There are endings that arrive quietly, like a door closing in another room, and then there are endings that arrive like thunder; sudden, violent, impossible to ignore; the kind that split your life into a before and an after.
Last week held both.
Last week Thursday was the one-year anniversary of my father’s wakekeep; the night we stayed awake telling stories, pretending that ritual could soften the fact that love does not stop death from being final. Friday was the anniversary of the day I almost died, in a collision on Third Mainland Bridge, on my way to collect what remained of him from the mortuary. And Saturday was the anniversary of the day we finally put him in the ground.
The day of the accident, the world crumpled in on itself. Steel bent. Glass scattered across the road. My body stayed intact, somehow, while my father’s body was waiting in a building I hadn’t yet reached. For a moment, it felt like death was collecting in bulk, like it was trying to take everything in one sweep.
But it didn’t.
I lived, and since then, living has felt like a responsibility, not just a miracle.
The burial day was not only about grief; it was also about vigilance. When it was time to pour the sand, I did mine quickly and ran off, because I had been warned not to cry where people could touch me; that someone could transfer something bad into me through my tears. So even in that moment, saying goodbye to my father, I was scanning the crowd, holding my breath, watching hands, controlling my body.
The whole time in the village, I was half in mourning and half on alert. Trying not to touch anyone, being told to stop crying. Making sure I had kolanut in my pocket, like I was instructed, in case I needed protection from spirits I could not see.
Even in grief, there were rules. Even in pain, there were precautions. Even while burying my father, I was also busy trying to survive the living.
That year ended something in me. It ended the version of me who thought the world was predictable. It ended the illusion that you can love someone enough to keep them here.
And yet, it did not end me.
I woke up in a body that still worked, in a world that still needed me, in a story that refused to close its cover.
January has become a quiet threshold; a place where endings seem to gather. Where the past reminds me that loss does not always arrive alone, that sometimes life takes more than one thing at a time, as if to test how much a heart can carry without hardening. I feel that weight this month; not only of what I buried, but of what I had to release.
Some endings are final, some are unfinished. Some leave no ceremony, no witnesses, no rituals to guide you through the letting go; but they still ask something of you. They still change the shape of your days.
Last week returned like a quiet reckoning; a reminder that I am walking proof of both loss and mercy. That my life is not just shaped by what I’ve lost, but by what I was spared.
I feel another ending settling into place; not the type marked by hearses, sirens or Evercare hospital lights, but the quieter kind. The kind where you finally lay down the version of yourself that has been living on alert, waiting for the next disaster, measuring time by what could go wrong instead of what could go right.
This is the ending of constant bracing. The ending of survival as identity. The ending of living as if everything good is temporary and everything painful is inevitable.
Grief will always be part of me, but so will gratitude; and fear does not get to run the rest of my life. If survival taught me anything, it is that being alive is not the same as being open.
And I want more than survival.
So I honour what has ended: my father’s earthly presence, the version of me who thought surviving was the same as healing, the version of me who kept trying to control endings because I had survived too many I didn’t choose.
And I honour what has not: my breath, my voice, my stubborn, sacred continuation.
I am still here, and that means the story is not over; only the chapter.
And so the chapter ends, not with forgetting, not with denial, but with a quiet decision to keep living forward, not just living in the past or after. Not just surviving what broke me, but becoming someone who is no longer built around what I have lost.
I am learning how to love without disappearing, how to grieve without hardening, how to stay alive without staying afraid. And that, I think, is the beginning of something quieter and braver.
And so it ends;
the era of bracing,
of loving from behind glass,
of surviving instead of arriving.
What begins now is not certainty,
but willingness.
Not safety, but softness.
Not guarantees, but breath.
I step forward without armour,
without maps,
with only the quiet courage of someone
who has already lost and lived.
And so it begins.