Unsaid

Little by little, my soul is filling with the faces of people who saw me grow up, people I haven’t seen in years, and sadly, some I will never see again. Not even on the day of their burial, because I refuse to visit a body I didn’t see in life, lying in a coffin at a funeral home.

Parents stay quiet. They stay very quiet. They carry a sepulchral silence inside them, a silence that will never be broken because they have made a pact with pain, pride, and the habit of storing every inner conversation they don’t understand, every situation that feels wrong but has become normal over time. They have learned to live with pain, sadness, distance, detachment, nostalgia, and the loss of people they will never see again.

My mind is filling with images of people I will never see again. I search through my archive of memories, trying to hold on to the last time I saw them, the last conversations, the pleasant moments. I also face the guilt that invades me because I didn’t reach out, not out of necessity or reason, but simply because I prioritized other things, including my own family irresponsibility. I know they could have reached out too, but this isn’t about what they didn’t do. It’s about what I didn’t do and could have done.

I know she is hurting. It hurts her that her loved one doesn’t think of her anymore. It hurts her not to have seen her in so long. It hurts to realize that the chances of seeing her alive again are almost none. I know it hurts me too. It hurts, and I try to hold back my tears, to normalize the pain just like she does, because I have entered that stage of life where all the elders who watched me grow are beginning to die.

I am at peace with the idea of one day not being here, but I still haven’t come to terms with the physical loss of a relative, with some exceptions. I say physical because some people, through distance, have been gone for a long time already. So, in moments like these, I think again: why didn’t I call? Why didn’t I buy that plane ticket and visit them? Why did I normalize the silence on both sides? Why?

Death is the most certain, the most faithful thing we have. Nothing belongs to us more than our unknown expiration date. So why do we act like naive teenagers, ignoring that one day we will grow old? Why do we ignore that everyone will leave? Why do we postpone, plan, and convince ourselves there will be time later? How beautiful our ego is, the one that dares to have as much faith as the arrogance that blinds us into believing we are eternal on this earthly plane. Spirit inside a body.

It is not my place to cry when they leave if, in truth, I left a long time ago.

Picture credit: @dollyr