How do you live after you've experienced death?

How do you live after you've experienced death?

Whenever someone close to you dies, you get this hit of mortality that you can’t unknow.

Not the “live every day like it’s your last” version. The real one. The kind that sits quietly in your chest and whispers, this can all disappear.

We all logically know death is part of life. Everything dies. People say that like it’s comforting. Like repeating it makes it softer. But until it happens up close, until it’s your parent, your person, it still feels distant. Like something that happens to other families. Or something that happens when you’re “old.” A future problem.

Then one day it isn’t.

Losing both of my parents (on completely different ends of the health spectrum) cracked something open in me that I can’t close again. My dad had chronic issues. A lifetime of habits that escalated, but his death was still unexpected. It happened in his sleep. One of those mornings where you think it's going to be a normal day, until the phone rings and it's shattered. My mom woke up at 4:30 every day to work out. She did the disciplined, responsible things. The “right” things. And then cancer showed up and rewrote the script anyway. We didn’t lose her suddenly. We watched as she slowly lost her spark, as she tried to fight, but the cancer got it's way. She didn't even have time to properly grieve losing her husband before she was deteriorating before our eyes. Anticipatory grief layered on top of actual grief. A front-row seat to something no one prepares you for.

Two very different stories. Same ending.

Tell me that doesn’t mess with your sense of control. People love to say, “You can control your choices.” Sure. But I watched one parent’s bad habits catch up with him. And I watched another parent do everything right and still lose. So tell me again how control works, because as someone who needs some sense of control in this life, everything feels out of control.

In a twisted sort of way, you don’t actually understand how much life is a gift until you experience having life taken away from you and you’re left standing there trying to understand why while picking up the pieces. It’s like someone rips the curtain back and says, “By the way, none of this is guaranteed. It can all be taken away.” And that awareness doesn’t feel magical and like I should appreciate life more. It feels destabilizing. Because once you see how fragile everything is, you can’t unsee it.

And yet life expects you to keep going.

The world doesn’t stop. Work doesn’t stop. Bills still need to be paid. The dog still needs to be fed. The laundry still piles up. Life has zero respect for your emotional state. People check in for a while. And then, quietly, the expectation shifts back to normal. You can't still be messed up from grief, right? It's been years. Like everything can just suddenly go back to normal.

But I didn’t feel normal. Not having my parents wasn't normal. Feeling so lost couldn't be normal.

So, I stopped.

I didn’t burn my life down. I still showed up. I answered emails. I paid the mortgage. I functioned. But internally? Everything felt muted. Like I was living under water while everyone else was breathing normally and asking why I seemed tired. After you lose people like that, you don’t see life the same way. Things that used to feel urgent now feel almost laughable. Office politics. Minor inconveniences. Someone spiraling over something that won’t matter in five years. Everything hits differently when you’ve buried two parents.

It’s hard to get excited about little things when something enormous happened. Something that split your life into before and after. Something that altered your nervous system. You’re constantly toggling between numb and flooded. Between functioning and unraveling. Between “I’m fine” and “nothing feels safe anymore.” And here’s the part that feels almost inappropriate to say out loud: It messes with how you see your own future. We’re raised with a script. Work hard. Pay your dues. Plan for retirement. Sacrifice now so you can enjoy later. Later is supposed to be the reward. But what happens when you watch someone grind their whole life and never make it to “later”? My mom didn’t make it to retirement. She never got the slow life she earned. So now when I think about retirement, my brain doesn’t go to beaches and relaxation. It goes to: Will I even live that long? Should I be planning decades ahead? Should I be sacrificing now for a future that might not come? Am I working my life away hoping for a pot of gold, only to have the rainbow end abruptly?

That’s not dramatic. It’s what grief does to your brain.

It rearranges how you see things.

We’re taught how to hustle. We’re taught how to delay gratification. We’re taught how to be functioning members of society. What we’re not taught is how to keep believing in “later” after you’ve watched later disappear for someone you love. No one teaches you how to reconcile ambition with mortality. So now I live in this in-between. I want to be responsible. I want to build a stable future. I want to plan. But I also don’t want to postpone joy like it’s optional. I don’t want to assume I have decades to circle back to what matters. I don’t want to grind blindly and hope I get to cash in. What if that day never comes and all of my "We'll do that laters" end up as nevers.

It’s a constant tug-of-war.

And layered on top of that is the absurdity of everyday life continuing as if nothing monumental happened. You’re quietly questioning time, safety, meaning. And someone emails you about a formatting error. Sometimes I want to reply: “Hi, yes. Both my parents are dead and I’m having a mild existential crisis about the fragility of existence. But sure let’s circle back on the font size.”

Instead, I say: “Thanks for bringing that to my attention.”

Growth.

Dark humor becomes survival.

Because if I don’t laugh at the expectation that I function normally after catastrophic loss, I will drown in the weight of it. People think grief is just sadness. It’s not.

It’s awareness. It’s fear. It’s anger. It’s gratitude that feels heavy instead of light. It’s googling symptoms at 11 p.m. because your brain now assumes worst-case scenarios are realistic. (at the moment, my oldest dog has cancer, my middle will die of obesity and my youngest was bit by a vampire. Clear health screenings, be damned.) It’s realizing how fragile everyone is. It’s realizing you are fragile.

Death doesn’t just take people. It rearranges the living. It rearranges how you see time. How you see risk. How you see work. How you see joy. In a twisted way, losing life up close makes you understand that life is a gift. Not the sparkly version. The heavy version.

The kind where gratitude and fear sit in the same room and refuse to leave. You start asking different questions. If time isn’t guaranteed, what actually matters? If later isn’t promised, what am I postponing? If everything can change overnight, what do I want my ordinary days to look like?

I don’t have the answers.

Some days I lean into planning because structure makes me feel safe. I need some sense of control. Some days I want to throw the five-year plan in the trash and book the trip. Most days I’m just trying to balance both. Trying to build a future without assuming I own it. Trying to live now without self-destructing. Trying to hold gratitude and grief in the same body. I am not the same person I was before. I’m less naive. Less impressed by trivial things. Less willing to tolerate nonsense. More protective of my time. More aware of how quickly everything can change.

There’s a heaviness to that.

But there’s also clarity.

Grief doesn’t just make you sad.

It makes you awake.

And once you’re awake like that, you don’t get to go back to sleep.

So now I live differently.

Not perfectly. Not fearlessly.

Just differently.

More aware that life is both a gift and unbelievably unfair at the same time.

And I’m still figuring out what to do with that.