Angelsete

My grandmother died a few years ago.

She was what I would call a young old lady. She was old, yes, but she was still herself. Still active. Still someone you expected to be there. She fell one day and broke her femur. They did surgery and after surgeries like that, they tell you to walk. To force your body forward even when it resists you. Healing, they say, depends on movement, because staying immobile can cause complications.

I knew she was in pain. And I have always struggled with other people’s pain. When someone I love is hurting, something in me freezes. I don’t run toward it. I hesitate. Not because I don’t care, but because I care too much and don’t know what to do with it. I do not know what to say. I do not know how to make it better.

I still called her. Just not as often.

I told myself she was healing. I told myself there would be more time. I told myself she would be fine and that she survived the surgery.

Then one day, my mom called me and told me she was dead.

Just like that. It is a strange thing to be told that someone who has existed your entire life no longer exists. The mind resists it. It feels like an error. Like misinformation. Like something that will be corrected soon.

A person who had existed my entire life was suddenly someone who existed only in the past.

I could not understand it. Not immediately. It felt like a nightmare. This was the woman who had known me since I entered the world. The woman whose presence had always been fixed. Certain. Permanent, in the way you assume some people are permanent.

But permanence is something we invent to comfort ourselves.

What made it harder was the lack of a final moment. There was no last meaningful conversation. No conscious goodbye. No point where I understood that I was speaking to her for the last time.

After she died, my mom and my uncle told me they saw her in their dreams. They spoke about it in a way that suggested comfort. And I waited for my turn. I waited for her to come see me too.

She never did.

That hurt me in a way I did not know how to explain. I wondered why she did not come. I wondered if it meant something. I wondered if it meant nothing. I just knew that I wanted something that would make it feel less final.

I did not tell anyone that it hurt me. It felt childish to admit it. But I wanted it. I wanted one last encounter. Even if it was only in sleep. I wanted something that felt like a goodbye.

I then realized that death is brutally final.

There is no clarification. No opportunity to correct your timing. No way to go back and give the attention you assumed you could give later.

For a long time, I could not fully accept that she was gone forever. Forever is not a word your brain understands easily. It is too absolute. Your mind keeps searching for exceptions.

But eventually, reality settles in. Not all at once. Gradually. You stop expecting new memories. You realize that everything you have of them already exists. There will be no additions.

But eventually, you stop questioning it. Not because it becomes acceptable, but because resistance changes nothing.

Loss teaches you this.

It also teaches you something about people who are still alive.

Not all goodbyes happen through death. Some happen through distance. Through withdrawal. Through silence that was not there before.

Sometimes, the other person leaves in ways that are not announced. They stop reaching for you. They stop choosing you. And you are left standing inside something that has already ended for them.

You do not get a final conversation. You do not get closure. You only get the realization, slowly and painfully, that you are alone in a place that once held two people.

This is also a kind of death.

Because something that was real is no longer real.

You don’t always get a final conversation. Sometimes there is no closing statement. No moment where both people stand in the same emotional place and acknowledge the end together.

Sometimes you are still present while they are already gone.

Because you are not just losing the person. You are losing the version of reality you believed you shared. The continuity you assumed would exist. The access you thought was stable.

And just like death, there is nothing you can do to reverse it once it happens.

Goodbyes are difficult because they force you to face the limits of your control. You cannot extend time through intention. You cannot preserve people through attachment alone.

Goodbyes strips away the illusion of permanence. They show you that nothing stays simply because you want it to. Not people. Not love. Not time.

You can only live with the fact that some endings will happen without your permission.

I no longer wait for my grandmother to appear in my dreams. I no longer question whether I did enough or said enough. I understand now that love is not measured only by final moments. It exists in the full history of what was shared. In what was ordinary. In what was consistent.

But I also understand something else.

If you have the chance to show up, do it now.

Not later. Not when it is more convenient. Not when it feels emotionally easier.

Now.

Because the hardest goodbyes are the ones you never saw coming.