lost the once taken-for-granted privilege of simply calling them. That we will never see their face again.

And then there is the tier most of us refuse to even think about.

Losing the one who gave meaning to our life.

This fear does not announce itself loudly. It sits as a hollow in the chest, unnamed, unspoken. For most of us, this loss has not come yet, and probably will not, because even as a thought it is unbearable. We shut it down before it finishes forming.

This is the final tier.

Above grief. Above mourning. Above even the thought of our own death. Because somehow the death of self feels imaginable, tolerable even. But the death of the person who makes the world make sense, that is something else entirely. Most of us will spend our whole lives quietly hoping we never have to find out what that actually feels like.

In the middle of the night, or in the early morning when the birds are chirping, a calm thought suddenly surfaces. We lose people to death. But do we actually lose them?

I came across a quote on social media: “Out of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.”

Looking at the graveyards, I disagree.

Whoever wrote that either never truly loved someone or never lost someone to death. Because the ones who have lost keep returning to that final bed. They come back to cover the grave with polythene so it does not get wet in the rain. They know the soul is not there. They know the body is not there. Yet they keep coming back. Decorating it with flowers. Nurturing it. Protecting it from the rain as though it is still someone who can feel cold.

They keep coming back because that grave is the only connection left.

We keep carrying them in our prayers, in return visits, and in the quiet ache of every Eid morning and every special occasion. Along the way, we cover a grave with polythene against rain that the body beneath can no longer feel. We keep carrying them because we cannot move on from love. We cannot move on from the last conversation we never got to have. It remains in the corner of our hearts simply because death does not warn most of us to have one last conversation.

Death comes every second in this world. And every time it comes, it shatters the entire world of someone. Almost every time, it comes with cruelty.