Death comes for everyone

A daughter’s loss

Death comes for everyone

Especially the larger-than-life ones. The ones you swear will outlive time itself.

It’s been almost two months since you passed, and I’m still in shock. I still can’t believe you’re gone.

I find myself crying in the strangest places, unable to make sense of my emotions. It’s almost impossible to accept that Nnanyelugo. The Big Joe. Lawyer. Okwuluora. My father—is gone. Just like that. After only three months of illness.

People offer condolences. They say they’re sorry. Then they go back to their lives.

I’m the one who has to keep living with the ache.

It comes for me after everyone has left. In the silence. In the ordinary moments. I never began this journey beside your hospital bed believing it would end with you dying in my arms.

Now you’re gone, and I don’t know anyone I can hand this grief to. I built a life that kept people at a distance, and now I’m living inside the consequences of that choice.

Today I cried at the gym, between sets. I was lucky I had the place to myself.

I don’t want to be alone.

I don’t want to carry on without you.

Yet every morning I wake up and do exactly that.

Against my will.

I wake up and head to the gym. I write when the weight becomes too heavy. I blast music loud enough to drown out my own thoughts.

Worst of all, my lungs keep breathing.

Last night I woke up crying. Even in my dreams, I couldn’t understand that you were gone.

My mind still refuses to imagine a world where you don’t exist.

There is no version of my life that doesn’t begin with you in it.

And maybe that’s the cruelest part of grief.

The world has somehow found a way to keep moving…

while a part of mine stopped the day you left.