27/03/2026
I was doing what we all do at midnight. Scrolling. Avoiding sleep. Letting the algorithm take me somewhere.
And then this image stopped me cold.
A man. A motorcycle. A sunset so heavy with colour it looked like the sky was bleeding out slowly and beautifully. And above it all, those words, sitting on the light like they had been waiting specifically for me to find them tonight:
"Your death will come on an ordinary day, in the middle of unfinished plans, and the world will continue without you."
I read it three times. Then I put my phone face down on the bed and just sat there. In the dark. With my father.
He died on an ordinary day. I need you to understand that. There was nothing cinematic about it. The world outside was doing what it always does - traffic moving, neighbours arguing, someone's radio playing something cheerful and completely indifferent. And inside, quietly, in a body that cancer had spent years dismantling piece by piece, my father left.
I was eight years old.
Eight. I did not have the language for it then. I had a gap where a person used to be, and no instructions for what to do with a gap that size, and a mother who was somehow - somehow - still standing. Still cooking. Still showing up. A woman who had spent most of her married life not just loving her husband but tending to him. Nursing him with the kind of devotion that doesn't make it into speeches because it is too quiet, too daily, too unglamorous for anyone to think to honour it.
She just kept wiping, waiting, hoping, praying, watching. Loving him through the version of him that illness made, the diminished version, the dependent version, the version that is no longer the man you married but whom you love with your whole chest anyway because love, real love, does not come with conditions about what form a person is allowed to arrive in.
She loved him until there was no more of him left to love. And then she kept going. For us. Because that is what mothers do with grief - they carry it somewhere private and they keep their face arranged for their children.
I did not understand any of this at eight. I understood that he was gone and that his absence had a shape and that the shape of it kept changing as I grew. At twelve it felt like anger. At sixteen it felt like longing. At twenty it felt like a conversation I kept rehearsing with someone who would never be able to answer. And now, it feels like... this. Like being stopped by a stranger's photograph at midnight and finding my father sitting quietly inside it.
"Your death will come on an ordinary day, in the middle of unfinished plans."
His did. I wonder sometimes about the plans. The things he was in the middle of. The sentences he never finished. The version of me he never got to meet, the adult one, the one sitting here in the dark holding a phone and missing him with a tenderness that has only deepened with time, the way good things do.
I spent years being angry at the ordinary-ness of it. At the fact that something so enormous could happen on a day when the radio was still playing. But I am learning, slowly, imperfectly, in the way all the most important lessons arrive - that ordinary days are all we are ever given.
There are no special ones reserved for the things that matter. There is only today, and what we choose to do inside it, and who we choose to love, and how loudly, and how completely, and how without waiting for a better moment that may never come.
My mother understood this. She did not wait to love my father fully. She did not ration it or protect herself from it or leave anything in reserve. She gave him all of it, every day, even the days that cost her everything. Especially those days.
I want to love like that. I want to live like that.
So live a little, the image says.
I think what it really means is: live completely. Live like someone who knows, really knows, not just intellectually but in their bones, that the ordinary day you are standing in right now is the only one you are guaranteed.
My father knew that. My mother showed me that.
Tonight a stranger's photograph on Instagram reminded me.
I'm glad I was still awake.
