Death

I saw a body yesterday.

Not on a screen. Not in a film. A real one. A family member, laid out, finished.

The face had shrivelled. Changed shape — like the person I knew had already left and whatever remained was folding into itself. Liquid seeped from the belly and groin. The legs were sticks.

I stood there and looked. Not because I wanted to. Because something in me needed to see what we become.

This. Exactly this. Skin pulling away from bone. Fluid where breath used to be. A shape in a room that used to be someone who ate and argued and slept and had plans for next week.

What hit me was not grief.

It was a stack of things arriving at once — the way truth does when it has been waiting. That could be me. What was any of it for. I need to move. What is the use of all of it. And underneath all of that, a thought so quiet I almost missed it: I am luckier than I have ever understood.

I am standing. My legs are not sticks. My face has not collapsed. There is no fluid where my breath should be. I am vertical and warm and I get to decide what the next hour looks like.

That is not a detail. That is the whole thing.

A dead body is the most honest object in any room. It does not perform. It does not hedge. It does not promise to start on Monday. It lies there — the final state of a life that either moved or did not. And you stand above it knowing — not believing, knowing — that the body is not the person. Whatever made them laugh, argue, choose — that is not in the room anymore. Something left. The shell remained.

And still. Even knowing that — even holding the faith that says death is a door and not a wall — the weight of it sits on your chest. Because knowing the spirit survives does not make the flesh less shocking. The shrivelled face does not care about your theology.

That tension is the truest place I know. Faith and flesh. The knowing and the seeing. I believe what I believe. And I saw what I saw.

Most of us treat death like a concept. Something that happens to other people, in other rooms, at some date we will deal with when we are older. Then you stand over a body and "later" evaporates. There is no later. There is this — this breath, this hour, this choice to move or not. Every hour I have spent hesitating, planning without deciding, preparing to prepare — I spent it in the same currency that ran out for the person in front of me.

I walked out of that room and the air outside was warm. Ordinary. A generator humming somewhere. Someone selling something down the road. The world was just continuing — indifferent, alive, offering another hour to anyone still here to take it.

Death does not motivate. Motivation is cheap — it arrives and leaves with sleep and weather. Death clarifies. It strips the noise until only one question remains: am I actually living, or am I just not yet dead?

I am building. Not because urgency is glamorous. Because I stood over a body and understood — in my legs, not my head — that the distance between me and that stillness is measured in heartbeats. I do not know the count. Nobody does.

But I am here. And the fact of being here — upright, breathing, capable — is so much more than I have ever treated it as.