What do you do when you’ve met death? When she’s crept inside and sunk in her teeth and curled up to gnaw? What happens when you can point to the decay? When you don’t simply move about in your day-to-day, feeling distinctly mortal but not able to distinguish whether it will be a car or a cliff or a tumor or a gun that will do you in, but instead, you know and recognize your end? What happens when you know at least that, but you still can’t and won’t know anything?

All I know is that no matter how I think about it, I get tangled in and embarrassed by my thoughts; my small, paltry language falters and collapses into whining when I think on how it’s all so unfair and tragic and incomprehensible. I think about death and think about how wrong I am about death. I can’t collapse the perspective I cling to, the perspective that reasons with my guts and tells me that I’m wrong as my every instinct screams that death is evil, that it’s cheating us of all we love and all we are. I know it’s like saying the same thing about birth. How can I hate one and be delighted at the other when it happens to every single thing, every human, every Thing. Everything ends.

Death, the promise fulfilled; death defining life; death defining the beginning, middle and end; death, the contrast; death, the oath keeper; death, the end of potential, the beginning of the absolute unknowable. And I rage, just as I am supposed to, as a mortal, at the dying of the light.

Shouldn’t I know, as I wrestle, instead of wrestling, shouldn’t I know and be comforted by the fact that the one who is being taken from me has built a life that would impact me in such way? Would impact so many? A person who’s life could be defined by joy and compassion and love and kindness and beauty? It is a life defined by depth and intelligence and talent and family and love and empathy and really, could someone ask to be blessed by more?

And how can I be so selfish to make so much of this experience about myself when she is the one leaving? How do you facilitate a beautiful, graceful, love-filled exit and not be creepy/shitty/self-serving about it? I suppose the best choice would be action—channeling the sorrow and panic into good works but when it is only one whose impact is so profound, not everyone can always be doing things. Sometimes you can only sit or run quietly or loudly with your thoughts.

Perhaps sorrow for the looming utter absence of a human of great quality is allowable. Maybe it is just acceptable to be sad to lose someone so precious.